Michelle M Sikes
Biographic Data
| ID | 3465561 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michelle M Sikes |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michelle M |
| FAMILY NAME | Sikes |
| SIGNATURE | SIKES M M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 14 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Kenya's Running Women
It is the principle behind the issue which is important and sacred”
A London-based rugby team toured Kenya mere days after the recently concluded, extremely controversial 1980 British Lions rugby tour of apartheid South Africa. Failure by Kenyan officials to retract the invitation for yet another British team was an outright denial of clearly stated anti-apartheid principles. After student campaigners advocated a boycott of the tour by the London Metropolitan Police, the University of Nairobi rugby team was the f…
Inaugurating ‘Good Feeling between the United States and South Africa’
In 1931, a track and field team sponsored by the American Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) toured South Africa, the first official visit of a US team to the African nation. The AAU fielded an all-white squad in this inaugural tour, even though African Americans held several world records in a variety of events during this era. Though it was not clear that US and South African officials explicitly coordinated to draw a colour line on the tour, it was …
Excavating the Ancestry of ‘Globetrotting’
During the twentieth century, systems of racial segregation flourished in both the United States and South Africa. Crusades for racial equality aimed at dismantling racial boundaries emerged in both nations. Sport played a key role in these endeavours. Drawing colour lines in athletic competitions reinforced ideologies of white supremacy while demanding racial equality in sporting contests fuelled campaigns challenging segregation. In an American…
Athletes for Peace’? From the Quest to Hold the Mavericks Accountable to a Second American Rebel Tour of South Africa
We Do Not Divide Our Champions According to Color’
In 1938 the American Amateur Athletic Union proposed a return tour of athletics stars to South Africa, recalling a 1931 trip as well as several return tours by South Africans to the US as important ventures. By the late 1930s African American athletes had become globally prominent icons of their nation, most famously Jesse Owens but also many others. US sporting bureaucrats announced the team would be selected at the 1938 national athletics champ…
I Consider Myself a Political Prisoner’
Flaunting international anti-apartheid bans, two groups of American track and field ‘rebels’ toured South Africa in the late 1980s. In defending their incendiary treks, they asserted their rights both to act on their own political principles and to earn a paycheck. Heavily criticized by a global coalition that supported the South African athletic embargoes, they were punished with long suspensions and public humiliation. A few of the ‘rebels’ rem…
I See the Struggle against Race Supremacy and Racial Inequality as World-Wide’
As the Civil Rights Movement in the US reached its apogee and apartheid in South Africa cemented its grip, the American Amateur Athletic Union in 1961 announced plans to send a team of athletics all-stars to the African nation. Following tours of South Africa by all-white American teams in 1931 and 1950, as well as a 1938 tour scuttled by racial disagreements, the 1961 proposal drew fire from Civil Rights leaders and anti-apartheid activists. In …
A ‘Rebel’ on the Run
In 1988, a solitary Kenyan runner joined a ‘rebel’ track and field tour of South Africa: Samson Obwocha, a ten-time NCAA Division II and junior college national champion who was then maintaining a precarious, post-collegiate running career on the US road race circuit. Obwocha sought to achieve his vision of his own excellence by way of athletics, yet the pursuit of a livelihood from that vocation ultimately put him in conflict with his own nation…
It’s a Policy Matter, Not a Racial Matter’
In June 1972, a coalition of athletes at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Men’s National Outdoor Track and Field Championships leveraged the power of a collective sport boycott as an effective tool for confronting apartheid policies in South Africa. Reminiscent of an earlier fight in which American athletes under the auspices of the Olympic Project for Human Rights demanded that the International Olympic Committee bar South Africa from the 1968 M…
A Democracy That Will Know Not the Differences of Race’
When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, these periodic sporting encounters served as lightning rods that rallied civil rights activists and anti-apartheid protestors, linking battles ov…
Winners, Regardless’
In 1950 as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momentum in the US and apartheid policies hardened in South Africa, the American Amateur Athletic Union sponsored a tour by US track and field all-stars to South Africa. The controversial 1950 venture, following an original 1931 trek and a 1938 trip cancelled after objections to the exclusion of Black athletes from the team, drew hostile fire from a variety of groups in the US went it leaked to the pr…
We Didn’t Kill Any Babies’
Just after the 1988 Seoul Olympics concluded, a handful of US athletes defied national and international customs and codes and accepted invitations to compete in South Africa, then a pariah state barred from international athletic competitions by almost every global sporting organization. The sporting boycotts represented one phalanx of the decades-long campaign to isolate South Africa until it dismantled apartheid. The US team included both whit…
Public Memorialisation and the Politics of Historical Memory in Africa
