Fifty-two years ago last month, 100,000 Black Angelenos gathered at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. Although the historic stadium had long served as a venue for many of the city’s sports teams, that wasn’t the draw on 20 August 1972. Rather, it was Wattstax ‘72, a celebration of Black culture meant to channel positivity and pride in a community devastated by the Watts riots of 1965 and mourning the assassination of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1968.

The Rev Jesse Jackson was an emcee, touting co-sponsor Schlitz Brewing Company’s initiative for Black jobs and urging the audience that no matter how impoverished they were, they should remember the motto “I am Somebody”. The police were not asked to maintain order – the organizers managed things themselves. One member of the talented lineup of performing artists, “Prince of Dance” Rufus Thomas, led attendees in a spontaneous on-field rendition of the Funky Chicken. (Many of the stars, including Thomas, had ties to co-sponsor Stax Records.) Afterward, one crowd member disobeyed a request to get off the field – until Thomas persuaded spectators to act as an escort. Overall, it was a successful repurposing of a sports stadium into a public square – a phenomenon that Columbia University history and African American studies professor Frank Andre Guridy further explores in his new book, The Stadium: An American History of Politics, Protest, and Play.

“We think of a stadium as a place to go to be entertained, see your favorite team or favorite performing artist,” Guridy says. “But whether it’s privately owned or – as is often the case – publicly managed or owned … in the US, this building has served as the institution of a public square where people gather together to recreate and feel a sense of connection.”

As he explains, “Civil rights groups organized protests inside or outside the walls of the stadium,” such as the Black Freedom movement, gay liberation and feminism. “When Pope John Paul II visited the US, or during the Billy Graham crusades in the mid-20th century, these were some of the largest crowds in stadium history.” And, he adds, “the institution played a huge role in whatever war effort” there was at the time, including both world wars and the more recent conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It’s a convincing thesis. (Pick your favorite sports metaphor: a slam dunk? A home run?) After all, the book notes, stadiums are generally accessible, including by public transit, and often are located in a central section of a major city. Yet the author is disheartened by what he sees as the current state of stadiums – places paid for by tax dollars, yet corporatized in design, catering to wealthy ticket-holders and contributing to gentrification. Consider the lifelong Bronxite and self-described sports enthusiast’s view on how Yankee Stadium has changed.

“It was totally different in the ‘70s and ‘80s,” Guridy says. “There was much greater representation of New Yorkers in that building – [in terms of] class, not just racially. The surrounding community is predominantly Black and brown. [Now] they’re either on the field or working in concessions … It’s a temple of exclusion, an enclave of exclusivity, contradicting its political and public purposes.”

The book documents plenty of occasions when politics and public causes came to the ballpark and the arena. Guridy found numerous examples from his hometown, including Madison Square Garden.

It opened in 1874 as a venue for PT Barnum’s circus. Befitting the Greco-Roman history of stadiums, it was originally called the Grand Roman Hippodrome. Rebuilt and renamed Madison Square Garden, it soon hosted sports and other forms of entertainment, and also became a political meeting hall.

In the 1930s, fascists and anti-fascists alike held rallies there. A March 1933 rally co-organized by the American Jewish Congress denounced Nazi antisemitism, with New York governor Al Smith among the speakers. The next year, a pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi group, Friends of the New Germany, held its own rally at the same spot, with swastikas on the ushers’ armbands. The ugliness peaked in 1939 when another such organization, the German American Bund, drew 20,000 to the Garden, ostensibly to celebrate George Washington’s birthday. Instead, it was a night of antisemitic and anti-Black rhetoric from speakers backdropped in a mixture of US and Nazi symbols. As protesters demonstrated outside, two voices made their antifascist stances known inside. Journalist Dorothy Thompson laughed in mockery of the Bund. Jewish plumber’s assistant Isadore Greenbaum disrupted the proceedings and was assaulted by the Bund’s security force.

“You see a German-American organization try to harmonize fascism with American patriotism,” Guridy says. “There are some parallels with Trumpism.”

Meanwhile, the author finds that wartime is an opportune occasion for pro-military displays at sporting events. He tracks the playing of the Star-Spangled Banner at ballparks, including an early appearance in the Civil War. World War I made it a mainstay. More recently, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, another patriotic song – “God Bless America” – has replaced “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the seventh-inning stretch, while the Department of Defense spends taxpayer money to promote the military across sports leagues.

Marginalized voices have also found ways to express themselves in public at stadiums. One such example occurred in 2016 when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem before an exhibition game against the San Diego Chargers at Qualcomm Stadium. Kaepernick’s stated reason was outrage over the way the US treated Black people and persons of color in the wake of minority deaths at the hands of police and vigilante civilians. The author sees a through line between Kaepernick and the Black Power salute by African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City – which also took place in a stadium, in this case the Estadio Olimpico Universitario.

Smith, Carlos and Kaepernick were all vilified for actions that challenged the status quo, with Kaepernick soon out of a job in the NFL. Despite their public nature, stadiums have a history of exclusionary practices, the book finds. Sports leagues banned integrated play between whites and Blacks while segregating audiences. Southern stadiums sometimes included pro-Confederate displays, as was the case with the Sugar Bowl at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

“[The] white South in the Jim Crow era sought to show white supremacist politics for the nation to see,” Guridy says. “The Sugar Bowl Classic was televised and broadcast on the radio. You were not just seeing a football game,” but also “glorification of the plantation past. Confederate flags were very prominent in the stands, on the field. When the Black Freedom movement started to make inroads, the ‘tradition’ got amplified even more.”

The book examines gender segregation in sports media; leagues banned female reporters from the press box and locker room. A landmark 1978 lawsuit by Time Inc, on behalf of Sports Illustrated journalist Melissa Ludtke, resulted in a mandate of equal access, yet change remained slow into the 1990s. Guridy also documents homophobia at stadiums, including the infamous “Disco Demolition Night” at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1979. To him, the oversize crowd vandalizing disco records – and eventually the ballpark – was not there for a harmless stunt, but for a blatantly homophobic action. He contrasts this with the positive example set by the Gay Games in 1982 as a place for gay and lesbian athletes to feel welcome.

“These are buildings designed to bring people together,” Guridy says. “Undeniably, there are also other stories of exclusivity, right up to the present.”

Yet if he’s disenchanted by the current scene at Yankee Stadium and elsewhere, he also sees reasons for hope. The upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic might have helped reorient stadiums toward more of a public role. The book chronicles the spontaneous Black Lives Matter protests at the Barclays Center plaza in 2020. WIth much of the world shut down, the centrally located Brooklyn space made for an ideal protest venue. Across the country, stadiums were repurposed as vaccination centers – and also as polling places, a development that continues today.

“It made perfect sense, it worked really well through clubs and elected officials,” Guridy says, noting that 50,000 Atlantans voted at State Farm Arena in the 2020 presidential election. “It was highly impactful. It was something that worked so much that they asked, ‘Why don’t we do this on a regular basis?’”