The integration of collegiate and professional sports parallels the civil rights movement, but in important ways it was a whole different track.
By Matthew Wills
Controversies over today’s “take a knee” protests of police violence against African Americans call to mind the rocky process of integrating sports in the first place. “Money and competition were the two major factors that drove the complete integration of teams,” writes Renford Reese, noting that white college and university administrators, athletic directors, and coaches led the effort in the 1960s after the long period of segregated sports that begin in the 1890s.
Initially, Reese notes, sports teams presented “ideal Negro” paragons to belie racist stereotypes. The boxer Joe Lewis was the model: he was “polite, well-mannered, and knew his place,” winning favor by not dating white women. By the 1970s, however, the era of tokenism in sports was over: organizations had to adapt to the new reality of competition or simply lose. The Southeastern Conference (SEC) was the last bastion of Jim Crow college football, with the University of Mississippi the last SEC school to integrate its team in 1971. This led to the paradoxical situation in which “people with bitter racial opinions about blacks in general would display great enthusiasm over black athletes on their favorite teams.”
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