Some 54 years after helping pass Title IX, Billie Jean King's advocacy continues

Sport

Some 54 years after helping pass Title IX, Billie Jean King's advocacy continues

2026-08-29 06:27 Last Updated At：06:40

For Billie Jean King, the fight for Title IX continues.

Some 54 years after the passage of the landmark legislation that banned discrimination in any education program or activity that receives federal funds, King still advocates for women's sports and equity.

There's a throughline from the passage of the law to the growth women's sports have seen in recent years. The fruits of King's activism can be seen in the athletes who populate the WNBA, the National Women's Soccer League, the Professional Women's Hockey League, and the other women's professional sports that have emerged in recent years.

"I think the professional part is starting to happen, they can see that if they want to be a big deal, they can see the top. We never had that when we were growing up, but now they can see it, and if you can see it, you can be it,” King said. “They’re going to be able to see these things, and that’s good. But what we need is at the grassroots levels. What I always worry about: you’ve got to keep the girls in the sports.”

King, of course, was an accomplished athlete in her own right, with 39 Grand Slam tennis titles. A year after Title IX was passed in 1972, she beat Bobby Riggs in the historic “Battle of the Sexes.”

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in 2009.

King runs a foundation in her name dedicated to supporting young people through sports, education and activism. She is also a founder of the Women's Sports Foundation, established n 1974, which works to expand opportunities for women and girls in sports. And more recently she's partnered with Dove's Body Confident Collective with other athletes and leaders, including former soccer star Mia Hamm and South Carolina women's basketball coach Dawn Staley, to help young girls remain in sports.

Title IX is increasingly under fire from many directions. Name, image and likeness deals that have proliferated in college sports are often tilted toward male athletes in the top sports like football and basketball.

A landmark NCAA antitrust settlement granted $2.7 billion in back pay for athletes who were barred from making money off their name, image and likeness. Critics argued the settlement should be equally distributed under Title IX.

But last year the Department of Education rescinded guidance issued by the Biden Administration that said schools must equitably distribute the payments.

And the Trump Administration is moving the arm of the Education Department that enforces Title IX, the Office of Civil Rights, to the Justice Department. The administration has shifted the priorities of the office in an effort to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It also moved to rescind guidance from previous administrations that gave Title IX protections to LGBTQ students.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we’re going to have to figure it out because I don’t think it’s going to help girls. You know, maybe it is going to help girls, but not to the same extent as the boys. So that’s not right either. It should be equality wherever we go in life,” King said.

That are also other potential threats. Recently the Heritage Foundation, which authored Project 2025, published a report, “Title IX’s Failed Experiment: Why Accommodating Sex Differences Beats Engineered Parity.”

"The current Title IX regime as applied to sports (and elsewhere) is part of a sustained social engineering effort that is designed to produce a new sort of woman — one that is more aggressive, more competitive, more male, less relational, and less oriented toward the goods of family and motherhood,” the report says.

But King is undaunted by the challenges ahead.

“You never understand inclusion unless you’ve been excluded. Women have been excluded, all women, then women of color and para athletes. So it gets, you go deeper and deeper," King said. "But we didn’t have the opportunities. You have to have the opportunities to understand this, and so we’ve been excluded. Excluded is what we’ve been for all these centuries, but now we’re included, and now we’re looked at as a great investment. But we’re still minuscule compared to what men have got.”

Civil rights groups make urgent plea for voting rights in DC, ahead of midterm elections

WASHINGTON (AP) — Voting rights, the work of the Civil Rights Movement and racial justice took center stage on the National Mall Friday, with protesters gathering ahead of midterm elections and following a wave of changes to voting laws and redistricting that some have condemned as detrimental to Black Americans.

Hundreds of people rallied on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the 2026 “Defend the Vote” March on Washington, organized by the Rev. Al Sharpton and Martin Luther King III, echoing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 march. The event follows the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark April decision in Louisiana v. Callais that reinterpreted key provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, allowing Southern states to redraw their congressional maps in a way that erodes equal representation in Black communities.

“We’ve been doing these marches for years, but this is probably the most important because this is the first year we are marching that the voting rights bill has been nullified by the Supreme Court,” Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, said in an interview with The Associated Press.

Civil rights leaders and major Democratic political figures rallied attendees before rallygoers marched past national monuments, including the late King's memorial.

