[For this
year’s Super Bowl series, I wanted to highlight inspiring American sports stories
and figures, past and present. Leading up to a special pre-Valentine’s tribute
to my two favorite American athletes!]
On two contrasting
and equally important ways to contextualize an inspiring family story.
I don’t
imagine I have to convince readers of this blog that sports are more than just a
distraction or entertainment, that they connect to all the layers of our
society and community and history. One of the most striking instances of such
connections for me is the fact that I first learned about the unique and
amazing American community of Chubbtown,
Georgia, through a pregame story on the running back Nick Chubb, then playing
as a stand-out at the University of Georgia. Chubb has since moved into the
NFL, as has his
relative, the equally talented defensive lineman Bradley Chubb. Both Nick
and Bradley are related to the historic Chubb
family, one of the oldest-recorded multi-generational African American
families in our history (with records
dating back to the pre-Revolutionary days) and the founders of Chubbtown, a
community
of free Black folks established in the mountains of Northwest Georgia in
1864, during the depths of the Civil War (and as an escape from that conflict).
Chubbtown
is far from the only community founded by African Americans during and
immediately after the Civil War, as anyone who has read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their
Eyes Were Watching God (1937) knows; Hurston sets
much of her novel in such a community, one based closely on her own
influential childhood experiences
in Eatonville, the first incorporated all-Black city in America. And
remembering such communities overall allows us—or perhaps forces us is the better
phrase—to engage with the 1923 Rosewood massacre,
when another all-Black community in Florida was largely destroyed by white
supremacist domestic terrorists. The late John
Singleton’s 1997 film portrays both that community and that massacre with
nuance and power, and I would say we can’t commemorate the Chubbs and Chubbtown
without a complementary examination of that story and these frustratingly
frequent and foundational American histories
of racial terrorism.
At the
same time, we talked a great deal throughout my 20th Century African
American Literature course this past Fall semester about not allowing such
histories to dominate our collective memories of the truly multilayered and
often profoundly inspiring stories of Black history. This year marks the 250th
anniversary of the first
recorded stories of the Chubb family, making their saga a particularly striking
and symbolic such inspiring story in early 2025 (and one that can, for example,
complement, challenge, and transcend collective memories focused only on the
250th anniversary of white-centered stories and figures from the
American Revolution). That story extends far beyond Chubbtown, but it became deeply
interconnected with this community, one that produced two iconic 21st
century athletes who can, like so much of the best of sports in our histories,
offer a window into better remembering every layer of that setting and story.
Next
inspiring story tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Inspiring sports stories or figures you’d highlight?
