Better Than the Best: Black Athletes Speak, 1920-2007

In these engaging and forthright interviews, thirteen African American athletes talk about how they endured through pain, loneliness, and rejection to become champions. In sports as diverse as football and fencing, wrestling and track and field, these men and women triumphed over the odds to become better than the best. Their legacy is in their accomplishments and in their determination to continue contributing to the societal transformation their efforts helped make possible.

A V Ethel Willis White Book

John C. Walter is professor emeritus of American ethnic studies, University of Washington. He is the author of The Harlem Fox: J. Raymond Jones and Tammamy and coeditor (with Johnnella Butler) of Transforming the Curriculum: Ethnic Studies and Women’s Studies. In 1953 he came to the United States from Jamaica on a track scholarship to Philander Smith College in Little Rock, Arkansas. Malina Iida is a student at William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawai’i.