Sidelined (29 page)

There was, therefore, no black athletic revolt in the South in the same way as there was in the rest of the nation. Sport and the black freedom struggle in Dixie had a different relationship. It would be wrong to paint a picture of blanket racial segregation on the sports fields of the South, but certainly after the
Brown
ruling there was a sustained attempt to separate the races in sporting competition. Examples of integrated sporting competition can be found in professional sports in the South. In 1953 the Savannah Citizens of the Sally Minor Baseball League, which included teams from Alabama and Florida, recruited black player Henry Aaron. In 1954 a team in minor league baseball's Southern League, the Atlanta Crackers, signed African American Nat Peeples. Following the breaking of the color line in the major leagues by Jackie Robinson, black southerners played in the major leagues, but these brief examples of integration were the exception to the rule before the mid-1960s.
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The number of black football players in the NFL increased as the 1960s progressed, and there were integrated sporting contests in the South. The Atlanta Falcons provide an example of an interracial team that played games in the South while many college teams were still segregated.
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Southern racial mores still affected professional sports teams who visited the region. Between 1961 and 1964 local civil rights activists fought a series of battles to desegregate Florida facilities used by major league baseball teams for spring training.
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In 1961 the Houston branch of the NAACP supported a picket by black fans of the city's NFL franchise because of the segregated seating in the stadium.
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These selected examples serve to show that professional sporting contests were inevitably affected by the racial customs of the South in the 1950s and 1960s. There were, however, also integrated teams that played in Dixie. Furthermore, there were examples of integrated contests at the college level taking place in the South before the late 1960s, and the importance of this fact for southern culture has been highlighted above. Not only was it culturally important for southern teams to play against top-ranked national opponents, but failure to do so also brought significant loss of financial revenue. Historians of sport and race relations in the
South have asserted that such integrated contests played an important role in the erosion of absolutist notions of racial segregation. Charles Martin argues, “Integrated games began to acclimate some white southerners to black and white cooperation in one important aspect of social life.”
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Russell Henderson has written about the decision in 1963 by Mississippi State University to repeal the unwritten law prohibiting contests with integrated teams. He asserts that “the color line in athletics appeared less rigid, and white sentiment less volatile over its erasure than in voting, schools, or public accommodations.”
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Nevertheless, this reading of the relationship between sport and race is too simplistic if we are to truly understand the relationship between sport and the black freedom struggle in the South and its place in the story of the black athletic revolt.

The integrated contests that have been highlighted above were between all-white southern teams and integrated northern competitors. The playing fields of many of the major colleges of the South were successfully kept all white well into the late 1960s. The color line had been eroded in schools, voting, and public accommodations before this racial barrier was broken down. Certainly, once the barrier was broken, sport did play an important role in the development of a post–civil rights identity in the South that could incorporate both black and white southerners. Sharing a locker room and winning and losing with a teammate of another race did help break down barriers to understanding. Nevertheless, there was not a straight line between the gradual acceptance of competition against integrated teams from outside the South and meaningful racial progress through interracial sporting participation. We must recognize this greater complexity so as to comprehend why a black athletic revolt did not emerge in the South. The fact that it took so long for top black athletes to put on the team colors of the Universities of Alabama, Tennessee, or South Carolina meant they were not in a position to engage with the black freedom struggle in the way that Edwards and his supporters were doing elsewhere in the nation.

In those other areas of the nation a relatively long history of integrated sporting competition gave strength to the myth that sport provided a color-blind arena that brought racial progress ahead of many other areas of society. The heart of the black athletic revolt was an effort to expose this myth and bring sports directly into the activism of the wider black freedom struggle. In the South large-scale integrated sporting competition did not emerge until after many of the battles of the civil rights struggle had been played out in other areas of society. The belief that sport helped the progress of race relations was not strongly held in the South in the
mid- to late 1960s in the way it was elsewhere in the nation. This was precisely because at this time sport was still being used by many in the white power structure to uphold white supremacy. The retrospective views of many black and white athletes of the time are that sport helped the progress of race relations. There is a large element of romanticism in these views, which should be acknowledged. The crucial point is, however, that these beliefs were formed in the late 1960s and early 1970s and have crystallized since. The South was not fertile soil for Edwards's message that black athletes needed to engage in the black cultural awakening because black athletes were only just gaining access to integrated competition.

The complexity of the relationship between sporting culture and the forces of segregation in the South can be illustrated by looking at the events surrounding the integration of the University of Georgia, Ole Miss, and the University of Alabama. We can see that the gradual acceptance of contests against integrated teams did not lead axiomatically to sports teams themselves being desegregated. These examples and the story of how the SEC football programs were integrated help to explain why a black athletic revolt did not hit campuses across the South at the time that it was sweeping across other areas of the nation and affecting the U.S. Olympic team.

