[With my older son in the midst of his high school cross-country season, and both sons gearing up for their next seasons of indoor and then outdoor track, running has become a huge part of this AmericanStudier’s life these days. But it’s long been part of both my life and America overall, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy different sides of running, leading up to a very special Guest Post from one of those aforementioned youthful AmericanStudiers!]
On two
interesting AmericanStudies contexts for a pair of interconnected all-time
greats.
I imagine
that this remains relatively common knowledge way beyond the relatively small
community of track and field fans, but in case not: Florence
Griffith Joyner (1959-1998) and Jackie
Joyner-Kersee (1962- ) weren’t just a pair of athletes who dominated track
and field and the Olympics in the 1980s and 1990s, both laying claim at one
moment or another to the title of
greatest female athlete of all time (one bestowed specifically on
Joyner-Kersee by Sports
Illustrated for Women, since JJK
competed in and dominated the many different events comprised by the heptathlon);
they were also, as their names suggest, related by marriage. In 1987, Florence
Griffith married
another Olympic champion, 1984 triple jump gold medalist Al Joyner,
who was Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s brother (Jackie had married
her coach, Bob Kersee, a year earlier). There’s plenty of competition for
the greatest athletic family, of course, but I have to think this is the most
athletically talented pair of sisters-in-law ever!
That in
and of itself makes for an interesting lens through which to AmericanStudy this
pair, but they were much more than their familial relationship; so I also want
to highlight one compelling context for each woman individually. Jacqueline
Joyner was born in March 1962 and named
after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, but that’s not the American connection
I want to share for her: it’s her birthplace, the confusingly named East St. Louis, Illinois (a city directly across
the Mississippi River from St. Louis, but obviously across a state line as
well). In the early 20th century East St. Louis was home to a blossoming
African American community, and in early July 1917, that community was targeted
by a multi-day white supremacist racial terrorist massacre that came to be
known as the
East St. Louis Race War (or race riot, but as I’ve written elsewhere,
that term is particularly problematic). As was the case with so many of those
ubiquitous massacres, the community
was decimated for many years thereafter, but it didn’t vanish; and I find
it incredibly moving that nearly fifty years later a newborn African American
baby was named after the First Lady and would go on to become one of the truly
first ladies of American and world sports. Ain’t that America?
It
certainly is—but so in its quite different and unique ways is Los Angeles, the
city in which Florence Griffith was
born two and a half years earlier than Jackie, in December 1959. Of course
Los Angeles, like much of the West, had been significantly changed by the
Great Migration, and Griffith’s family took part in that movement, with her
grandparents having moved from the South to Los Angeles a couple decades
earlier. But what I want to highlight here is the multi-layered, complicated
role of public institutions in Florence’s young life in California: her
upbringing by her single mother (a seamstress also named Florence Griffith) in the
prominent Jordan
Downs public housing complex in the Watts neighborhood of LA; and then her
experiences as a student-athlete at two universities in the UC system, first California State University at
Northridge and then UCLA
(with a short gap in between where she worked as a bank teller while seeking a
scholarship to return to school). California is of course not at all unique in
the role that public housing and public education alike played in its
development in the 20th century, but it was one of the states most
connected to those trends—and it’s telling that one of the most famous athletes
and Americans born in the state in the mid-20th century was so
interconnected with those public institutions and communities.
Last
RunningStudying from me tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Running connections or contexts you’d share?
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