Interview with HARRY EDWARDS : Fighting From the Inside

Like many young black teenagers in the 1950s, Harry Edwards saw sports as an escape from poverty. His father was a $65-a-week laborer who served time in the Illinois state penitentiary. His mother left home when he was eight. At San Jose State young Edwards starred in basketball. But the trappings of racism he found in fraternities, student housing, the faculty and staff radicalized him. By 1967 he was a Black Panther urging fellow black athletes to boycott white-sponsored events, including the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. At Cornell, where he earned a doctorate, Edwards was a mediator in an armed ) revolt by blacks on campus. Now a sports sociology professor at University of California, Berkeley, and a consultant to the San Francisco 49ers, Golden State Warriors and Baseball Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, Edwards is challenging the American sports establishment from the inside. On the eve of Bill White’s debut as the first black president of the National League, Edwards, 46, talked with TIME’s Dennis Wyss about his efforts to break through the almost-all-white lineup of sports managers.

Q. When General Manager Al Campanis was fired by the Los Angeles Dodgers for saying that blacks lack the “necessities” to manage a big league team, Ueberroth brought you into major league baseball. Why, then, have you hired Al Campanis to assist you?

A. Al Campanis has 40 years of experience in baseball. To sit down with him and talk about the inside functioning of a baseball organization and how to deal with owners and general managers has been enormously helpful. The problem is in baseball. The problem isn’t Campanis. Al Campanis is merely an all-but- irrelevant symptom of the problem. To allow him to be turning out there in the wind makes him a scapegoat and ultimately impedes any progress in dealing with the issues in a constructive way.

Q. Since you became a special assistant to the commissioner of baseball almost two years ago, major league teams have hired 21 managers or general managers. Only one, Frank Robinson of the Baltimore Orioles, is black. Has all the soul- searching following Al Campanis’ remarks led merely to more empty rhetoric?

A. The issue isn’t as simple as whites in positions of power not hiring minorities to run front offices or be field managers, although that is the principal problem. There are corollary difficulties. Some of the most competent and attractive minority candidates are not interested in jobs they’ve been offered. Or you have candidates like Joe Morgan, who can’t just give up businesses that gross millions of dollars a year to go off and become a general manager somewhere. Also, in the post-Campanis era, any new black manager or general manager will be under a microscope and very likely second- guessed on everything he does. Quite frankly, some people look at that situation and simply say, “I don’t want the job that badly.”

Q. What you’re saying, then, is that it’s much easier said than done.

A. That’s why they call it a struggle instead of a picnic.

Q. So what is your strategy?

A. To gather two ends to pick up the middle. On one end, we’ve worked to create a viable pool of candidates who are qualified now to take over a managerial or front-office position. On the other end, we’re bringing younger minorities and women who are not advanced in their careers into lower-echelon positions within a sports organization. The idea is to get them into the loop, learning the business and moving up through the system and into the comfort zone of those who do the hiring. The individuals who tend to be hired are usually those known to the people in authority.

Q. You recently warned that baseball faces demonstrations and lawsuits because of its failure to integrate minorities into meaningful positions of leadership. Under what circumstances would that come about?

A. I believe the struggle at the interface of race and sports should be one that is led, developed programmatically and implemented by sports people with intimate knowledge of their institution. If those sports people fail to meet their obligations to move the institution ahead, in terms of broadening democratic participation, then you’ll begin to get the civil rights people, protest interests and the lawyers stepping in.

Q. But you have stated that the problems involving race and sport cannot be solved by affirmative action, the major tool to redress racial inequality in American society. Why not?

A. This has got me into a great deal of conflict with the civil rights establishment, but I hold that affirmative action is not a universal panacea. It’s a tool, and no area indicates that more than sports. The N.B.A., for example, is 75% black, and there was no affirmative action involved in it. But if you had an affirmative-action plan in the N.B.A. based on society at large, you’d have 10% black players and 90% white players. As a tool, affirmative action would be counterproductive. The front-office situation in baseball, in sports in general, is not amenable to traditional civil rights remedies.

Q. Has anything really changed in the 20 years since your call for an Olympic boycott?

A. Things have changed for the better, but the struggle is not linear. It’s dynamic and ever changing. Jesse Owens and Joe Louis struggled for the legitimacy of black athletic talent. Later, Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell and others struggled for access. In the late ’60s, athletes like Muhammad Ali, Tommie Smith, John Carlos, Arthur Ashe and Kareem ((Abdul-Jabbar)) fought for recognition of the dignity of the black athlete. Now we’re in the struggle for power, and that’s the most difficult of all. If we can broaden democratic participation in sports, then there is at least the possibility that we can devise credible strategies for approaching the situation in society as a whole.

Q. What attracted you to sports?

A. My father always pushed me toward sports. The first thing I can remember is my father buying me a pair of boxing gloves. The Joe Louis phenomenon. It was something that was drilled into me for as long as I could remember. The basic idea was, ‘Hey, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson — they’re making endorsements. They got it made.’ They’ve all proved that if you can make it in athletics, you can make it in American society. Here was a way up and out of the degradations that black people suffered. Later, of course, I found out this wasn’t the case at all.

Q. You have written that when you were growing up, your father and your teachers constantly implied that because you were an athlete, your body mattered more than your mind.

A. Well, the ’60s was a time when it appeared that newly integrated sports was going to be extremely rewarding to blacks. As a black athlete, you had a special calling, and nothing else was on par with that. Not intellectual development, not personal development, nothing else. So teachers and parents winked at academic deficiencies and a lack of discipline in the classroom because the young man was on the basketball team or the football team. There was this strong notion that sports had the capability as an institution of raising the entire race. That’s a hoax, the greatest hoax that has ever been perpetrated on any people in this society. And it’s still alive and sick as ever.

Q. Does that mean, then, that poor black kids should not look up to someone who comes out of a similar background and is enormously successful in athletics?

A. No. It means that we must teach our children to dream with their eyes open. The chances of your 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.