African American Icons of Sport: Triumph, Courage, and Excellence (Greenwood Icon Series)

This title offers an examination of African Americans in sports, from a variety of perspectives and through a lively range of rhetoric styles, and illuminates the history of highly successful and influential individuals, athletes and teams who have transcended "mere" celebrity to come to represent a given Zeitgeist to a sizable part of the world. It also explores the history and lives of complex, multi-layered personages and groups. Finally, it examines the extent to which modern mass media and popular culture have contributed greatly to the rise, and sometimes fall, of the these powerful symbols of athletic, individual, and group excellence.

Icons of African American Sports includes articles on:- The Williams Sisters - Shaquille O'Neal - Jim Brown - Harlem Globetrotters - Jack Johnson - Carl Lewis - Jesse Owens - Joe Louis - Magic Johnson - Wilma Rudolph - Muhammad Ali - Barry Bonds - Dominique Dawes - Negro Baseball Leagues - Arthur Ashe - George Foreman - and others. Icons of African American Sports is a worthwhile study and a desperately needed contribution to the fields of African American history, United States history and sports history.