Friday's event harkened back to King Jr.’s historic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, when more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial. That march, an inflection point in the Civil Rights Movement, came at a fraught moment, when economic headwinds, civil unrest, political division and the Vietnam War bitterly divided Americans.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., one of dozens of speakers at the event, said that now is a “very dangerous moment in American history” and that the “dream of a more just and equitable society has never been under greater threat than it is right now.”

He placed blame on Republican President Donald Trump and the Supreme Court's conservative majority, listing attempts to purge voter rolls, obtain sensitive voter data, restrict mail-in and early voting, and redraw congressional districts as part of threats to voting rights.

“Today, we have a president along with the Supreme Court members he appointed carrying out the most significant assault on voting rights since segregation, targeting virtually every aspect of the electoral system,” Sanders said.

Martin Luther King III told the AP the Civil Rights Movement's work “is further eroding” in the wake of the April ruling.

He said his father would be disappointed with the state of the country, but current civil rights advocates should be undaunted.

“Had he lived, we’d be on a totally different trajectory,” the younger King said. “These would not be issues; they would have been resolved. I don’t think he would be surprised because he understands our history and understands those who are trying to retain power. But the challenge is challenging our communities to engage even more.”

King's Drum Major Institute, a progressive think tank and community action group, co-hosted the march with Sharpton's group.

Ray Turner, a 65-year-old Maryland retiree, sat Friday on the steps in front of the Lincoln Memorial. He came independently, carrying a sign that read “(Puny) Hands off our elections.”

“The lies about the 2020 election being stolen continue to be sounded, even though they’ve been disproved,” Turner said, adding, “Now they’re trying to use this to prevent people who are legal citizens, legal voters, from voting.”

Sharpton said the Trump administration’s immigration policy for Haitians and white South Africans, as well as cuts to social programs, are unifying concerns for this year's march attendees. But redistricting efforts by Republican-led states that reduce the number of Black lawmakers in Congress loom large.

“This march is about people who refuse to be counted out. When the courts and the legislature broke apart District 6, they did not just redraw lines,” Rep. Cleo Fields, D-La., said in a texted statement. “They told hundreds of thousands of Black families from Baton Rouge up through the Delta that their voice could be taken away at any moment.”

Fields' district was central in the Supreme Court decision that hollowed out the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The court ruled that his district, created just one term ago to permit a second majority-Black district in a state where Blacks make up 33% of the population, was unconstitutional because it relied too heavily on race.

The court has held that maps can be redrawn for partisan reasons.

Louisiana's legislature rushed to redraw the district after the decision, reshaping it to cluster around predominantly white communities in the Baton Rouge area and southern Louisiana.

Fields has opted not to seek reelection to Congress and instead is pursuing a seat in the state Senate.

Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., said that communities in his district “have felt the pain of being the tip of the spear” of the national redistricting fight. He warned that the ruling will likely impact state and local legislative seats during the 2028 election cycle.

“The scene of the crime is Louisiana, but the reverberation of its impact will be throughout the entire country,” said Carter.

Rep. Shomari Figures, an Alabama Democrat whose majority-Black district was targeted by the state’s Republican-led redistricting effort, said the original voting rights fight required local movements, national figures, lots of coordination and strategy. He sees this year's march as a continuation of that legacy.

“My district includes Montgomery, which was the birthplace of it all. It started with a bus boycott in 1955 and that, ultimately, morphed into a broader struggle for civil rights and led to a more broad Civil Rights Movement,” Figures told the AP.

Ahead of Friday, organizations participating in the march filed new claims in their federal lawsuit against President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting. The Supreme Court cleared a path Monday for possible implementation of the order, though it remains unclear how much can be put in place before the midterms.

Late Thursday, a federal judge in Boston who is hearing some of the lawsuits against that executive order temporarily halted the administration from moving forward with it. Time is running short to make any significant changes to voting in the midterms, with the first mail ballots scheduled to be sent out next week.

Associated Press writers Gary Fields in Washington and Kimberly Chandler in Montgomery, Alabama, contributed.

Some 54 years after helping pass Title IX, Billie Jean King's advocacy continues

Sport

Some 54 years after helping pass Title IX, Billie Jean King's advocacy continues

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