Join the Sport, Media, and Culture Minor for a talk with Frank A. Guridy. The event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow. 

Stadiums are much more than sport and entertainment venues. They are social and economic institutions where different sectors of society come to work and play. His talk will examine two sections of the American stadium—the press box and the locker room—to analyze how women sportswriters challenged gender discrimination in the male-dominated world of sports journalism during the 1970s. Racial and gender barriers fell by the wayside on the field and in the stands during the decade, but they stubbornly persisted in the press box and the locker room for years thereafter. Attending to the social history of the stadium’s built environment shows how stadiums have operated as de facto public squares where battles for justice and inclusion have been fought over and over again.

About the speaker

Frank A. Guridy is Professor of History and African American and African Diaspora Studies and the Executive Director of the Eric H. Holder Initiative for Civil and Political Rights at Columbia University. He is an award-winning historian whose recent research has focused on sport history, urban history, and the history of American social movements. His latest book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021) explored how Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes from marginalized backgrounds transformed American sporting culture during the 1960s and 1970s, the highpoint of the Black Freedom and Second-Wave feminist movements. 

Guridy is also a leading scholar of the Black Freedom Movement in the United States and in other parts of the African Diaspora. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He is also the co-editor of Beyond el Barrio: Everyday Life in Latino/a America (NYU Press, 2010), with Gina Pérez and Adrian Burgos, Jr. 

Originally published at smacminor.nd.edu.