“Is that Glock?” I asked, maybe talking to my dad, maybe talking to the TV.
“That’s Glock!”
Felipe Massa had already crossed the line first in the 2008 Brazilian Grand Prix, but the Interlagos circuit was still live for the positions behind. As they ran in that moment, Massa would have been Formula One’s World Driving Champion, barring rival Lewis Hamilton retaking a spot Sebastian Vettel had claimed a few laps earlier.
Or barring Timo Glock — the Toyota pilot with tires mismatched to the wet conditions — tumbling down the order to turn a typically innocuous sixth-place finish into a famous footnote.
That elevated Hamilton to fifth, and fifth was plenty. 121 years after the first ever motor race, a black driver was the sport’s champion.
Finally, a black driver history would not be allowed to forget.
Even still — whether cruelly coincidental or with sinister motive — his moment was, like so many racers of his race, afforded less than earned.
Massa, gracious in defeat, teary-eyed but standing taller than his 5'3" frame allowed, overshadowed the actual champion. Stories of his giving Ferrari and Renault overalls to Hamilton’s McLaren mechanics so they could safely exit the track — in Massa’s home nation, where partisan fans would not like the outcome — undoubtedly depicted a sportsmanship worth celebrating, but did so at the expense of recognizing that Hamilton had won a crown no one of his race had ever even competed for.
Then came the unfounded accusations, that McLaren colluded with Toyota to orchestrate the Glock situation. Conspiracy theories hijacked a winter meant for commemorating how one of racing’s greatest prizes had been won by the only driver in the field who, in another era, wouldn’t have been allowed to watch, let alone drive.
In a sport eager to forget its black history, it was a consistent, even if unintended, way to crown racing’s first top-level champion of color.
Consistent and fitting, because 2008, for all it meant, changed nothing. Ignored accomplishments leave few making any today. The reasons names of pioneers in the one sport where a black competitor in 2017 would still be a pioneer are unfamiliar now are the reasons there are so few active ones to be familiar with.
And those reasons leave just one answer to the question of how motorsports never integrated.
Before baseball
On April 15, 1947, Jackie Robinson first played for the Brookyln Dodgers, ending professional baseball’s segregation. Black drivers had already been racing against white ones in the United States for thirty-seven years.
While the major races were closed to black participants, as sanctioning body AAA refused to issue licenses to non-whites, “outlaw” racing was no less professional. The first was an exhibition: Barney Oldfield (the name following “Who do you think you are . . .” before Mario Andretti occupied that spot in the rhetorical line) against heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson. Many others were more serious, notably featuring Dewey Gatson.
“Rajo Jack” or “Jack DeSoto,” as he was best known, was a West Coast racer of everything from sprint cars to stock cars to motorcycles, and he was a winner. Sometimes allowed to race because of his competitors’ respect, and other times by pretending to be Portuguese or Native, Gatson had a thirty-one-year career at the wheel.
Not only did he win races, he won the kind of gritty way that should have made him an American icon, racing while blind in one eye and with an arm that barely moved, repairing his car in the bed of a pickup truck as his wife drove it down the highway to another race. So hellbent on going fast was Gatson, he’d put up with having to hide from photographers or having the white trophy girl refuse to present him his prize just to race.
Gatson never ran Indy, and was much less active by the time NASCAR existed. In 1934, however, riding mechanic Bobby Wallace became the first black participant at the 500, not because any racial barriers were broken, but because he passed for white. Deacon Litz drove the car to a fourth-place finish, with Wallace’s name nowhere to be found in the race’s record.
It is theorized that people of color aren’t involved with auto racing because they don’t want to be, because they don’t identify with it, because they have no blood in it.
Gatson and Wallace prove it’s not true, risking everything not just by being on the track, but in all they had to do to get to the track. When no one would integrate racing, they forced their way in, essentially giving motorsports a longer history of shared competition than baseball.
That’s not mentioned, though, because there’s no PR moment to celebrate and no way to distance today’s organizations from past racial injustice. Rather, it would be an admission of being so wrong the only way in was outside the lines.