In 2020,aglobal wave of anti-racism movementsc ontributed to widespread reconsideration of previouslyhonoured people. From Bristol'sslave trader Edward Colston, to confederate generals across the American South, to King Leopold II of Belgium, statues now seen as symbols of white supremacyh avef allen. Campaigns in Africa challenged state-endorsed memorialisations, thus contributing to the recent groundswell of alternative interpretations of the p…
Paralympic protest
In October 1979, the International Stoke Mandeville Games Federation (ISMGF) imposed a lifetime ban on Maggy Jones, a medal-winning British Paralympian. Her crime: distributing leaflets about the healthcare disparities in apartheid South Africa. Two years later, Bernard Leach, the British record holder in the freestyle swim, withdrew from the International Stoke Mandeville Games in protest when he learned that South Africa planned to send a team.…
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend? A Clash of Anti-Apartheid Tactics and Targets in the Olympic Movement of the Early 1960s
Tensions between anti-apartheid activists within the Olympic movement are surprisingly overlooked in the large body of literature on the international campaign to isolate South Africa in sport. Kenya’s denial of visas to South African delegates slated to attend the 1963 International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Nairobi precipitated one such fissure. The South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC) strongly opposed Kenyan politician…
Sport in Isolation? New Perspectives on Race, Sport, and Politics in Apartheid South Africa
The following essays constitute the second part of a double-issue that started with New Perspectives on Sport and Apartheid: Local and Global. 1 Inspired by the same scholarly mission that fueled p
From Nairobi to Baden-Baden
In July 1963, some three months before sports administrators from around the world were to descend on Nairobi for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) annual session, the meeting was in jeopardy. Government officials in Kenya announced that in protest against white minority rule on the African continent, delegates from Portugal and South Africa were to be denied entry visas. Their decision culminated in the eleventh-hour transfer of the IO…
New Perspectives on Sport and Apartheid
On March 31, 1962, the Rand Daily Mail headlined its front page: ‘Whites Only at Olympics’.1 The newspaper alerted the South African public to the fact that the Minister of the Interior, Jan de Kle
Enduring Legacies and Convergent Identities
The colonial era in Kenya was a pivotal and transitional period during which aspects of local peoples’ existing gender roles and relations were challenged, renegotiated and, in the case of running, confirmed. British colonial intent to introduce running as sport to men aligned with Rift Valley societies that condoned male, though not female, running. Indigenous ideas and ways of living could operate in tandem with the historically masculine orien…
Print Media and the History of Women’s Sport in Africa
This article explores one source through which African women’s sport history can be drawn and interpreted: the sport sections of African newspapers. In the case of Kenya, the major dailies, Daily Nation and The East African Standard , are repositories of information pertaining to the challenges that confronted female athletes. Taking into account the history and development of these media, the article addresses the question of why did Kenyan wome…
Women in Sports History
Running as a resource of hope? Voices from Eldoret
There is a continuing debate about East African running success. Few studies have considered wealth as a key motivation behind wanting to run. This article focuses upon the motivations of Kenyan women who choose to participate in professional running and the impact on them, their families and wider communities. Much of the fieldwork for this study took place in and around the town of Eldoret. It encourages researchers interested in sport in Afric…
Running as a resource of hope? Voices from Eldoret
There is a continuing debate about East African running success. Few studies have considered wealth as a key motivation behind wanting to run. This article focuses upon the motivations of Kenyan women who choose to participate in professional running and the impact on them, their families and wider communities. Much of the fieldwork for this study took place in and around the town of Eldoret. It encourages researchers interested in sport in Afric…
Print Media and the History of Women’s Sport in Africa
This article explores one source through which African women’s sport history can be drawn and interpreted: the sport sections of African newspapers. In the case of Kenya, the major dailies, Daily Nation and The East African Standard , are repositories of information pertaining to the challenges that confronted female athletes. Taking into account the history and development of these media, the article addresses the question of why did Kenyan wome…
A ‘Rebel’ on the Run
In 1988, a solitary Kenyan runner joined a ‘rebel’ track and field tour of South Africa: Samson Obwocha, a ten-time NCAA Division II and junior college national champion who was then maintaining a precarious, post-collegiate running career on the US road race circuit. Obwocha sought to achieve his vision of his own excellence by way of athletics, yet the pursuit of a livelihood from that vocation ultimately put him in conflict with his own nation…
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend? A Clash of Anti-Apartheid Tactics and Targets in the Olympic Movement of the Early 1960s
