We often identify stadiums and arenas with a sports team – the home of the Cowboys, the Spurs, the Longhorns. But these giant edifices of concrete and steel are much more than sports palaces where fans cheer on their favorites. Stadiums are also centers for entertainment, protest and activism.
In his new book, ‘The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest and Play,” historian Frank Guridy traces the evolution of these community institutions over the past century. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: I guess it’s natural to connect stadiums and arenas with sports or even a favorite concert we might have seen there. But these gathering spaces also reflect the history of political movements and civil rights – so much so that politics is the first thing you mentioned in your subtitle. How did you come to this conclusion?
Frank Guridy: So you’re right. We think of stadiums as sport and entertainment venues – and indeed they are, or they have that function. But when you look at their history closely, you see that they’ve had a multifaceted impact on American history, and partly because they’re deeply political.
They’ve been places where politicians have sought to cultivate loyalty. They’re places where we have the recurring performances of “The Star-Spangled Banner” before all sorts of events. They’re also places where elites have sought to project their power, in the past and present.
And so when you look at the kinds of events that we see there, from political rallies to what we’ve seen with the Democratic and Republican National Conventions happening in arenas in Milwaukee and Chicago, we see that the stadiums are always bound up or often bound up in politics.
Well, let’s start with a stadium name that has a very storied history. It’s had several physical homes, actually, and has a Texas connection most people might not know about. I know you’re in New York, so let’s talk about Madison Square Garden and a guy named Tex, appropriately
Tex Rickard, absolutely, yes. Texas has had a monumental impact on American sport history, Rickard is just one example of that. He was an entrepreneur who became really famous for promoting boxing in the 1910s and 1920s. And he basically takes over the lease of the first iteration of Madison Square Garden, which existed on the east side of Manhattan, not the current location.
And under his directorship, the Garden – in that iteration and in subsequent ones – becomes a home for all sorts of events: boxing, dog shows and political rallies, including the very infamous or famous 1924 Democratic National Convention.
And so Rickard was one of those entrepreneurs who saw the value of a building like the Garden beyond sport and entertainment. He also saw it as a place for political events. And so he had a very broad conception of what a building like that could offer for the public. And it did, during the time that he ran the Garden and of course after he died in 1929.
So, yes, the Garden becomes famous in part, you know, much more than because it’s not just as a sports facility, but it has this multifaceted history.
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You mentioned an infamous event there. Would you mind talking about one or two of those political events of the Garden?
Sure. Well, so the 1924 Democratic Convention is fascinating because it was the longest convention in American political history. It was this bitter battle for the Democratic nomination.
And one of the battles that’s taking shape at that time was whether or not the Democratic Party would stand against the Ku Klux Klan, which was emerging or reemerging in American society at the time. And so the Garden becomes a major battle for what the relationship between the Democrats and the Klan would be.
And then, of course, there’s the infamous 1939 rally staged by the German American Bund to sort of promote Naziism in the United States at the time. And this is, of course, when Hitler is in power in Germany, and it turns to a major battle inside the Garden and outside, protesting the Nazi rally.
And so we see there again, the 30s, particularly the Garden, becomes a space for basically a battle about what the fate of Nazis was going to be in the Atlantic world. And we see that very clearly in the 1930 rally.
Let’s turn to the role stadiums have played in the South – we’ll include Texas in that definition, for now anyway. Many southern stadiums were built in the 1930s with funds from Depression-era federal programs to house college football teams.
You write extensively about the Sugar Bowl stadium in New Orleans. Can you talk about what happened in 1941 when Boston College came to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl?
In 1941, Boston College, is the northern team that plays in the Sugar Bowl. And it has a Black player, and that Black player is excluded from the game. And in some ways, it’s an example of what we see in that period in which northern schools basically adhere to Southern Jim Crow customs in disallowing Black players to play on teams.
And the Sugar Bowl stadium, which was on the campus of Tulane at the time, becomes one of the sort of major college football venues in the South and in the country at that time, because it stages the annual Sugar Bowl New Year’s Day Classic.
And it really becomes a space where the white South is projecting its power and its image through elaborate rituals that we see at halftime shows and in the fact that it remained all-white until the mid 50s and into the 1960s.
You mentioned it took many years for Black players or even spectators to be allowed in the Sugar Bowl. How did that change come about? Was it hard-fought?
