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149 6 Dixie and the Absence of a Black Athletic Revolt 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 150 SIDELINED 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.”1 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. [13.58.252.8] Project MUSE...

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