The silenced history lets observers assume self-selection disproportionately sorts whites into more rides — as if anyone wanted to be there more than Gatson and Wallace.
A place to race
All the while, there was another approach to black participation in motorsports: the Colored Speedway Association, a hoped path toward integration by showing AAA the ability of drivers of color to not only build and wheel race cars, but to draw huge, paying crowds.
Founded in 1924, the Association was headlined by the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes, held on a dirt track in Indianapolis, purposely placed to make a point to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway where non-whites could not even sit in the stands. That event, and all the tour’s races, immediately took off. Black drivers wanted to race, and black spectators wanted to be part of a nation’s blossoming interest in pushing something your own hands built right to the point of breaking, hoping it’d last just enough to get you to the inexplicable glory of being the fastest.
Charlie Wiggins was the best at that. An ace mechanic who owned his own shop in the Crossroads of America, Wiggins began building a race car at his garage whenever he wasn’t working for customers. He won the Gold and Glory Sweepstakes four times in his twelve tries, dominating the Association’s other races along the way. His fan following was tremendous, his driving ability impressive, and his reputation for race car design unrivaled.
Despite being the exact model of business enterprise, grueling labor, and engineering ingenuity that could have made his a name invoked among the heroes of Indy, Wiggins never made it to the 500 as a driver, and by his death in 1979, had never seen anyone else of his race do the same. The closest he came was as “team janitor” — secretly, a driving instructor, test driver, and mechanic on the entry of Bill Cummings in the same 1934 Indianapolis 500 where Bobby Wallace (himself an Association driver) rode along with Deacon Litz.
Wiggins was only allowed on Speedway grounds at night and under the guise of his misnamed role, meaning he was unable to join Cummings in the winner’s circle when the car took victory.
Yes, victory. A car a black racer drove to work out the kinks won the Indianapolis 500. A black racer who was credited by the winning, white pilot as the best mechanic he’d ever worked with.
The “janitor” helped Cummings mop the competition, knowing that could have been his car to drive, and his face — a face of color —could have been forever enshrined on the Borg-Warner Trophy.
Even absent that place in motorsports’ narrative, Wiggins’ formidable accomplishments destroy another myth: that there are no black drivers because they have no history to connect with.
Wiggins and the drivers he beat, the fans he brought to the tracks, the successful racing business people of color ran for more than a decade: that’s history, and it’s 100% black history.
There are just too few people willing to tell it.
The lost years
When the Colored Speedway Association hit financial difficulty in the late 1930s, there was no amnesty from AAA. Everyone involved had proven a worthiness of contesting the same events as white drives (a worthiness they never should have needed to prove), but the judges of that proof weren’t bound to do what was just.
Charlie Wiggins had already retired from driving after a horrific crash. Dewey Gatson was still wheeling vehicles of all types, and winning, but often doing so as “Jack DeSoto,” garnering little attention among black racing fans because his career depended on avoiding acknowledgment of his race — and in any event, supporters of color couldn’t attend as spectators.
From 1937 until 1947, black drivers raced, but they raced without organization and without publicity. In the same span, A. J. Foyt, David Pearson, Bobby and Al Unser, Richard Petty, and Mario Andretti were growing up, some in racing families and some not, but all inspired to lay foundations for fruitful careers.
There would be no black equivalent because there was no way for a child of that era to grow up dreaming of race cars they couldn’t go see driven by people who hated them for the color of their skin. The golden names of American motorsport would be names of white men because racing’s best chance to integrate was passed by as if it were Timo Glock on dry tires in rainy Brazil.
The lost years helped erase the black racing community. Records of the Colored Speedway Association were lost. Many of its drivers stopped racing, given the efforts it took and the risks entailed in integrating outside the rules. The silent decade let the trick of there being no black racing history play out so easily because, for a decade, there was no way to know of any.
By failing to integrate when the Association went under, AAA perpetuated the white stronghold on motor racing not just by those ten years, but by the lifetimes of those whose careers could have started or whose interests could have ignited within them.
