Chronicling the uneven rise and slow decline of segregation in American college athletics, Charles H. Martin shows how southern colleges imposed their policies of racial exclusion on surprisingly compliant northern teams and explains the social forces that eventually forced these southern schools to accept integrated competition. Martin emphasizes not just the racism prevalent in football and basketball in the South, but the effects of this discrimination for colleges and universities all over the country. Southern teams such as the University of Alabama, University of Mississippi, and the University of North Carolina were obsessed with national recognition, but their Jim Crow policies prevented them for many years from playing against racially mixed teams from other parts of the country.

 

Devoting special attention to the Southeastern Conference, the Atlantic Coast Conference, and teams in Texas, Martin explores the changing social attitudes and culture of competition that turned the tide and allowed for the recruitment of black players and hiring of black coaches. He takes a close look at the case of Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), the first major white university in an ex-Confederate state to recruit African American athletes extensively. Martin skillfully weaves existing arguments and documentation on the integration of college sports with wide-ranging, original research, including previously unpublished papers and correspondence of college administrators and athletic directors uncovered in university archives.

Blacks with white skin. Since colonial times, showmen have exhibited the bodies of African Americans with white or gradually whitening skin in taverns, dime museums, and circus sideshows. The term "white Negro" has served to describe an individual born with albinism as well as those who have vitiligo, a disorder that robs the skin of its pigment in ever-growing patches. In The White African American Body, Charles D. Martin examines the proliferation of the image of the white Negro in American popular culture, from the late eighteenth century to the present day.

This enigmatic figure highlights the folly of the belief in immutable racial differences. If skin is a race marker, what does it mean for blacks literally to be white? What does this say not only about blacks but also about whites? Scientists have probed this mystery, philosophers have pondered its meaning, and artists have profited from the sale of images of these puzzling figures.

Lavishly illustratedwith many rarely seen photographsThe White African American Body shows how the white Negro occupied, and still occupies, the precarious position between white and black, and how this figure remains resilient in American culture.