Tensions between anti-apartheid activists within the Olympic movement are surprisingly overlooked in the large body of literature on the international campaign to isolate South Africa in sport. Kenya’s denial of visas to South African delegates slated to attend the 1963 International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Nairobi precipitated one such fissure. The South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC) strongly opposed Kenyan politician…
From Nairobi to Baden-Baden
In July 1963, some three months before sports administrators from around the world were to descend on Nairobi for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) annual session, the meeting was in jeopardy. Government officials in Kenya announced that in protest against white minority rule on the African continent, delegates from Portugal and South Africa were to be denied entry visas. Their decision culminated in the eleventh-hour transfer of the IO…
New Perspectives on Sport and Apartheid
On March 31, 1962, the Rand Daily Mail headlined its front page: ‘Whites Only at Olympics’.1 The newspaper alerted the South African public to the fact that the Minister of the Interior, Jan de Kle
Enduring Legacies and Convergent Identities
The colonial era in Kenya was a pivotal and transitional period during which aspects of local peoples’ existing gender roles and relations were challenged, renegotiated and, in the case of running, confirmed. British colonial intent to introduce running as sport to men aligned with Rift Valley societies that condoned male, though not female, running. Indigenous ideas and ways of living could operate in tandem with the historically masculine orien…
Running as a resource of hope? Voices from Eldoret
There is a continuing debate about East African running success. Few studies have considered wealth as a key motivation behind wanting to run. This article focuses upon the motivations of Kenyan women who choose to participate in professional running and the impact on them, their families and wider communities. Much of the fieldwork for this study took place in and around the town of Eldoret. It encourages researchers interested in sport in Afric…
Women in Sports History
Print Media and the History of Women’s Sport in Africa
This article explores one source through which African women’s sport history can be drawn and interpreted: the sport sections of African newspapers. In the case of Kenya, the major dailies, Daily Nation and The East African Standard , are repositories of information pertaining to the challenges that confronted female athletes. Taking into account the history and development of these media, the article addresses the question of why did Kenyan wome…
From Nairobi to Baden-Baden
In July 1963, some three months before sports administrators from around the world were to descend on Nairobi for the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) annual session, the meeting was in jeopardy. Government officials in Kenya announced that in protest against white minority rule on the African continent, delegates from Portugal and South Africa were to be denied entry visas. Their decision culminated in the eleventh-hour transfer of the IO…
New Perspectives on Sport and Apartheid
On March 31, 1962, the Rand Daily Mail headlined its front page: ‘Whites Only at Olympics’.1 The newspaper alerted the South African public to the fact that the Minister of the Interior, Jan de Kle
Enduring Legacies and Convergent Identities
The colonial era in Kenya was a pivotal and transitional period during which aspects of local peoples’ existing gender roles and relations were challenged, renegotiated and, in the case of running, confirmed. British colonial intent to introduce running as sport to men aligned with Rift Valley societies that condoned male, though not female, running. Indigenous ideas and ways of living could operate in tandem with the historically masculine orien…
The Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend? A Clash of Anti-Apartheid Tactics and Targets in the Olympic Movement of the Early 1960s
Tensions between anti-apartheid activists within the Olympic movement are surprisingly overlooked in the large body of literature on the international campaign to isolate South Africa in sport. Kenya’s denial of visas to South African delegates slated to attend the 1963 International Olympic Committee (IOC) meeting in Nairobi precipitated one such fissure. The South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAN-ROC) strongly opposed Kenyan politician…
Sport in Isolation? New Perspectives on Race, Sport, and Politics in Apartheid South Africa
The following essays constitute the second part of a double-issue that started with New Perspectives on Sport and Apartheid: Local and Global. 1 Inspired by the same scholarly mission that fueled p
Public Memorialisation and the Politics of Historical Memory in Africa
In 2020,aglobal wave of anti-racism movementsc ontributed to widespread reconsideration of previouslyhonoured people. From Bristol'sslave trader Edward Colston, to confederate generals across the American South, to King Leopold II of Belgium, statues now seen as symbols of white supremacyh avef allen. Campaigns in Africa challenged state-endorsed memorialisations, thus contributing to the recent groundswell of alternative interpretations of the p…
Paralympic protest
In October 1979, the International Stoke Mandeville Games Federation (ISMGF) imposed a lifetime ban on Maggy Jones, a medal-winning British Paralympian. Her crime: distributing leaflets about the healthcare disparities in apartheid South Africa. Two years later, Bernard Leach, the British record holder in the freestyle swim, withdrew from the International Stoke Mandeville Games in protest when he learned that South Africa planned to send a team.…
It is the principle behind the issue which is important and sacred”