The careers that would have been lost if, for example, an eight-year-old Gordon Johncock or a five-year-old Cale Yarborough had been denied entry to an auto race in 1944 on account of being white.
In name only
In 1947, Joie Ray broke a color barrier: the first black driver to be licensed by AAA.
To call it integration would be to misuse the word, not only because a black driver had raced a white one as early as 1910. The license was valid, sure, but it was for show.
Baseball integrated in 1947, so auto racing may as well create some buzz, too. Ray was a competent driver, racing with modest success in the Midwest, but he was never someone with the potential for Indianapolis. He could get a license, run AAA-sanctioned races, and never “disrupt” the one that mattered most.
It was a way of getting the press of integrating without actually changing the driver lineup.
Mel Leighton, however, was able to get to the Indy 500. Or so he thought. In 1949, despite AAA now issuing licenses to black drivers, his entry was denied because he wasn’t white, proving that the intent was simply to create the appearance of integrated competition.
Ray and Leighton are the first swing at one of the largest myths: that opportunities are out there for black drivers if they want them. What appear to be systems aiming to help are often elaborate cover-ups, grand spectacles for the media with the specific intention of keeping black drivers out of the top series and big-name races. The attitude has been they can race — heck, we’ll help them race — as long as they race somewhere quiet, somewhere less significant.
That was how it was in 1947. It hasn’t evolved in the intervening years.
Small steps
To discuss how Joie Ray’s license is the model for motorsports’ modern attempts at affirmative action first requires acknowledgement that the highest classes of motor racing have not been without competitors of color. Their experiences are no less insightful than those of the drivers kept out.
Elias Bowie was NASCAR’s first black driver, followed by Charlie Scott. The best-known, Wendell Scott, was the third, yet often treated as if his starts were the inaugural ones.
There is an admitted rationale for Wendell Scott’s fame: he won a NASCAR race in 1963, though NASCAR never recognized it until 1965, and did not give the trophy to his family until 2010.
Forgetting Bowie and the other Scott, however, helps perpetuate the myth that there is no black motorsports culture. And embracing Wendell Scott has its own modern implications: because Scott was described as “quiet [and] uncomplaining,” praise filled with disdain for people of color who show personality or question injustice, and because Scott’s career began with his willingness to be a racial gimmick — a black driver put in a field of whites to work up the crowd.
While Scott had every right to be himself and determine what role his race had in his career and life, the assimilating personality and his allowance for being stereotyped by stock car racing’s Southern, carnival-style promoters laid the framework for exactly the kind of black drivers NASCAR would want to recruit: ones who would appeal to the white motorsports fans.
George Wiltshire, Randy Bethea (a pole winner against Darrell Waltrip in what became the Xfinity Series), Willy T. Ribbs, and Bill Lester have also started in what is now NASCAR’s Cup Series. Lester, a computer engineer from California, received the most promotion from NASCAR — unsurprisingly, because he, like Wendell Scott, had the approval of white fans with their backhanded remarks of “articulate” and “college-educated.”
Ribbs, meanwhile, became the first black driver in the Indy 500 when he qualified in 1991, having previously practiced cars in 1984 and 1985. He returned in 1993, and joins with George Mack to create this disheartening statistic: only three of the 100 Indianapolis 500-mile races have had a racer of color.
Calling Ribbs the most successful black American driver — a six-time winner in British Formula Ford, a twenty-seven-time winner across various divisions of sports cars, the only black driver to run a full season in CART, the first black driver to test a Formula One car — would be accurate, though asterisked, if only because Charlie Wiggins and his contemporaries never had a chance to be successful in the top-tier disciplines.
Calling him the most outspoken wouldn’t need the asterisk.
Ribbs was the antithesis to the model NASCAR wanted: he was proud of who he was, he had a habit of dancing on his car when he won, and after his stints in the stock cars, he was quick to accuse the division of backward ways. Mack was just as willing to ruffle white feathers, requesting chocolate milk if he were to win the Indy 500 with the intent of making an important point out of the race’s dairy tradition.
