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Dissertation Information for Damion Lamar Thomas

NAME:
- Damion Lamar Thomas

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- History

SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Robert A. Hill

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Henry S.N. Yu
- Mark Sawyer

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: "The good Negroes": African-American athletes and the cultural Cold War, 1945--1968

Abstract: Between 1945-1968, 117 sports teams, 535 athletic coaches, and hundreds of other individuals were sent to nations in Africa, Asia, the Near East, Far East and South America under the State Department Goodwill Tours Programs. The four-fold purpose of the programs were to demonstrate American mastery of various sports, to teach the latest sports techniques to foreign athletes as they prepared for national, regional, and international sports competitions, to provide arenas for mutual understanding and friendships to flourish between athletes and countries, as well as to champion the American capitalist, democratic way of life. Situated in a historical epoch where crucial issues surrounding integrated sports, race, anticolonialism, Civil Rights and the Cold War coalesced, the United States employed athletics in their propaganda campaign because after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League baseball in 1947, sports were the most publicly visible expression of American efforts to integrate African Americans into the national mainstream.

International indictment of American segregation hindered United States efforts to gain the allegiance of nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, rather than providing immediate, substantive changes to the social landscape, the United States government moved to re-define and re-contextualize the slow and unsteady advancement of African Americans into the American mainstream as a narrative of progress and as an example of American democracy.

It is the thesis of this project that the politics of token symbolism associated with the African-American athletes was designed to give legitimacy to existing racial inequalities in American society during the Cold War/Civil Rights Era. The symbol of the integrated athlete allowed the government to argue that segregation was not an impediment to the advancement of individual African Americans. The prominent athletes who toured were referred to as "the good Negroes," which carried connotations beyond their athletic ability.

One of the unintended consequences of the State Department goodwill tours was that they helped politicize athletes and former athletes such as Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Harry Edwards. Edwards, the organizer of the Olympic Project for Human Rights that helped produce the lasting symbols of the athletic revolution--the raised fists of John Carlos and Tommie Smith at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics--became determined to produce a counter narrative to the State Department's story of progress. Rather than celebrating the suggestion that sports were at the forefront of racial advance, the athletes increasingly came to assert that sports were tied to a racist, oppressive system.

MPACT Scores for Damion Lamar Thomas

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-09-06 17:48:48

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Students under Damion Lamar Thomas

ADVISEES:
- None

COMMITTEESHIPS:
- None