The First

Original basketball captain Sonia Jarvis was the first Black female athlete in Stanford history

02/26/2021

---

 

THE BIRTH OF women’s basketball at Stanford didn’t happen in a vacuum. It came with a fight.

Sitting in hallways in front of doors that wouldn’t open. Seeking the attention of those who brush past or refuse to look in their direction. 

Equal treatment never comes easily. Sonia Jarvis ’77, professor of public policy, civil rights attorney, and Stanford’s first team captain, knows that as well as anyone. She fights for it every day.

In the mid-1970s, equal treatment was only on paper in the form of a civil rights law called Title IX that prohibits gender-based discrimination in education. Jarvis and teammates Stephanie (Erickson) Colbert ’77 and Mariah “Maggie” Burton Nelson ’78 knew Stanford was at a crossroads between reluctance and acceptance and chose to endure rejection and avoidance from administrators in exchange for the perseverance that leads to all worthwhile things. 

Stanford basketball and all women’s sports on campus deserved attention, credence, and respect. 

Their efforts were successful – look around when possible and appreciate the national championship trophies and gleaming training facilities. For her advocacy alone, Jarvis deserves recognition. However, there is another distinction that not even Jarvis was aware of until recently. 

Jarvis was The First, the first Black women’s varsity athlete at Stanford. That person was never identified, but history desires that we know her story and how this came to be. 

On the day Jarvis made history – Wednesday, January 29, 1975 -- a chill greeted Stanford. An overnight storm left snow on the tops of the Santa Cruz range to the west and covered the foothills with a light dusting. The air was crisp and clear. 

The previous night was a strange one on campus. An overflow crowd of 3,500 crammed into Memorial Auditorium to hear “Star Trek” creator and producer Gene Roddenberry rail against the networks, but vacated into the cold by a bomb threat.   

On Wednesday night, there was another overflow crowd that had nothing to do with Trekkies. Roble Gym, the ancient women’s facility derisively referred to as the “Woodpecker Lodge,” was bursting with 125, and Mr. Spock was nowhere in sight. 

Some of the crowd may have anticipated the significance. This was the first varsity women’s basketball game in Stanford history and Victory No. 1 for a program that now has 1,139. 

There was no scoreboard or seating. The uniforms and warmup gear hadn’t arrived. Instead, Stanford players wore white T-shirts with numbers pressed on the backs and red shorts. Team sweats were whatever hooded sweatshirts the players could afford at the bookstore. 

Still, at 6 p.m., magic happened. Jarvis, a 5-foot-9 sophomore forward out of Bowie (Md.) High School, took to the squeaky Roble floor, dead spots and all, and made history upon tipoff against Santa Clara. The era of the Stanford Black female athlete had begun. And Stanford won, 59-56.

The reasons why The First was unknown and unlooked probably had less to do with a color than gender. 

Though tennis, swimming, and field hockey had a history at Stanford, a women’s sports program didn’t gain official recognition until Title IX, law since 1972, finally was taken seriously. It took threats from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1975 to make it happen while complaints of noncompliance flowed in from throughout the country for the next several years. 

Basketball, cross country, field hockey, golf, gymnastics, swimming, tennis, track and field, and volleyball became official intercollegiate sports between 1974 and 1979. In the midst of this adaptation, racial milestones hardly were considered. 

“I can honestly say I had no idea,” Jarvis said. 

After Jarvis was tennis player Diane Morrison, who first took the court for Stanford on Feb. 20, 1976, in Tucson, Arizona, and became a three-time All-American before rising to No. 50 in the world rankings. They set the stage for great Black student-athletes on The Farm like Olympic swimming gold medalist Simone Manuel, golf national champion Mariah Stackhouse, basketball’s influential Ogwumike sisters, track and field record-setter Erica McLain, and volleyball’s transformational Kim Oden. 

However, as events of recent years have reminded us, nothing about racial equality can be taken for granted.

Here’s where Sonia’s remarkable story begins: 

When Sonia Jarvis was 10, she could step onto her porch and admire the Golden Gate Bridge and the deep blue water of the San Francisco Bay. Her family was stationed at the Presidio, a prime Army base of stunning scenery on a tree-covered bluff above San Francisco’s northern shoreline. 

Her father, William H. Jarvis, was a helicopter pilot who would retire as a Lt. Colonel with 25 years of service that included four overseas tours of duty – one in Korea and three in Vietnam, where he flew combat missions with the 128th Assault Helicopter Company. He was awarded two Bronze Stars and two Meritorious Service medals. 

