ourts and even in the court of public opinion that was once denied them. Yet, the black community remains disproportionately poor, uneducated or undereducated, and unemployed. Education is seen as the key to success in America, and every immigrant and ethnic group has eventually come to the conclusion that education for the next generation will give that generation a leg up on the ladder of success in American life. We still believe this today, even in an era of diminished expectations, but blacks seem to have been unable to make this idea work for them as well as some groups have done in the past. The success of blacks in college and professional sports has a racist component to it on its face--blacks are more accepted when they excel at sports or in the entertainment field while the mass of blacks are still relegated to bad schools and low-end jobs.
Still, the advancement of blacks in sports and elsewhere in American life has to be seen as an improvement over what existed before. It was only in 1946 when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in professional sports as he played his first baseball game for the Brooklyn Dodgers. In fact, the integration of professional sports took place before the era of the Civil Rights Movement and helped make later reforms possible. This came about as baseball owners realized that the more they cared about the color of people's money, the less they could afford to care about the color of their skin. Baseball had originally been organized as a segregated sport as owners in the late nineteenth century gave in to the demands of players that the races be separated. so long as all teams discriminated against blacks, each team could be certain it was no worse off competitively. After Robinson, this would no longer be the case (Sailer, 1996, 38-39).
However, the belief that sports have been fully integrated since the time of Jackie Robinson and that racism is no longer part of the sports ...