In F1, only Lewis Hamilton — who cites Ribbs as a major influence — has started a race. Hamilton, too, has received racially toned criticism for his personality. In a sport keen to celebrate the hard-partying, celebrity-mingling lifestyles of James Hunt or Kimi Räikkönen, Hamilton’s friends in the recording industry or nights out in Monte Carlo have him labeled unfocused at best, or a “thug” at worst.
More overtly, after then-rookie Hamilton upstaged his World Champion teammate Fernando Alonso in 2007, he became the target of racism in Spain. During the pre-season tests of 2008, crowds at the Barcelona circuit chanted, “black shit,” made gestures, and dressed up as racist caricatures wearing shirts that said, “Hamilton’s family.”
The strides made by those who have reached the top force recognition of the truth: stay quiet, don’t win often, and the white brass (and fans) will embrace you. But cause “trouble” by exercising your right to speak out in the media, by embracing your culture, and by being faster than the white drivers, and you’re not welcome.
A new agenda
By the 1990s, diversity programs took hold in American racing.
There had only been one movement prior: Black American Racers, started in 1973 by Leonard W. Miller (the first black co-owner of an Indy 500 entry), Malcolm Durham (a winning drag racer), and Ron Hines. Benny Scott drove their Formula 5000 car, making it into the first running of the Long Beach Grand Prix.
Miller and his son, Leonard T. Miller, were part of the 90s wave, primarily with a late model team sponsored by Dr. Pepper. Driver Morty Buckles won a race at Southern National and seemed poised to rise in the NASCAR ranks.
Dodge started a program as well. While the selected team, Bobby Hamilton Racing, siphoned all the money toward the vehicles of white drivers, Dodge did get Willy T. Ribbs, Preston Tutt, and Bill Lester on-track in early-aughts NASCAR Camping World Truck Series action.
CART attempted a diversity program, putting on a test for black drivers with their Atlantic Championship ladder series cars. Buckles and Lester were among the participants, though the practice day did not turn into a long-term commitment. Chris Miles, a black reporter on the FOX Sports Net show Inside CART, had been organizing on his own, but found rejection in the corporate boardrooms by brands like Valvoline that felt sponsoring a black driver had no value (a disturbing proposition that has led to white drivers racing in cars sponsored by black-owned brands like Vokál and FUBU).
Other ideas were floated, often involving black athletes and coaches, such as a partnership between ARCA driver Doc Watson (himself a person of color) and the NFL’s Dennis Green.
In Europe, such programs were less obvious — Danish racer Jason Watt came up on his own, but attracted behind-the-scenes attention from investors keen on the idea of a black driver in F1. The deals never materialized, with Watt becoming paralyzed in a motorcycle accident after a successful Formula 3000 campaign in 1999. South Africa’s Adrian Zaugg, meanwhile, won races in A1 GP, a series designed as a “World Cup” to involve more nations in motor racing.
A movement seemed to be starting, and that didn’t sit well with American motor racing management. They wanted the credit. They wanted to realize any commercial gain. And they wanted to control who entered and who didn’t, lest they get someone like Ribbs who would come in, speak out, and win lots of races.
So, NASCAR started its Drive for Diversity, which extended not only to black drivers, but to all non-white men and any (though, to date, only white) women. The program put selected drivers (on criteria including the suspicious “media friendliness”) in lower-division races, with the cars bearing the logos of NASCAR’s own corporate partners and often being fielded by an in-house NASCAR team.
Now, the entry of minorities into American racing was controlled entirely by the sanctioning body, the way it had been in the AAA days when licenses weren’t issued to black drivers.
The promising Morty Buckles’ career stalled out in Drive for Diversity. Allegations began to come from the drivers — including Buckles and Chris Bristol, as well as Joe Henderson III., that the program was a con, putting out bad equipment dressed up to appear fast so that it would look like the driver’s fault when poor results inevitably accumulated. Then, NASCAR and its backers could turn around, take the PR boost of introducing people of color to a sport they actually had a forgotten century of involvement in, never promote anyone, and avoid all blame for it.