Sonia’s mother, Ruby Riddick Jarvis, was the youngest girl of 15 children and met William in first grade. Salutatorian of her class at the segregated Princess Anne City Training School in Virginia Beach, Virginia, Ruby placed second for a city scholarship. Because she didn’t win, Ruby was unable to attend college for lack of funds and a growing family. But that hardly slowed her. Ruby was an active army wife, who began modeling while stationed in Germany, and carried a bullhorn and a voice for freedom for the Kansas Civil Rights Commission. 

All five children went to college. They became, in birth order: a psychologist, doctor, lawyer, engineer, and computer scientist.

For a Black man in 1952, joining a newly desegregated army was “the best option for William H. Jarvis,” Sonia said. By the 1960s, the military wasn’t as fashionable, and father and daughter’s views clashed as she questioned the validity of the Vietnam War in front of a father who continually risked his life in that very war to put food on the table for his family. He held his anger and provided a measured response: 

“I took an oath to protect this country and these are my orders,” he said. “And I need you to respect them.”

THE TRANSIENT LIFE of a military brat took Sonia from Fort Benning (Ga.) to Fort Rucker (Ala.), to Fort Lee (Va.), to Fort Hood (Texas), back to Ft. Lee (Va.), then to Stuttgart, Germany, to Daly City (Ca.) and the Presidio, to Forbes Air Force Base (Kan.), to Fort Knox (Ky.), to Fort Benning (Ga.) and finally to Fort Meade (Md.). 

Along the way, Sonia developed “a genuine antenna for justice.” That notion percolated when she was 5 and not allowed to attend kindergarten because it was off-limits to Black children in Eastern Shore, Virginia where she and her siblings lived while her father finished his flight training at Fort Bragg and her mother completed secretarial school in Washington, DC. Creative childcare arrangements were hastily made by her Aunt Eunice, with the church choir director, who taught Sonia the piano and how to read music, while her older brother and sister taught her reading and math. 

When she was able to finally start school, as a first-grader at Fort Bragg, Sonia’s reading and math skills were at the fourth grade level.

Of all the places Sonia lived while growing up, San Francisco felt most like home. Maybe it was the beauty or the Golden Gate Bridge, or Mrs. Black’s fifth-grade class. 

On a field trip down the Peninsula to Stanford, Jarvis saw a college campus for the first time, with Palm Drive as her introduction. She felt the sun, admired the trees and buildings and was greeted by friendly students. It was perfect. 

Around the dinner table that night, Sonia couldn’t stifle her excitement. 

“I know exactly where I’m going to college,” she announced.

“Where is that?”

“Stanford University!”

Her father considered this for a moment … “You know you’re not an only child, right?” he said. “If we send you to Stanford, we won’t have enough money to send the rest of your brothers and sisters to college.”

“You mean I can’t go there?” she said. 

“You can go to any school you want to,” her mother said. “You just have to get a scholarship. That means you have to get straight-A’s.”

Is that all? 

Sports always were part of the Jarvis family. Mr. Jarvis played football at Ohio’s Central State, a historically Black college, and his brother, Gideon Jarvis, played baseball for the K.C. Monarchs in the Negro Leagues. Mrs. Jarvis played tennis and bowled until she was 78. She loved the Olympics, especially figure skating, and named her middle daughter for Sonja Henie, the graceful Olympic champion skater of the 1930s and Hollywood screen star.    

The military life was perfect for an active Black family because officers’ children had access to gyms and pools otherwise restricted. Sonia learned to swim at 3, won a Kansas Junior Olympic title in the shot put in junior high and a state title in doubles tennis, and played any sport she could. Her favorite was basketball. The organized game for girls remained the 6-on-6, don’t cross half-court version, but Jarvis supplemented that with normal basketball, with boys in pickup games. 

Her first high school, Highland Park in Topeka, Kansas, had few girls’ sports. Bowie High, where she transferred as a sophomore, did.  

The move to Maryland embittered Sonia. It seemed one move too many. Fallout remained from the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. – whom they once heard give a sermon -- and Robert Kennedy in 1968. And Vietnam wasn’t going away. Her parents’ marriage fell apart after William’s third tour and the couple divorced. 

