February 5, 2025: Inspiring Sports Stories: Chubbtown

[For this year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute to my two favorite American athletes!]

On two contrasting and equally important ways to contextualize an inspiring family story.

I don’t imagine I have to convince readers of this blog that sports are more than just a distraction or entertainment, that they connect to all the layers of our society and community and history. One of the most striking instances of such connections for me is the fact that I first learned about the unique and amazing American community of Chubbtown, Georgia, through a pregame story on the running back Nick Chubb, then playing as a stand-out at the University of Georgia. Chubb has since moved into the NFL, as has his relative, the equally talented defensive lineman Bradley Chubb. Both Nick and Bradley are related to the historic Chubb family, one of the oldest-recorded multi-generational African American families in our history (with records dating back to the pre-Revolutionary days) and the founders of Chubbtown, a community of free Black folks established in the mountains of Northwest Georgia in 1864, during the depths of the Civil War (and as an escape from that conflict).

Chubbtown is far from the only community founded by African Americans during and immediately after the Civil War, as anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) knows; Hurston sets much of her novel in such a community, one based closely on her own influential childhood experiences in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-Black city in America. And remembering such communities overall allows us—or perhaps forces us is the better phrase—to engage with the 1923 Rosewood massacre, when another all-Black community in Florida was largely destroyed by white supremacist domestic terrorists. The late John Singleton’s 1997 film portrays both that community and that massacre with nuance and power, and I would say we can’t commemorate the Chubbs and Chubbtown without a complementary examination of that story and these frustratingly frequent and foundational American histories of racial terrorism.

At the same time, we talked a great deal throughout my 20^th Century African American Literature course this past Fall semester about not allowing such histories to dominate our collective memories of the truly multilayered and often profoundly inspiring stories of Black history. This year marks the 250^th anniversary of the first recorded stories of the Chubb family, making their saga a particularly striking and symbolic such inspiring story in early 2025 (and one that can, for example, complement, challenge, and transcend collective memories focused only on the 250^th anniversary of white-centered stories and figures from the American Revolution). That story extends far beyond Chubbtown, but it became deeply interconnected with this community, one that produced two iconic 21^st century athletes who can, like so much of the best of sports in our histories, offer a window into better remembering every layer of that setting and story.

Next inspiring story tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?