‘The Stadium’ may make us think of baseball and hot dogs but it’s also a source of inspiration and strife

During the last 150 years, Americans have built thousands of structures designed to allow large numbers of people to watch amateur and professional athletes, entertainers, circuses and rodeos. These places also have served as public squares, showcasing politicians and protesters.

In “The Stadium,” Frank Andre Guridy, a professor of history and African American studies at Columbia University, examines these arenas as barometers of American democracy, places in which Democrats and Republicans nominated presidential candidates; where Nazis, communists, segregationists, labor unions and civil rights organizations held rallies; disco records were demolished; and the political/cultural status quo was defended and attacked.

Guridy’s focus is on challenges to settler colonialism, racism, sexism and homophobia in stadiums and arenas. The Washington Redskins football team (now the Commanders), he reminds us, continued to caricature American Indians well into the 1990s. Their fight song, “Scalp ‘um, swamp ‘um, we will take ‘um big score,” he writes, reduced Indigenous peoples’ “life-and-death struggle against genocidal policies to the fate of a football team on the gridiron.”

Faced with criticism, the owners removed the broken English but retained the team name until 2020. Fans dressed as Indians continued to fill the stadium. The lesson, Guridy writes, is that social exclusion can be reinforced during “a seemingly innocuous activity.”

Throughout the 1960s and ‘70s, the Civil Rights Movement held events in stadiums and arenas across the country.

In June 1963, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave an earlier version of his “I Have A Dream” speech in Cobo Arena in downtown Detroit. In 1972, Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum hosted the Wattstax Festival, at which Jesse Jackson led 100,000 people through his call-and-response “I Am Somebody” litany. These events, Guridy indicates, signaled some of the most dramatic changes in American society “since the collapse of Jim Crow.”

Guridy also devotes a chapter to the efforts of mostly white female sportswriters to gain access to athletes’ locker rooms, thereby putting them, as one sarcastic critic put it, “‘dangerously’ close to black male sexuality.” Another chapter covers the Gay Games in Kezar Stadium in San Francisco in 1982, where 1,300 athletes competed in 16 Olympic-style events. And ACT UP’s stealth purchase, in 1988, of 252 seats in the upper deck of Shea Stadium in New York, where they displayed placards and banners protesting homophobia.

Guridy claims, without much evidence, that stadiums were more open to these activists in the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s because a majority of the venues were publicly funded and managed. In the 21st century, he argues, arguments for allegedly apolitical stadiums gained more traction as they became corporatized, spectators became whiter and more affluent and workers got more Black and brown. Since 9/11, Guridy notes, corporations partnered with the U.S. military to showcase jingoistic rituals celebrating soldiers and police officers.

That said, Guridy also acknowledges that the Black Lives Matter movement and murder of George Floyd transformed stadiums from compliant patriotism to contested spaces. And that 48 stadiums and arenas were turned into polling places in 2020.

It remains to be seen, Guridy concludes, whether Americans will build on these manifestations of social justice and political democracy, all in stadiums that usually pit two groups of athletes against each other.

Glenn C. Altschuler is an emeritus professor of American Studies at Cornell University.

The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play

By: Frank Andre Guridy.

Publisher: Basic Books, 368 pages, $32.