Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football by Derrick E. White (review)

While Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference were winning civil rights victories, Alonzo “Jake” Gaither and his Florida A&M University football team were winning championships. Derrick E. White’s Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football demonstrates that while the latter might not be the equivalent of the former, sporting success was not inconsequential in the era of the civil rights movement. White makes his case through a description of “sporting congregations,” emanating from “the faith in Black-controlled athletics for the betterment of the university and the community” (p. 9). These secular mirrors of the bodies led by ministers like King reflected the push for quantifiable achievement and for improved educational institutions. The successful black college football programs that those congregations supported also demonstrated the tensions between a desire for the structural benefits of integration without the sacrifice of cultural autonomy that typically came with it.

White describes football’s role in and representation of such dilemmas by telling the story of Gaither, who grew up in the upper South in the early twentieth century and attended Knoxville College during the 1920s. He joined the coaching staff of Florida A&M the following decade, eventually became the program’s head coach and athletic director, and served at the helm of one of history’s most successful football programs during the volatile civil rights era, winning seven national titles while King and his congregations were winning victories of their own.

Gaither and his Florida A&M team are perfect vehicles for White’s narrative, as they were on the tip of the spear for the potential costs involved with integration. To build his congregation, Gaither’s program graduated future high school coaches and placed them around Florida. He created a system whereby segregated education served as a pipeline to athletic and academic success for generations of students. It was a system that collapsed under the weight of integration, so when Gaither balked at some of integration’s dictates, some saw him as part of the problem. The Black Power movement was no more charitable, seeing Gaither as a comfortable middle-class power broker who benefited from the racial status quo. That criticism was not entirely unjust, but White’s narrative makes it clear that the story was far more complicated. After all, “[Florida A&M] spent the last three decades of the twentieth century chasing Gaither’s coaching legend” (p. 222). Such chasings were not the result of incompetence in hiring or coaching. As white universities in the South sought integration to feather their own athletic nests, the attendant media story of triumph often hid the erosion of those historically black college and university (HBCU) programs that were so central to White’s “sporting congregations.” In other words, Gaither’s wariness proved prescient.

White also uses Gaither and Florida A&M to tell the much broader tale of the rise and fall of HBCU athletics, the ancillary casualties of the push for integration, and the role of racial assumptions in state educational funding and sports media priorities in the creation of hierarchies, which always gave preference to whiteness but at the same time left space for the creation of legitimate and meaningful black sporting congregations. And though Florida A&M is the principal subject of the book, the congregations at Morgan State University, Grambling State University, Tennessee State University, and Southern University all play a role in the narrative. White’s story is not a hagiographic one of triumph that sometimes enters the genre of sport history. The ebbs and flows of Florida A&M’s success, and the racial and representational reasons for such movements, are incredibly instructive for anyone interested in either black college athletics...