Sidelined (27 page)

Again we see that the attempt to bring politics into the sporting realm, to use that realm to dramatize racial injustice in wider society, posed great problems for black players and their white teammates. Those white teammates believed the prevailing ideology that sport had delivered racial progress. For black players to then use the sporting arena to try to protest about racial injustice seemed paradoxical to many white athletes. This attitude can be linked to what George Lipsitz has called “liberal individualism.” This doctrine argues that society has delivered racial justice and that African American activists are wrong to press for further change.
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The concept of liberal individualism interacted with the specific context of attempting racial protest through sport in 1969 during events at Wyoming. Protests at the 1968 Olympics had hardened the attitudes of athletics administrators against the intrusion of politics into the sporting arena. Furthermore, the increasing attention of supporters of the black athletic revolt to issues of racism in sport and other clashes between coaches and their players over issues of discipline all helped to shape the reactions to the actions of the black fourteen. The attempted protest by the black fourteen was more in the spirit of the original intentions of the OPHR than any of the other campus protests that have been highlighted in this study. The context provided by these protests and the countercultural assault on college athletics created a framework that was hostile to the demands of the black fourteen. Their failure further elucidates the limitations of using
sport to protest civil rights injustice and points to a failure to realize the potential of sport to successfully contribute to the black freedom struggle.

In light of the events at Wyoming, the decision and words of Coach Jim McMullen at San Jose State are particularly interesting. When they played against Wyoming the San Jose Spartans wore armbands in an act of solidarity with the fourteen suspended black players.
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Coach McMullen told one reporter, “You can't just be involved in football, you have to be involved in life.” The stand taken by the white coach and his racially integrated team was fully supported by acting president of the university Hobart W. Burns. Furthermore, San Jose State resolved to cancel all future games with BYU.
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Stanford also severed all sporting ties with BYU. University president Kenneth Pitzer stated that their policy was “not to schedule events with institutions which practice discrimination on a basis of race or national origin.”
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The fact that the lead in protesting against BYU was taken by San Jose State is perhaps no surprise. It was at this institution that the black athletic revolt had been born. It was here that Harry Edwards and Ken Noel had used sport as a lever to gain concessions from university officials in 1967 by causing the cancellation of the opening football game of the season. In this protest, the true birth of the black athletic revolt, Edwards used sport to dramatize the problems of segregated housing in the areas around the campus and the lack of a black political voice in university policy that directly influenced black students.

When Edwards called for a black boycott of the Olympics he did so to dramatize the plight of African Americans and the continued racism of American society. The demands of the OPHR spoke to wider political issues. When Smith and Carlos stood with their raised clenched fists and shoeless feet they did so to highlight the poverty and injustice faced by black Americans. Yes, the OPHR recognized that sport was tainted by racism just as was the rest of society, but this was not its original or principal concern. It was in the period after the boycott had failed and Smith and Carlos had stood with courage and dignity that racism in sport became the main focus of the black athletic revolt. As a consequence the stand made by the black fourteen at Wyoming was more closely connected to the original ideals of the OPHR than other incidents of racial unrest on campuses in 1968 and 1969.

Coach McMullen's comment was particularly insightful. He argued that it was not enough to be “involved in football” but that one also had
to be “involved in life.” This was the essence of the original ideals of the OPHR; that athletes should use their position as athletes, as visible and respected members of the community—either their local college community or the wider national community—to draw attention to the continued racial problems facing the United States in the late 1960s. The prevailing ideology that sport ran ahead of the rest of society in racial affairs, that it was a leader in civil rights, constantly restricted opportunities for athletes to participate in such protest activity. Furthermore, the disciplined resistance to the intrusion of politics and the counterculture of the late 1960s into the sporting arena provided further problems. The black athletic revolt faced a twin backlash against Black Power and against indiscipline and a countercultural challenge to traditional conservative authority. The idea that sport was pure and should not be tainted by politics was in itself disingenuous. Sports administrators were consciously and subconsciously promoting their own political agenda by asserting that sport was a leader in the realm of civil rights.

We will see in the next chapter the distinctive dynamic of the relationship between sport and race in the South and the extent to which the black athletic revolt failed to significantly affect that region. Developments in Dixie perhaps did as much as anything to cement the ideal that prevails today, that sport provides a uniquely positive arena for the improvement of race relations in the United States. The fact that the actions of the black fourteen and the leadership of McMullen and his Spartans represented the last real attempts to use sport to dramatize the wider civil rights struggle of this era shows the limited success of the black athletic revolt. By this I mean the limited success of using sport as a platform from which to speak to the concerns of the civil rights struggle in the late 1960s in the original way intended by Edwards and the OPHR.

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I have said this on many occasions, that athletics probably did more for integration in the South than any other thing.

—Vince Dooley, football coach, University of Georgia

I let Martin Luther King be Martin Luther King. I did not want to be Martin Luther King. I appreciate everything that he did but that was not my intent. My intent was to play football and get a degree and go on and play at the next level.

—Condredge Holloway, University of Tennessee football

Eddie Brown was a young white football fan in the eighth grade when his Tennessee school integrated. His father was a big fan of the University of Tennessee Volunteers and took his son to his first game when he was seven years old. Eddie fell in love with the orange and whites and made his mind up at an early age that he wanted to play for the university team. In 1970 Eddie graduated high school and had no hesitation in accepting a place at the Tennessee institution. When his mother and father dropped him off on campus as a freshman they saw a young black man, Haskel Stanback. Haskel was also recruited to the Volunteers' football squad. Eddie's parents told Haskel's mother not to worry about her son and that they would keep an eye out for and look after him.