In December 1955 Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia caused great controversy when he objected to the Georgia Tech football team playing in the Sugar Bowl against the University of Pittsburgh. Griffin did not want a team from his state to play against integrated opponents, and Pittsburgh had an African American fullback named Bobby Grier. Students at Georgia Tech protested against Griffin's attempts to stop their team going to the Sugar Bowl and rival University of Georgia (UG) students sided with them. In Athens police had to use tear gas to disperse a crowd of UG students who rallied behind a banner that read, “For Once, We're for Tech.”
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University administrators voted to let the team play in the Sugar Bowl and many viewed the incident as a victory for racial integration. In fact, when sanctioning Georgia Tech's participation in the contest, administrators passed a series of resolutions that supported the forces of segregation. Measures were put in place to try to ensure that black athletes would never be able to play in integrated contests in Georgia. College administrators placed a large emphasis on sporting victory, but it would be a decade after
the Sugar Bowl controversy before Georgia Tech and the University of Georgia integrated their football teams.
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A year after the debate created by the game against Pittsburgh, Horace Ward's long effort to desegregate the University of Georgia was reaching a climax. Using many of the legal diversions and delaying tactics that were employed at both Ole Miss and Alabama to block the enrollment of black students, UG officials had continually rejected Ward's application. Fearing that things were going to drag on indefinitely, Ward had enrolled in Northwestern University Law School in Chicago so that he could start his studies while waiting for his application to Georgia to be approved. Realizing that this move meant that Ward would have to transfer to the UG law school in Athens, university officials claimed that he had not followed this procedure, and a court ruling in 1957 denied Ward entry.
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UG students were moved to protest in support of their Georgia Tech rivals being allowed to play against an integrated football team the year before but in 1957 the University of Georgia maintained racial segregation on its own campus.

Civil rights activists were keen to encourage outstanding black students to apply to all-white universities in Georgia as the campaign against segregation continued. In 1959 Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were among the brightest black high school students in the state. At first they were encouraged to apply to Georgia Tech, but they were unimpressed by the courses on offer so they tried to gain entry at UG. Lack of dormitory space was used as one of the reasons why they could not be admitted, and when they enrolled elsewhere in order to further their education officials made it very difficult for them to transfer.
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When a trial was set for December 1960 in order to try to force their admittance, Horace Ward was delighted to join Hunter and Holmes's legal team. Finally, in January 1961 the two black students became the first to integrate UG after a judge found there was no reason other than racial prejudice for their continued exclusion.

Although their first day on campus passed without major incident, things turned ugly that evening. Following a narrow defeat by their rival Georgia Tech in a basketball game, a mob of UG students descended on the dormitory where Hunter was housed. A bedsheet was unfurled with the words “nigger go home” written on it and bricks and bottles were thrown. Hunter and Holmes were temporarily suspended from the university for their own safety after police used tear gas to break up the riot.
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Although not as serious as events at Ole Miss a year later, the riot was a portent of
that violence. Throughout their education in Athens Holmes and Hunter faced varying levels of social ostracism and racial abuse. When Holmes began his final quarter at UG he had never eaten in a university dining room, never entered the gymnasium, and never studied in the library. He had no white friends outside of the classroom and he had never visited a white friend or had them visit him.
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Holmes was a talented athlete, and he had held hopes of playing football for the Georgia Bulldogs while studying at the university. When he enquired about his prospects for playing shortly after enrollment he was strongly advised by the dean that it was not a good idea. It was believed that there was the serious prospect of him being killed either by his own or opposing fans.
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The university had submitted to the integration of its campus but it was not about to submit to the integration of its football team. Despite this fact Holmes, Hunter, and the other black students who followed them still had Georgia Bulldogs bumper stickers on their cars. When asked why this was Holmes said, “Well we do go to school here. It's school spirit? No, not spirit. I'm trying to think of another word. I'll let you know.”
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In September 1962 Mississippi governor Ross Barnett signaled his defiance in the face of federal forces of integration. Barnett told an audience, “We will not surrender to the evil and illegal forces of tyranny…. No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor…. I speak to you now in the moment of our greatest crisis since the War Between the States.”
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Heavily associated with the symbolic legacy of that conflict was the University of Mississippi, Ole Miss. The university was founded in 1848 and then closed for the duration of the Civil War, when its buildings were used as hospitals. Dead soldiers were buried on campus. In 1936 the school adopted Colonel Rebel as its mascot. During football games Ole Miss fans waved the Confederate flag and sang “Dixie.” The symbols surrounding the football team were loaded with history and a sense of southern identity and defiance. As racial change swept across the nation in the 1960s, Ole Miss football games increasingly became a celebration of white supremacy.
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This celebration took place as the state struggled to hold back the slow-moving tide of desegregation. A 1954 law that was passed unanimously by the state legislature gave the governor the authority to close any school in Mississippi whenever he felt that this was in the interest of the majority of students. This was the law that Barnett used as the basis for his strategy of interposition in 1962. Previous attempts to integrate Ole Miss had all been rebuffed before fading away, and Governor Barnett intended to maintain this record of segregation across the state.
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In September 1962 James Meredith tried to register at Ole Miss but was repeatedly blocked by Barnett and the university's board of trustees. The Kennedy administration put pressure on the authorities to admit Meredith. After the black student had been refused entry to the university for the third time, Bobby Kennedy telephoned Governor Barnett to try to reach a settlement. The attorney general refused the governor's request for a staged scenario in which federal marshals would draw their guns so it would appear Barnett was being forced to step aside and allow Meredith to be registered.
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