Sidelined (6 page)

Lewis argues that from 1965 onward, as the defeated proponents of massive resistance to desegregation in the South were absorbed into the rise of New Right conservatism, their more overt displays of white supremacist ideology became more subtle and their language more coded.
Nevertheless, in the South sport was actually used as a form of symbolic resistance against the forces of integration well into the late 1960s. The sporting arena provides for a further dimension in the study of massive resistance and white backlash. In other areas of the country white Americans, perpetuating the myth of sport as an unequivocally positive racial force, were offended by the civil rights activism of the black athletic revolt. Black people had broken the color barrier in both professional and college athletics and played on integrated teams in front of integrated audiences. Crowds cheered both white and black players; the color line was drawn by the contrasting team uniforms rather than racial difference. Some black athletes, though, still protested and complained; they boycotted games, and they stood on the winners' podium and disrespected the American flag. White athletes, sports fans, and administrators all exhibited signs of disappointment and anger toward the black—and white—athletes who challenged the essentially mythical role of sport in race relations. The anger and disappointment that were exhibited form part of our understanding of the white backlash in the late 1960s.

The area of society in which white Americans were most clearly confronted by significant social change was education. The
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling that segregated schooling was unconstitutional made the classroom the front line of racial integration in the 1950s and beyond. It was in schools and universities—outside of the South before the 1960s—that young black and white athletes began to play sports with and against one another. The historical debate concerning the success or otherwise of the
Brown
decision intersects with the discussion about the nature of sport as a positive racial force. The
Brown
decision is widely regarded as a source of inspiration for civil rights activists and it holds symbolic value as the beginning of the integration of the education system—the incubator for America's future. Sport has enjoyed similar symbolic importance as an arena in which racial barriers can be broken down. The
Brown
decision and the integration of school sports did not, however, provide a simple path to racial progress.

Michael Klarman argues that there were the beginnings of a significant transformation in race relations before the
Brown
decision and that the positive impact of the decision was very limited. His “backlash” thesis maintains that the crucial role played by
Brown
was to harden southern
resistance to civil rights activism and provide for a confrontation. This confrontation led to images in the media that were greeted by many Americans with revulsion and consequent support for civil rights legislation. The immediate impact on desegregation in the South provided by
Brown
was minimal. Taking the region as a whole, by 1963–1964 approximately 1.2 percent of school-age blacks were actually attending school with whites.
⁸¹
In North Carolina, for example, dual systems continued to dominate well into the 1960s.
⁸²
An anonymous letter to the president of Mississippi State University in 1963 argued that “something more than the game [would] be lost” if the institution's basketball team broke the color barrier and competed against an integrated team.
⁸³
The team did, however, travel out of the state to compete against their integrated opponents.

James Cobb counters Klarman's view, arguing that the revisionism of historians of
Brown
stems largely from a sense of disappointment with the achievements of the ruling and its aftermath. The decision did provide an inspiration and impetus for black civil rights activists.
⁸⁴
Lewis has also asserted that the “elegant flow” of Klarman's argument is less convincing when the “intricacies and complexities” of massive resistance to desegregation are fully considered.
⁸⁵
Certainly within the sporting sphere reactions to school desegregation were varied. The complexities of massive resistance to which Lewis alludes meant that there was not a uniform response to the prospect of white and black student athletes playing and training together.

Although
Brown
was aimed at elementary and secondary schools, the issue of desegregation needs also to embrace higher education institutions. Certainly in the Deep South top universities resisted the integration of sports teams even after higher education institutions as a whole had been integrated. In all areas of the nation integrated schooling could lead to increased racial understanding through playing sports. Integration also had the potential to promote tension and destroy previously successful sports programs, however.

The failings of integrated education did, nevertheless, promote a discussion that strongly affected the birth of the black athletic revolt. The successes and failures of high school and college sporting arenas were important factors in the development of the black athletic revolt. Sport did offer opportunities for black and white social intercourse beyond the parameters of wider society's racial mores. Only on the baseball field could Jackie Robinson wave a bat at a white man in relative safety. Sport provided for the breaking of certain racial barriers in the South that would
have been conventionally impenetrable. Vince Dooley, University of Georgia football coach from 1964 to 1988, argued that once desegregation became widespread in the late 1960s and early 1970s, “athletics helped to integrate the South…. passions run so hard with sports and when they [southern people] saw white and black were playing together for a common cause then they were for that cause.”
⁸⁶
Pamela Grundy argues that even before the
Brown
decision of 1954 an increase in the number of integrated athletic contests opened “cracks in absolutist notions of racial separation.”
⁸⁷
Nevertheless, these contests were sporadic and largely comprised integrated northern teams competing against all-white southern teams.