Sonia was among the military kids bused to Bowie alongside poor Black students and poor rural whites. Tension was ever-present on a campus designed for 1,000, but bursting with three times that many. School was conducted in shifts. 

Race was a constant issue, bubbling up in fights and even riots. Sonia played the role of peacemaker, reasoning with students, white and black, to avoid violence when she could sense it was about to erupt. 

“I wasn’t viewing that as my role,” she said. “But I was coming in from the outside. It was easier for me to see some of those trends and pressures.” 

The pain of those years remains with her and provided an insight into the perils of integration itself. 

“It was very hard,” she said. “We put the burden of integration on the shoulders of children, and that was not fair. There weren’t efforts to hire Black teachers at the integrated schools. We lost a lot of Black teachers during that period. And who’s looking out for the new kids? That was missing too.” 

“You were basically talking about bringing together different cultures without anybody to do the guiding from Point A to Point B. And, very often, kids like me were caught in the middle trying to explain to both sides. There were no instruction manuals. I got lucky because I had good teachers who did not take my race against me.” 

Jarvis was 16 and a five-sport athlete (basketball, field hockey, softball, track, and tennis) when she graduated from high school in three years. The promise of Stanford kept her mind focused on getting out of Bowie. She was accepted to Harvard and Yale and University of Virginia, but held out. When Stanford’s letter finally arrived, Sonia was too scared to read it, and thrust the envelope into her mother’s hands. Ruby opened it and read silently.

“OK … OK … I think this can work,” Ruby said. “They decided to give you a full academic scholarship.”

Sonia felt like she came full circle.

AT STANFORD’S MADERA dorm, Jarvis was paired with Jasmine Gunthorpe from the Virgin Islands. They became fast friends, and formed a bond with the future Stephanie Colbert, another basketball player, and Darrow Chan, now a clinical psychologist specializing in ADHD. Music was always in the background and impromptu dance parties lit up the Madera lounge. 

They were two Black women, another who identifies as queer, and an Asian-American male. Each grew up in gritty circumstances, worked for everything they got, and knew prejudice first-hand. 

“What connected us is we knew what fighting for our rights was all about,” Colbert said. 

Women’s basketball was in its third year as a club when Jarvis arrived in 1973-74. Shirley Schoof came to Stanford in 1964 to coach bowling and teach P.E., but was pressed into coaching field hockey and eventually basketball, a sport Schoof didn’t know or particularly like. Overworked, Schoof wanted to leave basketball, but did not want to jeopardize the sport’s existence. 

The players found their competitiveness did not match the coaches’ recreational approach. Sometimes, entire lineups would be swapped out in a close game to give more players a chance to play. Afterward, opponents joined the Cardinal for cookies and cider. 

The uniforms throughout 1974 and on the road in 1975 were red cloth aprons called pinnies, which tied around the back and the neck. A number was painted on the front. They covered a white top and were accompanied by red shorts and striped tube socks. 

Roble Gym was, simply put, an embarrassment. And dangerous. The walls were so close behind the baskets that players finished fastbreaks by lifting their foot up to brace themselves for a collision. 

Besides defense, rebounding, and the occasional bucket, Jarvis said her greatest contribution was convincing the coach to let her bring a boom box to practice and warmups. 

“Every time I think of playing basketball at Stanford, I think of Earth, Wind & Fire and Sly and the Family Stone,” said Sukie Jackson, a forward on Stanford’s first two varsity teams. 

Women’s P.E. director Pamela Strathairn and men’s athletics director Joe Ruetz already began discussions about combining the women’s and men’s departments when Stanford began its first varsity basketball season in January of 1975. The status of the program changed from club to varsity, but there were few differences. P.E. graduate student Gay Coburn, with little basketball experience, was brought in to coach, but, in reality, Jarvis and her teammates mostly coached themselves. 

“She did her best under the circumstances, with not enough institutional support,” Jarvis said. “We were all clueless. It wasn’t as if we were demanding anything. It was more like, ‘It would be nice if we could take these pinnies off. Are we making progress on that?’ We were just thankful to have an opportunity to play.”

On game nights, Jarvis dug her shoulders into the opponent’s biggest players. During the day, she haunted the offices of Ruetz and men’s basketball coach Dick DiBiaso. With Title IX as their ace, the players felt administration had no choice but to listen to their wishes of actual uniforms, full-time coaches, athletic trainers, weight room access, and a move to Maples Pavilion. 

