It can be difficult to delineate whether or not society should rely on experts to lead or be completely self-governed. They are two competing ideologies, however, there is a potential middle ground. As Dr. Stephen Mack outlines in his blog, “Are Public Intellectuals a thing of the past?” public intellectuals can be a guiding force for the academia of a nation and assist in grooming their eventual self-governance. Yet, there is a toxic outcome when propping up public intellectuals for the person they are and not the work they have achieved. Mack explains:
That is, our notions of the public intellectual need to focus less on who or what a public intellectual is—and by extension, the qualifications for getting and keeping the title. Instead, we need to be more concerned with the work public intellectuals must do, irrespective of who happens to be doing it.
Relying too much on the person alone can ultimately lead to the rise of a celebrity who is more focused on their personal image. When that occurs, it becomes less about the work they have accomplished and shifts to be more about the fame they have acquired. If the public intellectual loses sight of what they were seeking to uncover in the first place, their title should be revoked. It is people like that who are crippling the future of American intellectualism. But even though they may not be what they were in the past, there are still some intellectuals out there that can put aside their acclaim and do the work because of their dedication to their field, their pursuit of public service and their quest for knowledge. Dr. Harry Edwards is one such public intellectual who preserved his ideals and commitment for over half a century.
Today, Edwards, 78, is renowned as the father of the sociology of sport. With several publications to his name and countless more articles, essays and speeches, he has cemented himself as the go-to person in the field when it comes to what happens outside the field of play and the equality that should be in place inside sports.
What makes Edwards’s work interesting is the fact that he drew upon his own experience as a Black man in athletics while growing up in a deeply flawed country when it came to race and discrimination. This experience allowed him to work with different intellectual tools that other sociologists trying to understand the sociology of sport lacked. Unlike the others, he excelled in high school and college in track and field events and went on to be the discus thrower for San Jose State, where he ended up completing a B.A. in sociology. This is when Edwards began to formulate his work. As a Black athlete at a mostly white school, he was held back from many opportunities, including academic ones, yet was lauded on the field. The cognitive dissonance between being loved for what you do, but still being looked down on because of what you look like fueled his early work. He moved on to receive an M.A. from Cornell, being one of the first to study the sociology of Black people specifically there. Around that time, he chose to continue his education rather than going into professional sports, though, NFL teams like the San Deigo Chargers and Minnesota Vikings were courting him. Edwards could have very well gone on to be a star athlete, standing at a menacing 6’8”, but instead, he dedicated his life to finding how athletics could be used as a medium for social change. Edwards’s momentary leave from Cornell led him back to San Jose State where he worked as a guest professor and in the athletic department. This was where his first big move and the inspiration for his first book came from. In 1967, he was responsible for a boycott of the football team’s opener, the first time a protest against racial inequality led to the cancelation of a collegiate sports game. Though he returned to Cornell to finish his Ph.D. in sociology, he had set the cogs in motion to begin one of the most impactful sports protests in history.
While Edwards’s academic contributions to the field of sociology of sport are immeasurable, perhaps his most important work came in the form of activism. His commitment to achieving equality and human rights for all, especially in the realm of sports, defines who Edwards is. While his works will be studied, it is what he has achieved through the social praxis that he will be remembered for. Before the 1968 Olympics, while Edwards was still obtaining his Ph.D., he created the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a spin-off of the United Black Students for Action (the group he cocreated behind the boycott of the San Jose State football team). The organization was inspired by The Clevland Summit from the year before, which was a gathering of high profile athletes in support of Muhammad Ali’s refusal to fight in the Vietnam War. Edwards planned to push for a boycott of the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, though, he was ultimately unsuccessful, failing to gain enough support. While many Black American athletes fully supported the cause, the lack of unity derailed any chance of a meaningful protest as the top athletes realized that another Black person would have taken their spot. The list of demands for the protest was: the removal of apartheid controlled countries from the competition (South Africa and Rhodesia), the removal of Avery Brundage, the problematic president of the International Olympic Committee, the restoration of Muhamad Ali’s heavyweight title that had been stripped, and a commitment to getting more Black coaches hired into sports, with a focus on Olympic coaches. While the boycott failed, Edwards was able to get American Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos involved in the cause.
