The Black Sports Reportage of Black Sports Magazine, 1971–1978

This article explores and contextualizes the short-lived magazine Black Sports (1971-1978) as an example of what the radical sports activist Harry Edwards called Black sports reporting. It identifies three interrelated themes that typified the magazine’s Black sports reportage and the sociopolitical and commercial goals that drove it. First, and most generally, Black Sports critiqued the white-controlled sports establishment and exposed its various forms of racism. Second, the magazine celebrated significant Black sports figures from the past who had been ignored, underrepresented, or misrepresented. Third, Black Sports linked its anti-racist activism to Black entrepreneurialism and suggested that business success provided the most effective way for African Americans to achieve social enfranchisement. The obscure and heretofore unexamined magazine sheds light on the history and racial politics of sports media during the 1970s and enriches understandings of the ongoing struggle for racial justice in sport, media, and culture

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