The experience of black student athletes post-
Brown
is typical of the tensions at the heart of the relationship between race and sport. The resistance to integrated schooling in the South and the experiences of those who lived through increased integration of sports teams in schools and colleges across the country had an important impact on the specific shape of the black athletic revolt. The problems faced by black athletes even after the integration of sports became an increasing focus for that revolt. In the South the hard-line segregationist backlash against the
Brown
decision affected the integration of high school and college sports. Steve Cherry, coach at East Lincoln High School in North Carolina, was approached by a member of the booster club who warned, “There's a man that's going to blow your head off if you keep playing all them niggers on your basketball team.”
⁸⁸

Highlighting a trend that will be explored further in the chapters that follow, the experiences of individuals and teams during the immediate period after integration was often shaped by the attitudes of the coaching staff. Horace King, one of the first black football players at the University of Georgia, was a senior in the late 1960s when his high school integrated. He described constant conflict on the football team and in the school system because of the attitudes of the players and their coaches. King asserted, “We should have had an outstanding football team but because of the dissension inside the team we could not compete and beat other teams like we should have.” King explained how he was removed from games when he played well so that he did not break any school records. The attitude of the players on the team was a reflection of the discrimination exhibited by the coach, who treated black and white players differently. In contrast, King's experiences of integrated high school basketball was much more positive because “of the way the coaches handled things.”
⁸⁹

Integrated sporting contests were visible expressions of the racial changes that the nation in general and the South in particular were experiencing in the late 1960s. White and black players working alongside one another for a common cause did help to break down barriers. This was only a partial process, however. As Grundy explains in relation to North Carolina, “Black and white students might attend school together, might work jointly on the details of offensive and defensive strategy, but after school let out they went home to different neighborhoods.”
⁹⁰
George Patton, a University of Georgia and Atlanta Falcons football player in the late 1960s, explained that off the field “the blacks stayed with the blacks, and the whites stayed with the whites.”
⁹¹
This social separation despite athletic integration was another element of the critique outlined by Harry Edwards and the black athletic revolt he led. The revolt on college campuses emerged directly from the experiences of black and white students and athletes in the post-
Brown
education system.

What is crucial is that these racial confrontations, accommodations, and tensions were faced every day on some level by white and black athletes and coaches involved in integrated sport. It was on high school football teams and college basketball courts that blacks and whites learned to adjust to the changing racial landscape of the United States immediately after passage of the landmark civil rights legislation of the mid-sixties. The reactions to the black athletic revolt by athletes, fans, administrators, and coaches were elements of the white backlash that formed part of the rise of a new conservatism. This new conservatism saw sporting competition as a crucial component of the American national character and passionately upheld the ideal that sport provided an unequivocal example of racial integration and progress.

This powerful ideal was clearly reflected in the language that Roby used when writing to Parker in the aftermath of the 1968 Olympics. His naked anger at the Harvard crew stemmed from the perceived impertinence of an attack on the cherished notion that sport had done more than any other area of society to promote racial equality. Roby accused the Harvard men of embarking on “a rather strenuous program of civil rights and social justice with other members of our Olympic delegation to Mexico City.”
⁹²
What vexed U.S. administrators further was the convergence of tactics from the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements. Smith and Carlos could be painted as Black Power militants, angry young black men whose sporting talent had lifted them out of the ghetto but whose character remained gripped by a destructive antiwhite mindset. Paul Hoffman and
his teammates wore the blazers of an elite academic institution and competed in one of the whitest sports in the games, however. They showed the potential of sport to be used as a tool to promote the black freedom struggle. Yet in many respects their stand represented the high-water mark of the black athletic revolt, as sport never fully reached its potential to positively affect civil rights activism.

2

Genesis and Response

The Olympics help to bridge the gap of misunderstanding of people in this country. There is no place in the athletics world for politics.

—Jesse Owens, quoted in the
New York Times,
November 26, 1967

He belongs to a controlled generation…. Does it occur to Jesse Owens that blacks are in-eligible by color-line and by endless economic obstacles to compete in some 80 percent of scheduled Olympic events?

—Harry Edwards,
The Revolt of the Black Athlete

At the beginning of 1967, Ralph Boston was the long jump world record holder, having set the mark of eight meters, thirty-five centimeters two years previous. That was his fourth world record and he could also boast a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics and a silver medal in the Tokyo Games four years later. Boston was therefore a very likely candidate to make the U.S. team that would travel to Mexico City for the 1968 Olympics. In the year preceding these games there were calls from some within the black community to boycott the occasion as a protest against continued racial injustice in America. When asked about the possibility of this boycott, Boston gave a very clear opinion against it. “I don't see that anything at all would be accomplished by Negroes boycotting the Olympic Games,” he told a reporter. “People train at least four years for this event, which is probably the greatest sporting event in the world.”
¹
At the age of twenty-eight
Boston knew this would most likely be his final opportunity to compete in the games. As he told me some years later, “I was not in favor of the boycott…. I guess that was quite selfish…. I knew it would be my last chance and so I wanted to go [to the Olympics].”
²

The long jumper was against the civil rights agenda impinging upon the Olympic Games to the extent that black athletes would refuse to participate. Nevertheless, he had shown seven years earlier that he was prepared to use the boycotting of events as a way of drawing attention to racial inequality. Boston had been involved in an incident in Houston, Texas, in 1961 that provides a relatively rare example of athletes using their position to protest against racial injustice in the early 1960s. He was one of thirty-eight athletes who refused to participate in a track and field event because of the provision of segregated seating for spectators. The Houston branch of the NAACP, which had organized the protest, was criticized by Jesse Owens for putting pressure on athletes to boycott the event and so restricting their individual freedoms. The NAACP responded that no pressure was put on the athletes. In a separate incident involving the picketing of Houston football games because of segregated seating, the NAACP stated that the San Diego Chargers' black players were not to be criticized if they crossed the picket line.
³
In the original incident that drew condemnation from Owens, Boston had shown that he was willing to sacrifice an athletic event to make a stand in the civil rights struggle. Clearly, though, the size of the Olympics and the prestige associated with winning medals far outweighed those of a regional tournament in Texas.