Benching Jim Crow: The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980 (Sport and Society) - Softcover

Martin, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252077504 ISBN 13: 9780252077500

Verlag: University of Illinois Press, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

A benchmark study of racial exclusion in college athletics

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Charles H. Martin is an associate professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso and the author of The Angelo Herndon Case and Southern Justice.

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Benching Jim Crow

The Rise and Fall of the Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890–1980 By CHARLES H. MARTIN

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07750-0

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................................................................ixIntroduction: The Strange Athletic Career of Jim Crow......................................................................xiii1. White Supremacy and American College Sports: The Rise of the Gentleman's Agreement, 1890–1929.....................12. "Fair Play" versus White Supremacy: The Gentleman's Agreement under Attack, 1929–45...............................273. "Massive Resistance" and the Fall of the Color Line, 1945–65......................................................554. Cracks in the Solid South: Texas Western College Abandons Jim Crow.....................................................905. Hold That (Mason-Dixon) Line: The Atlantic Coast Conference and Football................................................1206. "Two at Home and Three on the Road": The Atlantic Coast Conference and Basketball.......................................1507. The Eyes of Texas Are (Not) upon You: The Southwest Conference and Football.............................................1808. From Exclusion to Prominence: The Southeastern Conference and Basketball................................................2159. The "Final Citadel of Segregation": The Southeastern Conference and Football............................................255Conclusion: The Accomplishments and Limitations of Athletic Integration....................................................293Notes......................................................................................................................305Sources....................................................................................................................355Index......................................................................................................................359

Introduction

The Strange Athletic Career of Jim Crow The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line. —W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903

Think of what a rich recruiting field the South would offer if its own schools started seeking out good Negro athletes, instead of losing them by default to the rest of the country. —Louisville Courier-Journal, March 1963

In the first week of April 1989, Wade Houston left Louisville, Kentucky, and traveled to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he formally accepted the position of head basketball coach at the University of Tennessee (UT). Such coaching changes are a regular feature of the collegiate athletic scene, but Houston's hiring was anything but routine. In fact, it represented a historic racial milestone for the university, the Southeastern Conference, and the American South. In assuming his new job Houston became not only the first African American head coach at Tennessee but also the first black coach in any major sport during the fifty-five-year history of the SEC, the Deep South's premier athletic conference. This unprecedented development seemingly confirmed the continuing racial revolution in higher education in the South, once the country's most rigidly segregated region. It further suggested that racial concerns were now rapidly disappearing in the modern world of southern college sports. Subsequent events, however, soon disrupted this progressive narrative of unimpeded racial progress and briefly highlighted the continued presence of racial discrimination in the region.

Houston's personal journey epitomized the sweeping social transformation of the South since the mid-1960s. A Tennessee native, Houston had grown up in the industrial town of Alcoa some fifteen miles south of Knoxville and had rooted for the Volunteer athletic teams during his youth. The young basketball star graduated from Alcoa's all-black Hall High School in May 1962, at a time when no student from the school had ever attended the nearby University of Tennessee. In fact, the university had accepted its first three black undergraduates just one year earlier, and all of its athletic teams remained exclusively white. Ignored by UT coaches, Houston subsequently left the state to accept a basketball scholarship from the University of Louisville (UL), where he and two other recruits became that school's first African American basketball players.

In the spring of 1989, some twenty-seven years later, social conditions in Tennessee appeared to have changed dramatically. During Houston's absence from the state, the University of Tennessee had become a more diverse institution, and its athletic teams now included numerous African American players. Moreover, African American students, staff, and faculty constituted a noticeable though not large presence on campus. Houston's hiring rekindled excitement among Volunteer basketball fans and attracted positive comments across the wider community. The Nashville Banner even suggested in a somewhat apologetic headline that "Houston's UT welcome is 27 years late." Within a week, though, charges of continuing racism shattered this harmony. On April 5 a local newspaper reported that the prestigious Cherokee Country Club had refused to accept Houston as a member, even though the university subsidized several memberships at the facility for its senior athletic staff. Forced to confront an unpleasant reality that they had previously ignored, embarrassed school officials canceled all of their memberships at the Cherokee Country Club and transferred them to another local club that did not practice racial discrimination.

The brief tempest over Houston's country club membership aptly captured the contradictions that marked southern college sports near the end of the twentieth century. From the 1890s into the 1960s southern universities, especially those that were located in the Deep South and belonged to the Southeastern Conference, had consistently maintained a policy of racial exclusion in the classroom. When the federal government finally forced these institutions to desegregate in the early 1960s, this historic breakthrough created the possibility that their intercollegiate athletic teams might voluntarily seek out black players. Influenced by continuing white hostility toward desegregation, most coaches did not immediately pursue this option. Eventually, though, between 1966 and 1973, SEC members gradually dropped their internal color lines and integrated their athletic teams. During the 1970s and 1980s these universities hired a small but expanding number of black assistant coaches. Now, in 1989, Tennessee and Wade Houston had shattered the glass ceiling that had blocked African Americans from advancing to head coaching positions. Yet in the midst of this celebration of color blindness in southern sports, the controversy over the Cherokee Country Club's restrictive membership policy temporarily derailed this triumphalist narrative of uninterrupted racial progress and demonstrated that racial discrimination, though greatly diminished, still remained an unresolved issue in the South, even within the supposedly enlightened world of higher education....

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Illinois Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2010
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0252077504
• ISBN 13: 9780252077500
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 416
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland