Blood, Sweat, and Tears

As professional football emerged as the dominant spectator sport on television during the 1950s, viewers across the United States were increasingly confronted with the names of unfamiliar colleges and universities. Morgan State University, Grambling State University, Prairie View A&M University, Alcorn State University, Tennessee State University, and North Carolina A&T State University now moved into the national sports mainstream as premier athletes from historically black colleges and universities became standout players in professional football. By the early 1970s, however, the steady stream of star athletes from such institutions had dwindled to a trickle as racial segregation in traditionally all-white universities disappeared. Major college athletic conferences, such as the Southeastern Conference and Southwestern Conference, now fielded football teams of more than 50 percent black players. Derrick E. White has tackled this complex subject with a sharp eye on the nuances of racial issues and an appreciation of the history of intercollegiate athletics. He places the once-dominant Florida A&M University football program coach, Alonzo “Jake” Gaither, in the larger context of the history of college football and the civil rights movement. Gaither's Rattlers compiled a win record of 84 percent between 1945 and 1969 and in the process claimed several mythical national black football championships. Sportswriters openly pondered whether his teams could compete with the all-white teams in major southern conferences. White argues that they could, pointing toward Gaither's recruiting dominance across Florida's talent-rich black high schools and the large number of his players who went on to excel at the professional level. White provides important insights into the popularity of Rattlers football across Florida, detailing how Gaither fostered the development of a “sporting congregation” that provided African Americans with a sense of cultural autonomy, linking the university to black communities across the South, creating a sense of self-determination during a time of pervasive segregation (p 172). Pivotal games between rival national contenders—frequently including Florida A&M—routinely drew crowds of more than forty thousand spectators and were widely covered in black newspapers

Athletes · Context (archaeology · Football · Mainstream · Media studies · Political science · Sociology · State (computer science · White (mutation · American Sports and Literature · History · Law · Medicine · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society