Haskel Stanback and Eddie Brown became roommates when they traveled on the road together. They both later described the football team at the university as like a big family. During a trip to Oxford, Mississippi, to play Ole Miss, the two experienced a community that had long resisted the integration of
its university and even longer resisted the integration of its football team. When Haskel and other black members of the Volunteers team took the field, members of the home crowd screamed “kill that nigger.” Eddie remembered the atmosphere on these trips to the Deep South as often “very ugly.”
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Throughout the 1960s southern society and identity faced the serious challenge of racial change, a challenge that clearly affected the sporting arena of the region. Confrontations over desegregation provided a paradoxical role for sport in the development of race relations in the South. Far from being more racially progressive than wider society, the sporting arena was often used as a symbol of the maintenance of white supremacy. Southerners sought to protect many of their most prestigious sports teams from desegregation. Collegiate football's Southeastern Conference (SEC), for example, remained all white for over a decade after the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision. It did not have any black varsity players until 1967, two years after the passage of the major civil rights legislation of the decade. Schools were desegregated before many major college sports teams, which remained all white in a statement of defiance against the forces of integration. Once integration of the southern sports world quickened in the late 1960s, however, sport was hailed as a positive force for social change. It was argued that black and white southerners could come together in the sporting arena in a way that proved much more difficult in wider society.

By the early 1960s there was widespread interracial sporting competition at both the professional and college levels throughout the rest of the nation. By playing the game black athletes were, in accordance with the prevailing sporting ideology, advancing racial progress and understanding. Edwards and other leaders of the black athletic revolt sought to expose that this was not the case. Sport, they argued, provided an arena in which blacks were still treated like second-class citizens. In the South there was limited interracial competition. In the Deep South sport was strictly segregated by race. This made it very difficult for Edwards's message to take root in the South. Athletes could not use sport to promote civil rights in the same way as in the rest of the nation because black athletes could not engage in this struggle from a position of participation in integrated competition. The goal for many black athletes in the South was simply to make it onto the previously all-white playing fields of the most prestigious teams of the region. Often these black student athletes were more conservative and much less radicalized than their fellow students and less likely to openly engage with the black freedom struggle on campus.

This explains why there was no black athletic revolt in the South. In fact, it was the white southern authorities who used the sporting arena to make their own racial protest. Their athletic revolt was against the forces of integration that gradually wore away the edifice of segregation. In a more real sense than in any other region of the United States, when the integration of sporting competition did come, it helped to break down racial barriers.

In many respects sport was a malleable force in the development of southern culture and identity. At various times in the late nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century it was used to draw the region more closely into the national mainstream while also providing a vehicle through which to foster a separate regional identity. In the late 1870s a U.S. professional baseball league was established, with most of the teams confined to the industrial Midwest and Northeast. An invented tradition portrayed baseball as a distinctly American pastime and ball games helped to provide a focus for Fourth of July celebrations of patriotism.
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In postbellum Richmond, Virginia, the baseball club was owned by men who embraced the ideology of the New South. They were part of a growing national middle class and attempted to run the club with management techniques that integrated the team into a national system. Nevertheless, the Richmond team was also a potent reminder of the sectional conflict that had recently ended in defeat for the South. Many of the men who formed the Virginia Baseball Association in the 1880s were veterans of the Civil War. Ex-Confederates used baseball in Virginia to glorify the Confederacy, and the game was clearly linked to the myth of the Lost Cause that emerged in the postbellum South. Interestingly, black spectators—segregated by social custom prior to the emergence of official Jim Crow laws—watched from a separate area of the Richmond ballpark and cheered visiting teams.
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In this example sport was very much a contested cultural site in the search for southern identity in the immediate postbellum years.

As time passed and the sectional wounds of the Civil War were healed through a process of national reunification, so sport was increasingly used to bring the South into the American mainstream. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries collegiate football spread out from the Northeast and moved into the Midwest and the South. Thanksgiving football games provided a national ritual that affirmed a sense of shared tradition and
identity.
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Southerners who had learned the game at northern universities in the 1890s brought it South. The infusion of football into southern sporting culture was an element of the New South movement. Progressive southerners sought to emulate northern practices as part of modernizing the South.
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There was, however, a distinctly regional element to football culture in the South. In the early days of southern football, teams were relatively weak in comparison to their more experienced northern rivals. In the 1920s and 1930s the University of Alabama's Crimson Tide became an increasing source of regional pride when the team won a number of games against northern opponents. Victories in the most prestigious of postseason games, the Rose Bowl, stimulated quasi-religious fervor in the region. Alabama governor Bibb Graves reveled after the first Rose Bowl win: “The hearts of Dixie are beating with exultant pride. We are here to tell the whole world the Crimson Tide is our Tide and an Alabama troop of heroes. It upheld the honor of the Southland and came back to us undefeated.”
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Collegiate football, encouraged by the growth of Thanksgiving Day rituals, helped to move the South closer to the national cultural mainstream. At the same time it fostered a continued sense of southern pride and of distinctiveness from the rest of the nation that was deeply rooted in the unresolved sectional tensions that were a legacy of the Civil War. Andrew Doyle has argued that the Rose Bowl wins by the Crimson Tide in 1926 and 1927 were the most crucial games in southern football history, as they highlighted this incomplete absorption into the American mainstream. Football grew to be a powerful arena in which ideals of what the South should become could be projected. Doyle astutely observed, “The cultural text of southern college football possessed a symbolic plasticity that allowed southerners to mould its interpretations to serve their disparate and often conflicting needs.”
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Participation in national bowl games allowed southerners to connect with the American mainstream. Often this connection required a certain degree of flexibility in the policies of segregationists. Playing against integrated teams, it was argued, was not inconsistent with the maintenance of racial segregation. To put segregation before the “cultural validation” that was provided by national sporting contests was regarded as “a fate worse than integration.”
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