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If senior Katie Grudnowski occasionally dances around the answer to a question, you might attribute it to a lifetime on the softball field. After all, fancy footwork can distinguish good players from great ones. So when she’s asked about the team’s performance
early in her career, she nimbly sidesteps the question. “People didn’t have as much of a background in softball as they do now,” she says. “We just loved to play.”
PHOTOS: CHRIS MITCHELL
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With a combined 6–68 record in 2005 and 2006, the cellar-dwelling Scots needed a kick start, and Grudnowski was just the woman for the job. She’d been anchoring the infield at shortstop for two years, and had the speed to beat out almost any
ground ball for a single. Last year, Grudnowski took the helm as a junior
captain—a rare honor—and seemed poised to lead the team in a new direction.
She had her share of obstacles.
She felt responsible for introducing Macalester’s softball traditions to the 10 first-year students who had joined the team. She had to swap shortstop for center field to accommodate the new players. And she had to figure out a way to build a cohesive team while construction
on the Macalester Athletic and Recreation Center wiped out the team’s practice space, playing field, and locker rooms.
 There’s no question Grudnowski
excelled despite the challenges:
she earned all-conference honors for her performance on the field and guided the team to 10 victories, the most since 2003. The team even earned accolades off the field. At the end of 2006, the National Fastpitch Coaches Association honored Macalester with an All-Academic Team award for the players’ cumulative grade point average (3.66). “We’re heading in the right direction,” Grudnowski says.
As the team moves into its second season without a permanent
home, Grudnowski is committed
to carrying on traditions. “We used to have a good locker room dynamic,” she says. “We’d all come in early just to hang out before practice. We can’t really do that now.” Instead, Grudnowski has tried to build camaraderie during long rides to practice facilities and semi-annual spaghetti dinners.
Coach Tom Cross admires Grudnowski’s work as both an athlete and a captain. “Katie’s a tremendous player,” he says, noting that all-conference awards are tough to earn in a league that includes national champ St. Thomas. “And she’s one of the best captains I’ve had. She understands both the coach’s and the player’s perspective.”
Even without a permanent place to play, the Scots will likely draw more attention this year. Grudnowski will lead an experienced core of players in a campaign to play .500 ball and earn one of the conference’s top spots. The new softball field may not be in game shape by the time the season gets under way, but the Scots definitely will be, says Grudnowski. When she’s asked about prospects for the upcoming season, she doesn’t need to evade the question. “We’re ready,” she says.
Framing the Black Panthers: The Spectacular Rise of a Black Power Icon (The New Press, 2007) is an absorbing new book by Jane Rhodes, Macalester’s dean for the study of race and ethnicity and chair of the American Studies
Department. She recently spoke about the book for a Macalester
podcast, from which the following interview is excerpted.
 Q: What is it about that time, and the Black Panthers themselves, that is so fascinating?
A: Every time I ask my students about black leaders from the 1960s, they mention Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers. Part of the reason the Panthers keep coming up is that they were such visible components of the culture of the sixties and seventies. They were central in the media as symbols of black militancy in America.
Q: Talk about the title, Framing the Black Panthers.
A: From a scholarly standpoint, to understand things we have to put them in a framework to make sense of them. And there are media frames. When the media writes a story, they can’t incorporate every element, so they put in the most recognizable
components of that story, and those get repeated. There are also many who argue that the Panthers were framed from a legal standpoint, hounded by the FBI, and accused of a variety of crimes that they didn’t actually commit.
Q: Whom you did interview for the book?
A:Probably the best known was Elaine Brown, who became in the mid-1970s the first woman to lead the Panthers. In the 1990s she published a popular biography called A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story, which is still widely read today. also interviewed Kathleen Cleaver, the wife of Eldridge Cleaver and herself a leader of the Black Panthers.
Q: Talk a bit about gender in the Black Panthers organization.
A: The organization was clearly deeply masculinist, as were many of the social movements of the day. Men were at the helm. More controversial were the charges of sexual abuse and exploitation. That, think, was endemic to lots of organizations.
Q: At the height of the organization’s
power, how many people called themselves Black Panthers—and does the organization
still exist today?
A: At its peak in 1970, the Black Panthers had about 10,000 members
across the United States. The original Black Panther Party is long gone, though many former members are still around. group called the New Panther Party, affiliated with Khallid Abdul Muhammad, has been repudiated by the original Panthers, who don’t believe the new group lives up to the original organization’s
principles and ideals.
Q: What do you hope your readers
will come away with after reading your book?
A: I’d love for my readers to come away wanting to do humanitarian
work, especially the students here at Macalester who are so bright, ethical, and passionate. But I’d also want them to bring some sadness to this work, to really understand that this is tragic work they’d be engaging in.
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