Smith and Carlos happened to be enrolled at the same that Edwards was a guest professor at San Jose State. With guidance from Edwards, the two sprinters would go on to make history. Yet, Smith capturing the gold medal and Carlos bringing home bronze would not be what they were remembered for. While on the podium, with the Star-Spangled Banner being played, the American’s, standing shoeless in black socks, raised a fist with a black glove. Their raised fists represented Black power and unity, while their socks stood for Black poverty. There were other various symbolic gestures as well, and even the silver medalist from Australia, Peter Norman, stood in solidarity with the two of them. Though he did not raise his fist, he joined in as all three of them wore Olympic Project for Human Rights badges on their tracksuit.
Though it is viewed today as the most iconic sports protest of all time and an influential piece of Olympic lore, it was seen far differently back in 1968 with both runners being sent home and condemned by the American National Olympic committee. At the time, sports were seen as an apolitical venue, a place to get away from such discussions. Edwards was crucial in breaking down that barrier. While legal segregation had been abolished a few years prior by the Civil Rights Act, Black Americans were still facing innumerable hardships in the form of institutionalized racism. The exception was Black athletes during sporting competitions (in most cases). However, once they left the arena, it was back the inequality that everyone else was facing. Edwards understood the need for Black Americans in the spotlight to use their voice to speak up for the plight of others like them, something he still preaches today. Edwards, along with Smith and Carlos, came from poverty and represented Black America. While there were other impressive feats of athlete activism in the years that followed, none of it would have been possible without the first major step by Edwards. Even though the Clevland Summit preceded the 1968 Olympics, it was more about the individual (Ali). Edwards’s goal was more focused on a societal cause (racial inequality) and using the athlete’s platform to bring light to it.
After the protest, Edwards completed his first book, The Revolt of the Black Athlete, and completed his Ph.D. at Cornell. He then went on to teach at Berkley as a professor in the field of sociology of sport. Edwards’s academic contributions to society serve as both the culmination of his activism and the framework for future movements. After the completion of his first book, Edwards went on to write Sociology of Sport and many other books focused specifically on Black athletes and their obligation to use their platform. Though Edwards’s focus was on sports, he also wrote about the need for education in Black communities, noting not everyone can be an athlete. In a Q&A with Dennis Wyss of TIME, Edwards remarked:
The chances of you becoming a Jerry Rice or a Magic Johnson are so slim as to be negligible. Black kids must learn to distribute their energies in a way that's going to make them productive, contributing citizens in an increasingly high-technology society.
Decades later, Edwards has had his fingerprints all over the sports world. As a consultant for the San Francisco 49ers starting in 1975, he helped improve diversity and equality in the locker room and organization and partnered with legendary coach Bill Walsh to found the NFL’s Minority Coaches Internship and Outreach Program. Walsh and Edwards had immense respect for one another and the two were often seen standing next to each other on the sideline. Multiple Black head coaches in the past decade benefitted from the program that Edwards started with Walsh. Edwards’s approaches to helping the 49ers players combat all sorts of issues were eventually accepted as a league-wide initiative. While his overall work focused on what the athletes should do with their platform, he also helped change how organizations were constructed.
He also aided in counseling players for another Bay Area team, however, this time it was the Golden State Warriors of the NBA. He did not stop there either, also working on a macro-level with Major League Baseball to fix diversity issues and weed out the institutionalized racism of the league that remained over 40 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. His work in baseball was instrumental in getting more people of color and women involved on the business side of the game in front offices.
Possibly the most commendable quality of Edwards is his complete and utter focus on his ultimate goal. Others could have become enamored by the access to professional sports leagues and been complacent with being involved and not want to push their luck and risk losing said access. This is where Edwards stands out among a crowd of fame-junkies only doing work for the respect. He kept pushing back, calling for more and more equality, knowing each time could have gotten him fired even while receiving threats and being watched by the FBI.
