Exercises and DBQs

Interactive Exercises

The following exercises include excerpts from 1940s and 1950s newspapers and discuss Alice Coachman, Althea Gibson, or some aspect of the sports in which they participated. Read the excerpt, and, using what you learned in the earlier sections, determine whether it is an example of the white or black press. If the computer response refers to the exercise, click on the words or phrases that the response tells you to notice and they will be highlighted in the exerise itself. You will probably find some of the examples fairly straight forward. Others will require you to puzzle out which press presented the coverage.

Remember, the white press generally focused primarily on gender and the black press reported their careers through the lens of race. But this meant different outcomes for the two athletes since a decade separated their careers. Also, for Coachman, race could play a close second to gender in the white press, and African American sports journalists often used cover stories to “feminize” female track and field athletes. If you are having trouble, go back and review some of the material in the earlier sections. Good luck!