Sidelined (28 page)

The argument that sport promoted racial progress had a distinctive tone in the South. The football teams that garnered so much southern pride were all white. Their victories represented an expression of white southern manhood and identity. As we will see below, resistance to integrated competition on southern soil was long and fierce. Despite their exclusion
from such sporting contests, many black educators, contemporaneous with the development of both a regional and national sporting culture, extolled sport as a vehicle for racial progress. Progressive reformers believed that black athletes who excelled in the Olympics or on the playing fields of prestigious northern universities would increase racial pride and slowly change the white supremacist hegemony. As white southerners rejoiced at the victories of the Crimson Tide, historically black colleges promoted sporting competition. It was believed that “athletic accomplishment could strengthen the sense of racial pride among black southerners and at the same time encourage them to identify with national pastimes.”
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The potential for sport to have a positive impact on the wider social landscape of race relations in the South was limited, however, by the strength of white supremacy and the importance of sport as a malleable element of southern culture. That culture was heavily loaded with white desires to maintain racial segregation; when those desires were increasingly threatened by the forces of social change that quickened as a result of the Second World War, white southerners sought to defend their way of life. This also meant defending racial separation in the sporting arena. Many of the most prestigious sporting institutions in the South were prepared to play against integrated teams, but they kept their own rosters lily-white until the late 1960s. Black southerners who did excel on their own sports fields and then moved north and or went on to Olympic success could engage with the national sporting culture. They were, however, excluded from a distinctly southern sporting culture.

James Cobb has explained the extent to which black southerners were denied their regional identity. They were seen as black but not as southerners. This was a product of attitudes of both white defenders of a southern way of life that focused on racial segregation and northern liberals who sought to help black southerners. The latter found it difficult to comprehend that the black population in the South would have any great allegiance to a region that was so synonymous with racial oppression and suffering. Furthermore, the rise of Afrocentrism and the black pride movement in the late 1960s emphasized links with Africa as the spiritual and cultural touchstone for African Americans. In fact, one of the most fascinating developments of the post–civil rights era is the move by many blacks to migrate back to the South and identify themselves as southerners.
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The rapid integration of sports in the South after the late 1960s can be viewed as part of this process of African Americans reclaiming their southernness. The use of sports like football to promote an exclusive southern identity means
that increased black participation on the playing fields represented part of a redrawing of this regional identity. Within this context we can further understand why there was no black athletic revolt in the South in the way there was in other parts of the nation. Playing the game marked significant progress, progress that ran behind wider social changes. As a consequence there was not the same impulse to use the sporting arena as a platform on which to engage in civil rights activism.

Sport has provided a changeable cultural reference point in the relationship between the South and the rest of the nation. It has also provided a shifting and flexible element of southern identity. Football, for example, was used to foster regional pride and defend a certain way of life. It could tie the South to a national sporting culture without requiring the region to choose between its own values and those of the rest of the nation.
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The traditions surrounding it were in many ways artificially created, however. Football was not part of a long-term definition of what it meant to be southern. The concept of the South and regional identity is important when understanding sport in the region; nevertheless, these concepts and this identity have been shaped to fit contemporary imperatives.
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In this sense we can see a constant struggle over the place of sport in southern identity, a struggle that has allowed a post-1960s southern sporting culture to develop that embraces racial integration and extols the values of team before race. This redefinition of the place of sport in southern identity is one factor in allowing black southerners to embrace that new identity.

Arguably the most important struggle of the Civil Rights Movement in the South was over the desegregation of the region's public schools. For white southerners who resisted the racial changes of the 1950s and 1960s, the thought of their sons and daughters sitting in classrooms next to black children was anathema. Some of the most infamous and symbolic moments of the civil rights struggle took place in the realm of education. In 1957 in Little Rock, Arkansas, federal troops were required to protect the first black students to attend the local high school. President John F. Kennedy was forced to intervene in the controversy over the admission of James Meredith to the University of Mississippi in 1962, and a year later Governor George Wallace stood defiantly in the doorway of the University of Alabama in an effort to resist a court order to desegregate.

The struggle to integrate collegiate sporting competition in the South
was no less significant. Segregationists reasoned that racial changes would produce a domino effect whereby concessions in one area of society would lead to transformations elsewhere. The most prestigious university sports teams held out against integration years after the institutions as a whole had been integrated. Focusing particularly on the SEC we can see that sport ran behind, not ahead, of other areas of southern society where racial integration was concerned.
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This largely explains why a black athletic revolt did not occur in the South. The delay before full integration in college sports meant that when it did come it was seen as a victory in itself. Black athletes were making tangible strides forward simply by playing the game. On the whole, therefore, they did not attempt to use the sporting arena to engage in the wider civil rights struggle.

The key starting point for a study of the desegregation of education is 1954. In that year the Supreme Court ruled in
Brown v. Board of Education
that “separate but equal” educational facilities damaged black and white students and that segregation should be dismantled. In a further ruling the following year,
Brown II,
the court ordered that the integration of schools should proceed with all deliberate speed. The battle lines were drawn in the fight over integration as White Citizens' Councils were formed all over the South in an effort to resist the school desegregation process. Historian Michael Klarman is chief among those who argue that the
Brown
decision had a limited immediate impact. Furthermore, he asserts that the forces of southern racial moderation were destroyed by the massive resistance against school desegregation. It was this backlash that then created the radical and confrontational environment that spawned scenes of racial oppression in the South shown in the homes of millions of Americans on the TV news.

