A League of Our Own: Sports and Embodiment

Home to seven professional major-league sports teams, including the ASTROS (MLB), the ROCKETS (NBA), the TEXANS (NFL), the DYNAMO (MLS), and DASH (NWSL), Houston provides an international stage for record-setting global sports engagement, health research interventions, and Black cultural expression. These franchises emerge in a cultural context characterized by a vast playing field of athletic contests and racial consciousness in equal measure. Dubbed the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” the Houston Astrodome revolutionized sports entertainment as the first fully enclosed, air-conditioned major league stadium in human history. Constructed in 1965, the Astrodome aided in the desegregation of what was then the seventh largest city in the United States during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In a calculated act of desegregation, the Astrodome became the first sports arena in the city’s history to open fully integrated, all the while avoiding inflaming public backlash. This seldom acknowledged moment in the racial history of sports and urban development in Black Houston(s), warrants critical attention to such questions as: How have sports served as a site for Black Houstonians to negotiate economic mobility, political refusal, and social representation? In what ways have Black embodiment been policed, celebrated, or commodified in Houston’s athletic arenas? What stories and strategies emerge from Black Houstonian engagements with athletics across generations—from the 1940s Houston Eagles of the Negro Leagues to Houston’s own Jalen Hurts of the Philadelphia Eagles?

The Fourth Annual Black Houston(s) Symposium, titled “A League of Our Own: Sports and Embodiment,” will convene artists, scholars, athletes, organizers, and community members to explore the dynamic ways in which Black Houstonians have moved, been moved about, and been moved upon—politically and historically. “A League of Our Own” offers a cross-disciplinary symposium that interrogates the legacies and contemporary realities of Black embodiment and sport in Houston, from the professional arena of NRG to the pedestrian pick-up games of Emancipation Park. In doing so, we spotlight the physical, symbolic, and structural dimensions of Black movement—both celebrated and surveilled—across the city’s sports arenas, community centers, dance floors, and public parks.