A London-based rugby team toured Kenya mere days after the recently concluded, extremely controversial 1980 British Lions rugby tour of apartheid South Africa. Failure by Kenyan officials to retract the invitation for yet another British team was an outright denial of clearly stated anti-apartheid principles. After student campaigners advocated a boycott of the tour by the London Metropolitan Police, the University of Nairobi rugby team was the f…
Inaugurating ‘Good Feeling between the United States and South Africa’
In 1931, a track and field team sponsored by the American Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) toured South Africa, the first official visit of a US team to the African nation. The AAU fielded an all-white squad in this inaugural tour, even though African Americans held several world records in a variety of events during this era. Though it was not clear that US and South African officials explicitly coordinated to draw a colour line on the tour, it was …
Excavating the Ancestry of ‘Globetrotting’
During the twentieth century, systems of racial segregation flourished in both the United States and South Africa. Crusades for racial equality aimed at dismantling racial boundaries emerged in both nations. Sport played a key role in these endeavours. Drawing colour lines in athletic competitions reinforced ideologies of white supremacy while demanding racial equality in sporting contests fuelled campaigns challenging segregation. In an American…
Athletes for Peace’? From the Quest to Hold the Mavericks Accountable to a Second American Rebel Tour of South Africa
We Do Not Divide Our Champions According to Color’
In 1938 the American Amateur Athletic Union proposed a return tour of athletics stars to South Africa, recalling a 1931 trip as well as several return tours by South Africans to the US as important ventures. By the late 1930s African American athletes had become globally prominent icons of their nation, most famously Jesse Owens but also many others. US sporting bureaucrats announced the team would be selected at the 1938 national athletics champ…
I Consider Myself a Political Prisoner’
Flaunting international anti-apartheid bans, two groups of American track and field ‘rebels’ toured South Africa in the late 1980s. In defending their incendiary treks, they asserted their rights both to act on their own political principles and to earn a paycheck. Heavily criticized by a global coalition that supported the South African athletic embargoes, they were punished with long suspensions and public humiliation. A few of the ‘rebels’ rem…
I See the Struggle against Race Supremacy and Racial Inequality as World-Wide’
As the Civil Rights Movement in the US reached its apogee and apartheid in South Africa cemented its grip, the American Amateur Athletic Union in 1961 announced plans to send a team of athletics all-stars to the African nation. Following tours of South Africa by all-white American teams in 1931 and 1950, as well as a 1938 tour scuttled by racial disagreements, the 1961 proposal drew fire from Civil Rights leaders and anti-apartheid activists. In …
A ‘Rebel’ on the Run
In 1988, a solitary Kenyan runner joined a ‘rebel’ track and field tour of South Africa: Samson Obwocha, a ten-time NCAA Division II and junior college national champion who was then maintaining a precarious, post-collegiate running career on the US road race circuit. Obwocha sought to achieve his vision of his own excellence by way of athletics, yet the pursuit of a livelihood from that vocation ultimately put him in conflict with his own nation…
It’s a Policy Matter, Not a Racial Matter’
In June 1972, a coalition of athletes at the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) Men’s National Outdoor Track and Field Championships leveraged the power of a collective sport boycott as an effective tool for confronting apartheid policies in South Africa. Reminiscent of an earlier fight in which American athletes under the auspices of the Olympic Project for Human Rights demanded that the International Olympic Committee bar South Africa from the 1968 M…
A Democracy That Will Know Not the Differences of Race’
When in 1931 the United States sent an all-white track and field team to compete against an all-white South African roster, it inaugurated a series of interchanges that over the next six decades illuminated intersections between politics, race, and sport in both nations. Between the 1930s and the 1980s, these periodic sporting encounters served as lightning rods that rallied civil rights activists and anti-apartheid protestors, linking battles ov…
Winners, Regardless’
In 1950 as the Civil Rights Movement gathered momentum in the US and apartheid policies hardened in South Africa, the American Amateur Athletic Union sponsored a tour by US track and field all-stars to South Africa. The controversial 1950 venture, following an original 1931 trek and a 1938 trip cancelled after objections to the exclusion of Black athletes from the team, drew hostile fire from a variety of groups in the US went it leaked to the pr…
We Didn’t Kill Any Babies’
Just after the 1988 Seoul Olympics concluded, a handful of US athletes defied national and international customs and codes and accepted invitations to compete in South Africa, then a pariah state barred from international athletic competitions by almost every global sporting organization. The sporting boycotts represented one phalanx of the decades-long campaign to isolate South Africa until it dismantled apartheid. The US team included both whit…
Kenya's Running Women
Political science (22 works) · Law (19 works) · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts (19 works) · Sports, Gender, and Society (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Gender Studies (16 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Politics (15 works) · History (12 works)