Torrence Banks, Campus News Editor

Two sports-related Alternative Crown Forums at Morehouse College this week will feature panelists from all three AUC schools. They will include Edwin Moses and Mark Anthony Green from Morehouse, Tareia Williams from Clark Atlanta University and Nzinga Shaw from Spelman.  

Sports and social justice is the overall theme of the workshops, which are open to the public. These events were created by the Atlanta University Center Consortium (Clark Atlanta University, Morehouse College, Morehouse School of Medicine and Spelman College) and the Atlanta Super Bowl’s Host Committee Legacy 53.  

On Thursday, January 24, Professor David Wall Rice held a panel discussion entitled “For Sports: Competition and Commodification of Black Bodies” in Sale Hall Chapel from 4-6 p.m. 

“One of the things that we were asked to do from the Super Bowl Host Committee was to have dialogues that allowed for us to provide a different look at what sport looks like in contemporary 21st century America,” said Rice, a Morehouse Associate Psychology Professor and the director of the Institute for Social Justice Inquiry in Praxis. 

On Friday ,January 25, there will be a panel discussion named “Gender, Race and Inclusion in the Sports Media: Who’s In, Who’s ‘Out’ and Who’s Still Left Out?” held in Bank of America Auditorium from 7-9 p.m. 

“The focus of the panel is to look at some of the relatively new issues in sports and look at how well the sports media is covering them,” said Ron Thomas, director of the Morehouse College Journalism and Sports Program.   

One of those relatively new topics is exploring how comfortable the sports world is for LGBTQ  athletes. 

Friday panelist Cyd Zeigler, the co-founder of Outsports magazine, questions “the media’s role in perpetuating the notion that sports are not a welcoming place for LGBTQ people. It’s an outdated notion and unfortunately the media in many respects continues to push the idea despite all the evidence that says otherwise.”  

Thursday’s workshop will be co-moderated by Rice and Spelman Associate Professor of Sociology and UNCF Mellon Programs Director Dr. Cynthia Neal Spence. The panelists are Atlanta Hawks Diversity and Inclusion Officer Nzinga Shaw and Edwin Moses, Morehouse’s most accomplished athlete who won 122 consecutive intermediate hurdles events from 1977-87. 

“We’re going to talk about activism and advocacy,” Rice said. “We’ll talk about how it is that black bodies are commodified through sport. How it is that we guard against that. How it is that athletes are able to use their own agency so that they are able to be in control of their performance. As well as how it is that they allow other people to engage them based on their performance. 

“These two people are folks who are interested in the schools that they come from. The fact that they’re coming back and the time that they are spending with students provides a great opportunity.” 

The second workshop will be moderated by Turner Sports Director of Communications and 2004 CAU graduate Tareia Williams. The panelists are: 

Rana Cash is sports director at the Courier Journal in Louisville, Kentucky, and is the only African-American female sports editor at a major newspaper in the country.  

Mark Anthony Green is the “Style Guy” columnist for GQ and wrote and directed the film “Trapeze USA.”  

2006 Morehouse graduate Carron Phillips is the Sports, Race, and Social Issues columnist for the New York Daily News. He has made appearances on CBS46, HLN and MSNBC. 

This week, Renée Tirado was just promoted to Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for Major League Baseball. 

There is plenty of diversity in various forms among Friday’s panelists.  

“We have African-American panelists,” Thomas said. “We have a white panelist. We have a Latinx panelist. We have men and women, and we have regional diversity – people from the Northeast, Southeast, and West Coast.” 

Students can be inspired by the amount of AUC representation among panelists who were sitting in their seats in classrooms years ago. 

“I remember being in those chairs when I was younger,” Green said. “The best thing for me was to hear what others were talking about and to be inspired.” 

Zeigler, the author of “Fair Play: How LGBT Athletes Are Claiming Their Rightful Place in Sports,” hopes to do the inspiring Friday, which is why he flew nearly 2,000 miles from Los Angeles to participate.  

“I love going to colleges and speaking to college students and professors,” he said. “I teach a class of Social Justice and Sports Media at the University of Florida. Anytime people at a school contact me to be a part of something, I always try to make it work.”