[lbo-talk] Zirin: The history of the last protest against the Mormon Church

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Mon Dec 29 10:39:21 PST 2008


http://www.edgeofsports.com//2008-12-29-399/index.html

Latter Day Protest? Proposition 8 and Sports

By Dave Zirin

As supporters of Gay Marriage are have discovered, it's never easy to

be on the Mormon Church's enemies list. The Church of Latter Day Saints

backed the anti-Gay Marriage Proposition 8 in California with

out-of-state funds, and gave the right a heartbreaking victory this

past election cycle. But the Mormon Church has been challenged in the

past. Just ask Bob Beamon.

If you know Beamon's name it's almost certainly because he won the long

jump gold medal in legendary fashion at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.

Beamon leapt 29 feet, 2.5 inches, a record that held for twenty-three

years. Great Britain's Lynn Davies told Beamon afterwards, "You have

destroyed this event." This is because Beamon was not only the first

long jumper to break 29 feet, he was the first to break 28.

But you may not know that Beamon almost never made it to Mexico City.

Along with eight other teammates, Beamon had his track and field

scholarship revoked from the University of Texas at El Paso, the

previous year. They had refused to compete against Brigham Young

University. Beamon and his teammates were protesting the racist

practices of the Mormon Church, and their coach at UTEP, Wayne

Vanderburge, made them pay the ultimate price.

They weren't alone. As tennis great Arthur Ashe wrote in his book, Hard

Road to Glory, "In October 1969, fourteen black [football] players at

the University of Wyoming publicly criticized the Mormon Church and

appealed to their coach, Lloyd Eaton, to support their right not to

play against Brigham Young University. . . . The Mormon religion at the

time taught that blacks could not attain to the priesthood, and that

they were tainted by the curse of Ham, a biblical figure. Eaton,

however, summarily dropped all fourteen players from the squad."

The players, though, didn't take their expulsion lying down. They

called themselves the Black 14 and sued for damages with the support of

the NAACP. In an October 25th game against San Jose State, the entire

San Jose team wore black armbands to support the 14.

One aftershock of this episode was in November 1969, when Stanford

University President Kenneth Pitzer suspended athletic relations with

BYU, announcing that Stanford would honor what he called an athlete's

"Right of Conscience." The "Right of Conscience" allowed athletes to

boycott an event which he or she deemed "personally repugnant." As the

Associated Press wrote, "Waves of black protest roll toward BYU,

assaulting Mormon belief and leaving BYU officials and students,

perplexed, hurt, and maybe a little angry."

On June 6th, 1978, as teams were refusing road trips to Utah with

greater frequency, and the IRS started to make noises about revoking

the church's holy tax-free status, a new revelation came to the Book of

Mormon.

Whether a cynical ploy to avoid the taxman or a coincidence touched by

God, the results were the same: Black people were now human in the eyes

of the Church. African Americans were no longer, as Brigham Young

himself once put it, "uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable, and low in their

habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the

intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind." The IRS was

assuaged, the athletic contests continued, and the church entered a

period of remarkable growth.

Similar pressure must be brought to bear on the Mormon Church today for

its financing of Proposition 8 in California. One nonprofit crunched

the numbers and found that $17.67 million of the $22 million used to

pass the anti-gay marriage legislation was funneled through 59,000

Mormon families since August. It was done with the institutional

backing of the church, though many pro-gay Mormons have spoken out

defiantly against the church's political intervention.

The question now is whether this latest tale of social conflict and the

Church of Latter Day Saints will also spill onto the athletic field.

Men's athletics have been one of the last proud hamlets of homophobia

in our society (although the attitudes of male athletes is more

progressive than you might think). But women's sports has been

historically more open around issues of sexuality.

Will any women collegians raise the specter of Proposition 8 if they

have to travel to the schools of Utah? Will we see the ghosts of Black

14 emerge from the past?

If any athletes choose to act, the ramifications could be

"Beamonesque."



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