Klarman outlines that
Brown
had almost no direct impact on school desegregation in the South. In Upper South states like Tennessee and North Carolina, less than 3 percent of blacks attended desegregated schools in 1963–1964. In the Deep South states of Alabama, South Carolina, and Mississippi not one black child was attending school with whites in 1963. Across the South as a whole 32 percent of black southern children attended integrated public schools in 1968. It was passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 that increased federal spending on public education and accelerated desegregation. Southern schools found it financially difficult to hold out against integration.
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This is important for two reasons. First, as we shall see later in this chapter, the high school experiences of black and white college athletes often had a significant impact on
how they reacted to integrated teams on campus. Their experiences were varied and heavily shaped by the different regional trends in school integration. Second, the story of desegregation of public schools provides the context for the integration of southern universities.

In the realm of higher education there was no
Brown
moment, no defining date that began the process of desegregation. Indeed, the story of the desegregation of higher education has only recently been fully explored by historians. Key symbolic moments, like the riots that attended Autherine Lucy's brief enrollment at the University of Alabama in 1956 or the Meredith and Wallace incidents mentioned above, have dominated references to the desegregation of higher education. It is important, however, that we recognize the evolutionary process of integration on the campus. The slow but increasingly steady enrollment of black undergraduates at southern universities from the early 1950s onward sets the scene for the eventual acceptance of blacks in college sports programs. Charles Martin has shown the gradual acceptance of integrated sporting contests between southern teams and squads from outside of the region in the period between the end of World War II and the beginning of the 1960s.
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This did not lead automatically to the integration of southern sporting programs, however. Although all major southern universities had enrolled black students by 1965, black athletes did not appear on the rosters of the majority of SEC basketball and football teams until 1970. Sport was a symbolic bastion of white supremacy long after many other racial barriers of the Jim Crow system had been dismantled. In direct contradiction of the ideal that sport ran ahead of changes in wider society, the color line remained in the locker room well into the late 1960s.

By 1950 historically white schools in the border states began admitting black students. At the University of Kentucky, for example, three black undergraduates earned degrees in 1951. Maryland and Missouri were among states that amended admission procedures to incorporate black undergraduates immediately after the
Brown
ruling. By 1955 black students had enrolled in small numbers at the University of Virginia and the University of Texas.
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States in the Deep South held out the longest against the forces of desegregation. In 1965 Mississippi State University became the last institution of the major Deep South universities to enroll a black student when Richard Holmes arrived on campus. In 1964 the University of Mississippi enrolled Irvin Walker, who was the first black student to be admitted without the need for a court order. These universities and those in South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, fellow members
of the SEC, had all been desegregated by the mid-1960s. It is worth noting that while they had been integrated they did not have many black students in the late 1960s. Often when one of the blacks graduated there was a period where the university student body was briefly all white again until a small number of new black students enrolled.
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In some respects sporting competition and rivalries drove the slow integration of southern athletic teams. Non-elite colleges and universities took the lead in integrating sports in the South as they searched for some form of competitive edge against their more illustrious and well-established competitors. Atlantic Coast Conference football was integrated in 1963 when the University of Maryland recruited Darryl Hill. Texas Western College (later the University of Texas at El Paso [UTEP]) won the 1966 NCAA basketball championship with an all-black team.
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These provincial teams led the way in the recruitment of black athletes. Indeed, this active recruitment of black athletes created opportunities for Bob Beamon and other athletes and also explains why UTEP authorities were so upset when racial trouble rocked the campus in 1968. They felt they had given many black athletes a good education and did not deserve the criticism that was leveled at them by Jack Olsen and others. In the Southwest Conference the league's three highest-status members were the last to integrate, and it was the more-established institutions of the SEC that were slowest to integrate their rosters also. In the search for a better chance of sporting success it was the less popular teams that led the way.
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Given the small number of undergraduate students on campuses as a whole, it was not particularly surprising that sports teams did not integrate until years after the initial instances of desegregation. After all, the athletics departments of universities represented only a small proportion of the overall student body. Crucially, though, sports, and in particular football, resisted integration in a conscious way. The football field was used as a symbol of the maintenance of white supremacy. In this respect, sport was used in the South in a way that directly contradicted the prevailing ideal that it was an arena where racial progress could be made. Edwards and his supporters encouraged black athletes to revolt because simply being allowed to play the game with whites was not enough; sporting participation alongside whites had not brought real change. In 1967 Edwards was calling for the boycott of football games at San Jose State College and then a black boycott of the Olympics. In 1968 Smith and Carlos and other black members of the U.S. Olympic team protested against the racial injustice in the United States. At university campuses across the Northeast, Midwest,
and West students were protesting against the alleged racial discrimination of coaches and in some cases using sport to highlight the wider civil rights struggle. In the South in the same period, however, black athletes were being recruited to athletics programs for the very first time. Not until the academic year 1967–1968 were there any black athletes in the SEC varsity programs.