People who are newer to sports may know Edwards by some of his more recent work with athletes, mainly, Colin Kaepernick. Kaepernick, the ex-49ers quarterback who began kneeling during the national anthem back in September of 2016, was protesting against police brutality and racial inequality. Edwards had become a friend of Kaepernick and helped him in the early stages and throughout the process, once he garnered large amounts of attention. The kneeling itself was not directly linked to Edwards, rather it came from a conversation between the QB and former Green Beret Nate Boyer (Kaepernick’s began by sitting during the anthem). Edwards has remained one of Kaepernick’s largest supporters often coming to his defense and applauding his commitment to social change. He even has compared the former 49ers’ quarterback to the social change advocates of the sporting world from the 1960’s that he worked hand in hand with and stated that his jersey should be in the Smithsonian.
Potentially the biggest crossover between his academic work and activism comes in his theory of waves of athlete activism. Any fan of sport can appreciate and should acknowledge the journey athletics has taken from apolitical and fundamentally racist to, while not perfect, in a much better state in line with the ideals of today. Edwards broke down the growth into four segments, with a new fifth iteration now underway. It started in the late 20th-century with athletes like boxers Jack Johnson and Joe Louis and, more famously, Olympic track and field star Jesse Owens. Johnson was the first Black man to win the world heavyweight championship while Owens shined during the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Johnson upset the establishment in 1908 by taking the crown and after a few years of dominating the white competition, there was a call for the “Great White Hope” (also known as former champion Jim Jefferies), to restore the status quo of white domination. After Johnson won the “Fight of the Century” against Jefferies, the narrative of white-excellence began to shift. The same was accomplished by Jesse Owens years later during the “Hitler Olympics” when he captured four gold medals and upstaged Adolf Hitler in his own arena. Hitler had planned for the games to be a showing of the dominance of the Aryan race and instead showed the world what Black people were capable of. These athletes, along with other early trailblazers, ushered in, as Edwards calls it, the wave of legitimacy. For many, it was an awakening that Black people may not be inferior human beings to whites, a view widely propagated by white elites.
After Black people began to be legitimized through athletic achievement, the next wave was about achieving access, according to Edwards. The athletes who championed this era were the likes of Jackie Robinson and Kenny Washington. Both players broke the color barrier in the MLB and NFL respectively, Robinson in 1947 and Washington a year earlier. Edwards noted how these athletes helped push for desegregation in sports before there was even desegregation in many parts of the country. The real work of nationwide racial equality, not limited to the sphere of the sporting arena, would come during the Civil Rights Movement and other various protests driven by prominent athletes in the 1960’s. Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul Jabar, Bill Russell and Jim Brown led this era. However, they had some help in the form of a budding activist: Dr. Harry Edwards. Edwards helped athletes of that generation use their platform to aid in changing political and racial discourse through the aforementioned 1968 Olympics protest and many others.
Though there is a large gap between the latter two waves, Edwards has kept pushing and guiding athletes the whole time. His work in the fourth wave has been more from the sidelines than it was in the third, mostly being a counselor or confidant for athletes trying to make messages. The fourth wave keyed in on the Black Lives Matter movement back in the early-to-mid 2010s. For the first time, athletes with large followings were able to use social media to deliver messages straight to their fans. The unprecedented exposure has been a double-edged sword, but has also allowed for greater mobilization on issues. A fifth and very recent new phase is the fight for more widespread equality through actions instead of protests. The transition between waves was spurred by the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020. Edwards spoke out about how important the next step was for the athletes, comparing it to what came during the fourth wave. “These athletes are boycotting. That is sending a message to all the interests and stakeholders,” said Edwards. He was referring to the short, but meaningful walk-out by players in the “NBA Bubble” that halted the season for a few days while the athletes reevaluated how best to use their platform.
Edwards retired from Berkley in the early 2000s, but his determination to his work is as strong as ever, helping guide athletes in their protests and still routinely engaging in speaking opportunities and lecturing at colleges. He is someone who has framed his predecessors’ work and guided the next generation and even after he left the frontlines, continued to work from the shadows. He could have chosen to get enveloped in his fame and connections in major sports leagues and lose sight of his goals. Instead, he used those ties to keep pushing for change. The title of public intelectual should not be permanent, rather it should be a temporary one, only held by those who stay committed to their work long after their initial recognition, like Edwards. Because of this, Edwards stands out as an ideal public intellectual for the modern-day. Someone not trying to lead himself, but able to encourage others to get involved and learn.
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