Gerald Early

Professor of African & African American Studies & English

Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters

PhD, Cornell University

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contact info:

Email: glearly@wustl.edu
Phone: 314-935-4008

office hours:

By Appointment

mailing address:

Washington University
Campus Box 1098-0137-02
One Brookings Drive
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899

Professor Early is an award-winning essayist, author, and editor. He has served as a commentator for NPR and as a consultant for multiple documentaries with Ken Burns.

Gerald Early is the Merle Kling Professor of Modern Letters in the African and African American Studies Department at Washington University in St. Louis, where he has taught since 1982.

He was most recently the interim director of the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity, and Equity (2022-2023). He was previously the chair of the African and African American Studies Department (2014-2021). He is also the executive editor of The Common Reader, Washington University’s interdisciplinary journal published under the auspices of the Provost’s office.

Early is a noted essayist and American culture critic. His collections of essays include Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture (1989); The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism; This is Where I Came In: Essays on Black America in the 1960s (2003), and, most recently, A Level-Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports (2011). He also authorizes Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood (1994).

His anthologies include The Cambridge Companion to Boxing (2019); Approaches to Teaching Baraka’s Dutchman (2018, with Matthew Calihman); The Sammy Davis, Jr. Reader (2001); Miles Davis and American Culture (2001); The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998); Ain’t But a Place: An Anthology of African American Writings About St. Louis (1998): and Body Language: Writers on Sport (1998). Early is an elected American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellow and has been honored with a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

in the news:

2.20.18

On Topic: The history of black studies with Gerald Early

Play Harder: The Triumph of Black Baseball in America

By Gerald Early and the National Baseball Hall of Fame

An authoritative exploration of how Black Americans have shaped baseball from its emergence after the Civil War to the Negro Leagues and Jackie Robinson’s breaking of the color barrier, up to today’s game—by award-winning author Gerald Early in collaboration with the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

No sport has been more associated with America’s sense of itself, with its identity, than baseball. No sport has been so inextricably bound with America’s traditions—with its notions of democracy and fair play—than baseball. And no professional sport in America has been as dramatically connected to social change as Major League Baseball when it became racially integrated the moment Jackie Robinson took the field with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.

Play Harder comes at a time when the history of Black baseball has become especially relevant—following MLB’s recent recognition of the Negro Leagues as major leagues and the effort to incorporate statistics from the Negro Leagues into those for all players. Before Robinson, as Play Harder shows, Black athletes played baseball as far back as the 1800s even before the establishment of the Negro Leagues. But once founded in 1920, the Negro Leagues gave Black Americans an inroad to baseball that would be enduring and profound. The leagues were an instrument of community building during a time when discrimination separated Black people from all white enterprises, including baseball, and they paved the way for racial integration that Black players hoped would come.

Play Harder showcases the Black stars of the game—those from baseball’s early years such as Moses Fleetwood Walker and Rube Foster; Negro Leagues stars like Satchel Paige and Cool Papa Bell; Jackie Robinson and those who crossed the color line after him, like Hank Aaron and Willie Mays, followed by Frank Robinson and Curt Flood; and the stars who ushered in today’s game, such as Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Barry Bonds, and Ken Griffey, Jr. Playing out against the cultural and political events of 150 years, the story bears witness to the richness of this country’s diversity while remaining clear-eyed about the racial injustice endured by Black Americans. In the end, Play Harder celebrates the triumph of some of baseball’s greatest players and their remarkable contributions to the game we know and love today.

Penguin Random House

42 Today

By Gerald Early

Before the United States Supreme Court ruled against segregation in public schools, and before Rosa Parks refused to surrender her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, Jackie Robinson walked onto the diamond on April 15, 1947, as first baseman for the Brooklyn Dodgers, making history as the first African American to integrate Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. Today a national icon, Robinson was a complicated man who navigated an even more complicated world that both celebrated and despised him.

Many are familiar with Robinson as a baseball hero. Few, however, know of the inner turmoil that came with his historic status. Featuring piercing essays from a range of distinguished sportswriters, cultural critics, and scholars, this book explores Robinson’s perspectives and legacies on civil rights, sports, faith, youth, and nonviolence, while providing rare glimpses into the struggles and strength of one of the nation’s most athletically gifted and politically significant citizens. Edited by noted Robinson scholar Michael G. Long, and featuring a foreword by celebrated directors and producers Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, this volume recasts Jackie Robinson’s legacy and establishes how he set a precedent for future civil rights activism, from Black Lives Matter to Colin Kaepernick.

A Level Playing Field: African American Athletes and the Republic of Sports

By Gerald Early

As Americans, we believe there ought to be a level playing field for everyone. Even if we don’t expect to finish first, we do expect a fair start. Only in sports have African Americans actually found that elusive level ground. But at the same time, black players offer an ironic perspective on the athlete-hero, for they represent a group historically held to be without social honor.

In his first new collection of sports essays since Tuxedo Junction (1989), the noted cultural critic Gerald Early investigates these contradictions as they play out in the sports world and in our deeper attitudes toward the athletes we glorify. Early addresses a half-century of heated cultural issues ranging from integration to the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Writing about Jackie Robinson and Curt Flood, he reconstructs pivotal moments in their lives and explains how the culture, politics, and economics of sport turned with them. Taking on the subtexts, racial and otherwise, of the controversy over remarks Rush Limbaugh made about quarterback Donovan McNabb, Early restores the political consequence to an event most commentators at the time approached with predictable bluster.

The essays in this book circle around two perennial questions: What other, invisible contests unfold when we watch a sporting event? What desires and anxieti

Harvard University Press