With no clear path to advance from the entry-level divisions, a new era of Joie Ray-style “integration” began, merged with admiration of the Wendell Scott mentality: if black (and other minority) drivers want to race, have them race out of the spotlight, have them assimilate in the media, and have them stay out of the white drivers’ way.
The damage of NASCAR’s approach to creating a profitable illusion of opportunity doubled. Little investment was being made outside the Drive for Diversity initiative, while, open-wheel racing, now becoming IndyCar instead of CART, saw very few black drivers coming up its development structure because any getting started in racing were lured by the hype of NASCAR’s program.
All streets but the dead-end of Drive for Diversity were closed.
Only Kyle Larson (a half-white Japanese-American) and Daniel Suárez (a white Mexican) have made it to full-time rides in the premier NASCAR Cup Series as Drive for Diversity alumni, and both were generation-defining talents with many of their own private backers. Each was all-but-guaranteed to rise to the top; Drive for Diversity was just a quick stop to mobilize NASCAR’s PR heft behind themselves in a mutual arrangement to make press and take credit.
Even then, Suárez was critical of “D4D,” accusing the team of a poor effort and a lack of support in an early-season championship bid that completely collapsed. The results of many others were just as inconsistent — Sergio Peña was at some times the future of auto racing and at others a future footnote as its biggest bust; Bryan Ortiz fluctuated from high potential to highly disappointing; Kenzie Ruston’s worst-ever season was the only one she did in the program. The first wins by a participant came from Paulie Harraka, driving for the powerhouse Bill McAnally Racing, rather than with the NASCAR-controlled team.
Those intentionally disappointing results have failed the black participants especially. Darrell Wallace, Jr., better known as “Bubba,” represents one out of seventeen: the only driver of color to meaningfully advance from NASCAR’s PR vehicle. Wallace did so years removed from Drive for Diversity, having stayed in the minor leagues with Joe Gibbs Racing, which had once run its own affirmative action initiative.
Many of the independent programs, like Dodge’s, were mismanaged. Others lacked proper investment. But all were planting seeds to commit to actual progress, and as soon as NASCAR seized the means of entering auto racing, that would all be undone.
As planned, the purported new approach left only a familiar result.
It becomes increasingly clear that black drivers aren’t racing not because of the oft-posited myths, but because of a tangible hostility that began when motorsports did and never went away. The excuses are easily undressed, and opportunities are merely disguised exercises in profiting off lost history to gain control of who enters and how.
By forgetting Dewey Gatson, Charlie Wiggins, and Mel Leighton, motorsports sanctioning bodies keep black audiences disconnected from auto racing — the way AAA intended. Then, by creating programs that put a few minorities, selected for their agreeableness to predominantly white executives, in lower-tier race seats, the same sanctioning bodies can claim — with few knowing the requisite history to refute them — they are doing something unprecedented. Profiting off the PR, the sanctions use the programs to take complete control of minority participation in auto racing, limiting, rather than advancing, it.
There’s a discomfort among white racing decision-makers and white racing fans with black auto racers that should have gone away before racing was even invented, let alone gone away in 1910 when Jack Johnson drove a race car, in 1924 when the Colored Speedway Association showcased all the lost talent, or in 1934 when Charlie Wiggins played an integral role in winning the Indianapolis 500.
Let alone in 1963 when Wendell Scott won a NASCAR race, or in the 1980s when Willy T. Ribbs was tearing up sports car speedways.
Let alone in 2008 when that was Timo Glock backsliding, with Lewis Hamilton surging through to his first of what is now three World Driving Championships.
For all that’s been accomplished, little has changed. Racing’s worst tradition is its truest, and so long as forgotten history and publicity stunts allow the myths to stand, anyone aiming in good faith to find a solution will be aiming in the wrong direction.
There’s one reason why this is a “white sport.” Motorsports never integrated not because it never tried to, but because it tries hard not to.
Consequently, we keep on racing without a race.