Absolutely. It was very much part of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 60s, where activists throughout the country, and in New Orleans in particular, started lobbying and filing lawsuits against the state of Louisiana, which had kept the Sugar Bowl and all athletic facility segregated deep into the 1960s.
And it really isn’t until the late 60s where you see more integrated teams playing in the Sugar Bowl. And that’s also facilitated by the arrival of the New Orleans Saints NFL franchise, which first played its games at the Sugar Bowl starting in 1967.
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I’d like to talk about the Texas bowl stadiums during the stadium boom. We’re talking about the Cotton Bowl in Dallas or the Sun Bowl in El Paso. Were they any more open than the Sugar Bowl when it when it comes to integration?
In some ways, yes. Because it’s in 1948 when the Cotton Bowl decides to invite Penn State to play SMU for the Cotton Bowl New Year’s Day Classic. And so in some ways, the Texas sports entrepreneurs were a little more open-minded at the possibility of what an integrated sports environment could bring. I don’t want to overstate that, but it is true that integration proceeds a little more quickly in a Cotton Bowl context.
Although again, segregation is a law and the custom that governs most of Texas, college football as well at the time. So you see a similar pattern, but you do see the cracks in the Jim Crow edifice a little earlier in the Texas context than you do in Louisiana and other southern states.
We’ve been talking kind of at the college level, but in the 50s and 60s Texas got its first professional sports teams and stadiums. Were the builders any more open to integration than had been the case in the college bowls?
In some ways, absolutely. I think what we’re seeing in the early 60s are wealthy sports entrepreneurs – the Lamar Hunts, the Clint Murchisons and others – realized that if they wanted to bring professional sports to Texas – the NFL, the the American Football League and Major League Baseball – they understood that they needed to have a desegregated environment.
And in fact, what we see in Houston in the early 60s is the Astrodome actually facilitating racial integration in athletic events, because basically what happens is that Houston requires public funds to build what becomes the Houston Astrodome. And in order to do that, they needed to have Black support and a wide array of support to pass the bond that would allow public funds to construct the Astrodome.
So the Astrodome becomes the space where Houston is moving into this sort of post-Jim Crow society. You actually see that clearly in Houston, and to some extent in Dallas as well.
And these stadiums around the country, as they became more integrated, became a place for Black protest and activism. Can you talk more about that?
You know, I argue in the book that stadiums function as public squares, because what we see are movements from marginalized communities. African-Americans are a prime example. The Black freedom movement over the 1960s and 70s basically staged their claims for racial equality at rallies across the country.
We see Martin Luther King having rallies in Houston and in Detroit. We see Black power activism, and also Black power celebrations with the very famous 1972 concert that happens at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the famous Wattstax concert, which becomes a celebration of Black culture: 100,000 people come to that concert in 1972. And so we see that happening in the 1960s and 70s.
And then by the time we get to the 80s, we see gay and lesbian activists doing something similar with the advent of the Gay Games tournament that starts in San Francisco’s Kezar Stadium in 1982.
We see protests happening, of course, in recent years; it was Colin Kaepernick in 2020 and afterwards. So, you know, the stadium business magnet that attracts movements to it because of its visibility, because of the fact of its large size, and because it attracts thousands of people that allow movements to stage their claims for justice and equality.
Well, today, stadiums and sports teams are much more corporate than was true historically, from the sale of naming rights to expensive tickets and luxury boxes.
Do you think the American stadium still functions as a place where people come together for “politics, protest and play,” to quote your book’s title?
Today’s stadium, as you said, is dressed up as a temple of worship of corporate America, with the naming rights and with advertisements, as far as the eye can see plastered all over these buildings today. But they still function in a political manner, right? Because number one, to build them requires an enormous amount of public subsidies, direct or indirect.
Because, again, they remain important venues for political conventions, as we see to this day, and as we’ve seen in recent years, social movements often do stage their protests, even against the wills of stadium owners and certainly sports teams. Whether they like it or not, we will usually see climate protest or again, protest for racial equality, among other causes, anti-war protests as well.
So even though the stadium is presumed to be this apolitical space that’s corporatized, you know, their political function remains intact, from their earliest years and to the present, even in this day when they’re dressed up as these sort of temples of worship to the corporate cause of the 21st century, as I like to say.
