Black Female Cheerleaders in Professional Sports

In April 1969, 200 Black Americans gathered in front of West Senior High School in Rockford, Illinois, to protest discrimination at the school. Among the signs they carried was one that said, “Black Cheerleaders to Cheer Too.”  During the 1950s and early 1960s, high school students and their parents relied on a variety of protest tactics to “take a strong stand to secure a Negro cheerleader(s).”