In November 1939, the editors of theCrisis, the monthly publication of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), nominated a rather unusual “honor roll.” Instead of successful black students, or even black businesses or schools, the list consisted of predominantly white southern universities: Southern Methodist University, Texas Christian University, Duke University, the University of Oklahoma, and the University of Maryland. What had these schools, many of which would not admit African American students until decades later, done to deserve such an honor? All had played football games in the previous year against racially integrated teams from...

Spectators at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York, on the afternoon of November 24, 1917, witnessed a remarkable sight: deliriously excited white Rutgers College football fans storming the field and carrying a black player by the name of Paul Robeson on their shoulders in celebration. The occasion was Rutgers’s stunning 14–0 victory over the Newport Naval Reserves, a veteran All-star squad that had dominated some of the best teams in the Northeast. That the upstart Rutgers College team won was quite an achievement; that its best player was a black man, the only black player on either squad, made...

In the November 18, 1939, issue of theWashington(D.C.)Afro-American, sports editor Sam Lacy could not contain his excitement. As the college football season wound down, it was not the local black colleges and universities, such as Howard University, that inspired Lacy’s enthusiasm; nor was it any of the East Coast schools that featured black players, such as Cornell University. instead, Lacy turned his attention to the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), then a relatively young school with few athletic accomplishments to its credit. The UCLA squad was undefeated, and it seemed likely that a season-ending game...

Standing more than seven feet tall and moving with an agility and grace uncommon to big men, Wilt Chamberlain nearly always attracted the attention of those around him; he quite literally stood out in a crowd. Even on the basketball court, surrounded by other tall players, he dominated action as fans, coaches, and his fellow competitors all marveled at his on-court exploits. But Chamberlain did more than excel at basketball—as one of the first black basketball stars in the Midwest when he played for the University of Kansas (KU), he also profoundly influenced contemporary discussions of race in a...

Charlie Scott was a harbinger of things to come in more ways than one. On the basketball court, Scott augured a different style of play and a new model of player. Previously, guards had been little guys, quick and skilled with the ball, but floor-bound and focused on outside shooting. Big men, like Chamberlain, stayed closest to the basket, shooting hook shots over their shoulder or making layups and dunks. They were often lumbering and bruising. Scott was a hybrid of these players. He did not stay rooted to the floor, but his skills were not limited to dunks and...

In August 1970, A.M. “Tonto” Coleman, the commissioner of the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the athletic association of the most prominent (and predominantly white) universities of the Deep South, wrote an impassioned column in which he described the moral worth and intrinsic values of college football. Published in the annual college football preview in theBirmingham News, Coleman’s column would have had special resonance with the newspaper’s local readers, who ranked among the most passionate fans in the nation. Many rooted enthusiastically for the University of Alabama (UA), located only sixty miles from Birmingham in Tuscaloosa. The school’s football team had...

The centrality of sports to debates over race and equality would continue in the years after 1973, but the early 1970s marked an important era of transition—with the integration of the last SEC schools, racial segregation in big-time college athletics (at least among players) had ended. This era also saw the gradual demise of the modern civil rights movement, as the fractures exposed in debates over affirmative action and black nationalism proved too wide to heal entirely. Nonetheless, the movement wrought remarkable changes in American civic life. African Americans could no longer be denied access to public spaces because...