“A Pillar of all HBCUs”: Deion Sanders, Aspirational Prophecy, and the Divine Promise of Jackson State University Football

Madera J.

Abstract “Early Black Worldmaking: Body, Compass, and Text” previews a Black cultural history of the abolition epoch. It focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century author–activists. Judith Madera tracks an emancipatory network that linked pioneering abolitionist communities in the Caribbean and US by print channels and shared place-based histories. Madera states that Black geographies grew up in reading societies, church organizations, cottage industries, women’s leadership groups, social clubs, and political debate fora. Black women abolitionists, she claims, called for a civics that first needed to be built. They cast blueprints for better worlds because they could imagine that other worlds were possible.

McClearen J., Fischer M., Sheppard S.N., Close S., Howell C.E., Overby K.M.

Jackson D., Trevisan F., Pullen E., Silk M.

In this introduction to a special issue on sport communication and social justice, we offer some reflections on the state of the discipline as it relates to social justice. We bring attention to the role of sport communication scholars in the advancement of social justice goals and articulate a set of dispositions for researchers to bring to their practice, predicated on internalizing and centralizing morality, ethics, and the political. Identifying the epistemological (under)currents in the meaningful study of communication and sport, we offer a set of challenges for researchers in the contemporary critique of the communication industries based on “sensibilities” or dispositions of the research to those studied. We then introduce and frame the 13 articles that make up this double special issue of Communication & Sport. Collectively, these articles begin to demonstrate such dispositions in their interrogation of some of the most important and spectacularized acts of social justice campaigns and activism in recent decades alongside investigations of everyday forms of marginalization, resistance, and collective action that underpin social change—both progressive and regressive. We hope this special issue provides a vehicle for continued work in the area of sports communication and social justice.

Cavaiani A.C.

Recently, athlete protests about social injustice have garnered much attention from fans and the media. An element frequently overlooked is the role of place in sports protests. Stadiums are iconic markers of identity for communities and play a significant role in the media’s representation of sports games. Informed by Endres and Senda-Cook’s research about place-in-protest, I argue how the Botham Jean and O’Shae Terry protests outside AT&T Stadium in Dallas functioned as place-as-rhetoric to build on the intended purpose of the stadium while temporarily reconstructing its meaning. This material enactment is achieved by the stadium serving as a performative space that authorizes new meaning onto the stadium and surrounding space while heralding it as a champion marker of social justice. I position my analysis within a framework that understands how sports stadiums deploy material rhetoric in ways that produce embodied rhetoric and ephemeral rhetoric that legitimize the Jean and Terry protests as social justice protests. I argue that the stadium functions as place-in-rhetoric to capitalize on its mobilization of fandom in order to amplify social justice messages to a wider audience.

Lavelle K.L.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) has a conflicted history navigating issues of race and Black identity. When audiotapes were released with Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling making racist comments, fans and players threatened to boycott playoff games. Within 4 days, the new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver banned Sterling for life. While Silver was lauded for his decision, coverage ignored the underlying structural issues that uphold inequality in the NBA. This article reviews recent communication and sport scholarship examining race and the NBA. By examining Silver’s decision using Kenneth Burke’s Terms of Order (1961), this article argues that the NBA continues to ignore how racism operates in the league.

Spencer L.G.

This article considers the rhetoric of Leontine Kelly, the first woman of color to be elected bishop in any Christian denomination. As a black woman bishop in the United Methodist Church, a denomination with a history fraught with contradiction on issues related to gender and racial (in)justice, Kelly often preached to primarily White audiences with the goal of convincing them that racism and sexism were sinful. To do so, Kelly brought together prophecy and irony. This combination proved useful for Kelly and offers possibilities for fruitful interactions between irony and prophecy.

Khan A.I.

This article asks the following question: When we compare the contemporary political challenges associated with sexual identity to the civil rights history embodied in Jackie Robinson, what shape do the politics of sexuality take? This article argues that through Jackie Robinson, Michael Sam mobilizes the political rhetoric of respectability, the notion that inclusion is the meaning of social struggle and that it is achieved in enacting the rhetorical and behavioral norms modeled in straight White men. Respectability works to domesticate the imagery associated with gay sexuality, to figure the citizen as a model of comportment which relies for its appeal on the civil rights movement as queer sexuality’s map through politics. Moreover, Sam’s circulation through public discourse is marked by a carefully managed stage presence, a phenomenon which, I believe, disavows critiques of neoliberal capitalism by attaching Sam’s sexuality to meanings that might generate economic value. Although the allusion to Robinson presupposes a discursive frame in which Sam’s race and sexuality are merely incidental to each other, taking it seriously is worthwhile not only by examining the rhetorical work the comparison performs but also by tugging at the hidden stitches that hold it together.

McCune J.Q.

Milford M.

Burke argues priesthoods that work to maintain the social order govern orientations. This can lead to cultural lag or the gap that results when a priesthood fails to maintain an orientation in light of communal changes. To account for cultural lag, a community can develop prophets who work to revise the orientation. To illustrate, I examined the University of Miami booster who provided improper benefits to student-athletes. As a result of the coverage of the scandal, the media worked with the college sports community to blame and chastise the NCAA in order to provide them with a plan for revision and restoration. This case illustrates how prophets can function to take up the cultural lag in a community by challenging the priesthood with its own sins and providing a means of restoration that adapts the orientation to current circumstances.

Henry K.

Lewis T.V.

Southern sports teams embrace the notion that attendance and participation by competitors and fans alike have made the activity, especially collegiate football, the new locus of religious passion. Social media resources on YouTube, home team motivational videos, and professionally produced documentaries use religious metaphors to communicate the notion that college football fills the same function for celebrants as does the local church. These examples of social media have become a “voice” for the fans as they practice this para-religious exercise. This article analyzes the use of religious metaphors and references social media as examples of how the use of such iconic videos can demonstrate the ongoing connection between religious communication and sports to a wider community of sports fans.

Butterworth M.L.

As one of the most widely covered athletes of recent years, Tim Tebow is both beloved and resented. In this essay, I critique sports media coverage of Tebow to demonstrate how tragic framing constitutes this opposition. By emphasizing his character both as a football leader and a Christian missionary, sports media frame Tebow in transcendental terms, the consequence of which is a discourse of absolutism and symbolic division. What is required, therefore, is a turn to Kenneth Burke's notion of the comic frame, a position of humility that is well-suited to the agonistic ethos of commercial sport.

Khan A.I.

Johnson A.