“Dick DiBiaso didn’t know what to do with us,” Jarvis said. “It got to the point where he would avoid us, or we’d camp out in front of his office knowing he’d come back. We raised the same questions again and again. But I think we had a role in making things move from where they were, which was dreadful, to the beginnings of something really special.” 

“We were all just teenagers,” Colbert said. “As fierce and determined as we were, there still were only three of us. Many others behind the scenes had pushed for change, and now there was a law behind them to make it happen.”

Stanford Athletics committed to women’s sports by 1975-76. Title IX was not to be avoided, but rather embraced. DiBiaso took the directorship of both basketball programs, providing more organization and providing a key to Maples, the program’s new home. The women could live with early-morning practices and didn’t require more than one set of bleachers to be pulled out for games. They were pleased that Roble now was a memory.

“Everything wasn’t perfect,” Jarvis said. “You had to fight to get out of those pinnies. But we did get out of those pinnies, and we did get a national championship as a school (in 1990 and 1992). Those are the things you look back on and say, ‘It was worth the stress, it was worth the work, and it was worth the worry.’”

Jarvis graduated in three years. At 19, she walked with degrees in psychology and political science with honors, the latter with a self-designed major that included elements of anthropology and philosophy called Social Thought and Institutions. 

“Even with all of her accomplishments she always prioritized the needs of her friends over her studies,” Chan wrote in an e-mail. “Often her friends just needed to have some fun and she always delivered. A little beat of the bass would get Sonia on the dance floor, sunny Palo Alto days meant tennis and walks, and evenings meant Sonia could introduce us music neophytes to new genres of music including soul, rhythm and blues, and jazz.”

Ruby insisted that Sonia spend a gap year before going to law school. She embraced that year as a musician, playing in bands in San Francisco and Oakland – a bass guitarist in a Chick Correa-inspired jazz fusion combo and a funk group of former bandmates at Stanford. She played cello, guitar and sang in a folk group. 

Then it was off to Yale Law, where Jarvis took on future Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor in a mock trial and won, with her classmate Mark Del Bianco, and earned her J.D. in 1980. 

The fights are different now -- for racial justice and civil rights -- but they remain based on the promises of legitimacy and respect.

Jarvis is a distinguished lecturer at Baruch College’s Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, and an accomplished scholar whose research and teaching focuses on race, politics, and the media. She’s co-authoring a book entitled States of Confusion: The Crisis of Voter Identification and What to Do About It, under contract with New York University Press.

Jarvis followed Yale with a clerkship under U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. who made landmark civil rights rulings that helped end segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South. The experience was transformational for her, to see how a judge, based in Alabama, could stay true to his convictions despite an environment that was adamant in preventing such a thing. 

Jarvis was Johnson’s first Black clerk and his influence remains with her today. Because of Johnson, she considered becoming a judge, but experiences steered Jarvis in a new direction and through that she was able to examine some of our nation’s greatest shortcomings -- school desegregation, housing discrimination, poverty and inequality, and voting rights – in a different way.

Voter suppression, for example, takes different forms now than it did in previous generations. For more than six years, Jarvis served as the executive director of the National Coalition on Black Voter Participation, walking through poor neighborhoods, Mexican American communities and Native American reservations to find out how deep distrust was embedded in Black, Brown and Red cultures. 

She took a deep look at 10 states with the most restrictive voting rules and saw how Voter ID requirements are the new techniques of suppression, not just on their own, but because of the demands of extra fees, transportation, and registration during limited hours of a work day. 

“Roadblocks are being placed every day,” Jarvis said. “Racism is a form of power. I have privileges that you do not, based on something you can’t change, that will follow you your entire life. How is that just?” 

With the Rodney King beating and riots of 1992 firmly in the nation’s collective psyche, the Clinton White House was eager to open national dialogue on race and created the One America Initiative as a vehicle. Jarvis became a senior consultant to the executive director Judith Winston and was commissioned to write a report entitled "America in the 21st Century: Forging a New Future”. On the very day the report was presented to the public, Ken Starr released his report on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. The race initiative quickly was forgotten. 

“Every time we make progress, it’s followed by immediate pushback,” Jarvis said.

IF JARVIS GETS discouraged, you’d never know from a laugh that’s always at the ready. It comes from within and rarely fails to bring a smile. But there are times when she’s been pushed down … very hard. One instance was during the 1991 Supreme Court nomination hearings of Clarence Thomas. Jarvis faced public scorn in support of her friend Anita Hill. 

