Isa Cruz

On Tuesday evening in Kresge Auditorium, sports historian Doug Stark spoke to an audience of student-athletes and community members alike in a talk centered around race and sports in Boston. After a brief presentation introducing Black Bostonian athletes of the past, from Lou Montgomery to Louise Stokes, Stark took questions from Assistant Professor of English Zahir Janmohamed, who is currently teaching a first-year writing seminar titled “The Art of Sports Writing.”

Stark co-wrote “Race and Resistance in Boston: A Contested Sports History,” a book that dives into the long history of Black sporting culture in the city. It is the second book in a four-part series regarding this topic with the last two contracted for the years to come.

Even though Stark grew up in western Massachusetts, many of the stories he uncovered for the books were unknown to him.

“I heard of the big stories and read the newspapers a lot. But in working on this project, many of these stories were new to me,” Stark said. “I wish I had known more of these stories, [that] they were part of Boston’s Black community, but they were not part of the mainstream press. So it sort of fuels my desire to try to find more and bring it to the public.”

Janmohamed was introduced to Stark’s work through Assistant Professor of History David Hecht, who met Stark in college.

“For me, especially as a Californian, it is really complicated, because there’s a story that I think many of us know about Boston, which is that it’s a notoriously racist city in terms of its sports culture,” Janmohamed said. “But there were moments throughout Boston sports’ history of resistance, of integration. And that is a part of the record that oftentimes does not get discussed. And the whole purpose of my class is how do I get students to look at moments in sports history that we often forget.”

Stark touched on these points of conflict, including the fact that the Boston Red Sox were the last major league baseball team to integrate, yet a few years later, the Boston Celtics were the first basketball team to have a Black player.

“I think it’s an opportunity to discuss the larger issue of documenting Boston’s Black athletes and race and sports in Boston and to show a much more nuanced portrait than what traditionally exists,” Stark said. “The point of the project and the books is to have a much more layered approach to say, ‘Hey, there’s more data points, there’s more stories of struggle and hope and triumph.’”

Stark acknowledged the potential tension regarding the intersection of race, gender and other identities in sports, while understanding the significance of uplifting lesser-known athletes and their stories.

“With the political climate, I think these stories still resonate today, about cultural expression, racial identity and economic uplift,” Stark said. “And I think it’s important to have a well-balanced understanding of society, despite what may be going on today.”

Janmohamed came into the evening with the goal of opening the audience’s eyes to the genre of sports journalism, specifically emphasizing how it’s more than just play-by-play narratives and hot takes.

“I hope students come out realizing that the field of sports writing is very expansive. And, so, while there are lots of articles about which team might win the World Cup, there’s also deeper dives about the ways in which sports intersect with race.”

In addition to his prolific writing career, Stark started doing archival work at the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Following his work in Springfield, Mass. where he met Larry Bird, a highly decorated former professional basketball player, Stark was the museum director of the International Tennis Hall of Fame for 13 years. He helped secure a major renovation project to improve the visitor experience and helped the museum become the first sports hall of fame to be accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.

After the fourth and final book in the project is published, Stark hopes his research and experience in museum curation will lead to an exhibit of his own.

“I think it would be terrific to get this involved with a university system somehow, whether it’s in a library, whether it’s teaching a course, but I think there’s a lot more opportunity out there to expose [more] people to this story,” Stark said.