The following is an excerpt from Fit Citizens: A History of Black Women's Exercise from Post-Reconstruction to Postwar America by Ava Purkiss, available everywhere books are sold. Unfit Citizens: Physical and Ideological Cases against Black Citizenship At the turn of the twentieth century, African Americans were keenly aware of the legal, social, and ideological barriers to full-fledged citizenship. Despite the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which defined African Americans as emancipated citizens with equal protection and voting rights, Black people found that these rights existed more in theory than in practice. From...