As Hill considered her next move in sexual harassment accusations against Thomas, she leaned on Jarvis, a former roommate. Jarvis was scheduled to testify in the hearings on behalf of Hill but ultimately did not for a variety of reasons, opening herself up to attacks to her honesty and integrity, things that people who know Jarvis would consider her greatest strengths.  

“It was a very difficult period,” Jarvis said. “Terrible. But that was one of those lessons: If you support a friend, it might cost you too. It was so political and so charged that my parents were fearful for my life.” 

After it was over, Senator Arlin Specter wanted Jarvis investigated for perjury, causing Jarvis to hire her own lawyer to fend off the accusations. She was fortunate to have been represented by the late Richard Thornell, another graduate of Yale Law School, who started the Peace Corps when he was 24, taught at Howard University’s Law School for three decades and who later helped South African President Nelson Mandela draft that country’s new constitution. 

“I was finally able to put that behind me,” she said. “But it’s part of being in the public eye. Not easy.”

Jarvis was portrayed by Kimberly Elise in the HBO movie “Confirmation” about the Hill-Thomas hearings. However, Sonia’s nephews paid more attention to the car Sonia’s character drove. 

“That wasn’t your car,” they complained. “Why would they use a car that wasn’t the one you were driving?”

“Oh, so you’re paying attention?” Jarvis responded.  

In one case, Jarvis was representing involuntarily retired U.S. Navy commander Robert E. Davis in a civil rights case involving charges of sexual harassment and racial discrimination. The original time for settlement was the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 at the Pentagon. Jarvis was on the Metro platform bound for the Pentagon when she received a call from the secretary of her co-counsel, Del Bianco, telling her not to go -- Del Bianco had seen the first plane hit the Twin Towers. Jarvis returned home. American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon at 9:45 a.m.

Marie Earl '78, a close friend since she was a freshman and Jarvis was her R.A., summarized the essence of Jarvis in this e-mail:  

“She’s had plenty of reasons to be discouraged or angry -- discriminated against when trying to rent housing in Los Angeles, followed around in stores when we shopped together to make sure she wasn’t going to steal anything, unable to hail a taxi in NYC in the evening unless I stood in front of her. Instead, she elected to focus on humankind at its best and worked to create a more just world for all through her teaching, leadership contributions to social justice efforts, serving as legal counsel to others who had been mistreated, and, perhaps most importantly, in seeing and appreciating all in everyday encounters.”

The challenge we face is significant:

“How can we use laws and policies to make our nation live up to some basics like: Men and women are created equal?” Jarvis pondered on the “Giving Space” podcast. “Growing up in a home where you’re encouraged to judge people by how they treated you, rather than the size of their bank account or their color … that was a bedrock principle I learned when I was young.” 

When Stanford women’s basketball celebrated its 25th season with an alumnae game, Colbert gave it a go. At 43, she was the oldest player on the court. She was determined to do two things: not embarrass herself and score a basket. She accomplished both, with Jarvis, still recovering from a burst appendix that nearly took her life, cheering her on from the stands. 

During the game, Jasmine Gunthorpe, their friend, team manager and biggest fan of those early teams, died suddenly in Maryland from a ruptured brain aneurysm. 

“She was like a sister to me,” said Jarvis, godmother to Gunthorpe’s twin sons.

The loss of Gunthorpe is one indication of the time that has passed since the days of the pinnies. Stanford won 19 games and lost nine in those two varsity seasons, but scores and points seem less important now. 

“Sonia was stunned to learn that she was the first Black female varsity athlete at Stanford,” Earl wrote. “As I said to her, ‘You were just Sonia being Sonia.’ And that is pretty much how she has continued to comport herself throughout her life.”  

“What did I gain most from Stanford?” Jarvis asked. “I would say it’s the friendships I made and still have. They have helped to shape me as a person, as a woman, and as a citizen of the world.” 

Colbert mustered the energy to talk about Jarvis recently after a long day’s work as a construction worker in Seattle. 

“Sonia is brilliant,” Colbert said. “But she’s also wise. She has the ability to understand one’s struggles with an insight based on wisdom and compassion. She’s brilliant, but she cares.”

On the court, Colbert used to rally Jarvis with these encouraging words: “You’re the fire! You’re the fire behind everything.”

For Black women athletes at Stanford, it’s absolutely true.