Strong Inside

Andrew Maraniss

Description

New York Times Best Seller
2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition
2015 Lillian Smith Book Award
2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title

Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we've come to expect from the genre. Perry Wallace's unusually insightful and honest introspection reveals his inner thoughts throughout his journey.

Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended "separate but equal." As a 12-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville's lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 16, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee's first integrated state tournament--the same day Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game.

The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined.

On campus, he encountered the leading civil rights figures of the day, including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Kennedy--and he led Vanderbilt's small group of black students to a meeting with the university chancellor to push for better treatment.

On the basketball court, he experienced an Ole Miss boycott and the rabid hate of the Mississippi State fans in Starkville. Following his freshman year, the NCAA instituted "the Lew Alcindor rule," which deprived Wallace of his signature move, the slam dunk.

Despite this attempt to limit the influence of a rising tide of black stars, the final basket of Wallace's college career was a cathartic and defiant dunk, and the story Wallace told to the Vanderbilt Human Relations Committee and later The Tennessean was not the simple story of a triumphant trailblazer that many people wanted to hear. Yes, he had gone from hearing racial epithets when he appeared in his dormitory to being voted as the university's most popular student, but, at the risk of being labeled "ungrateful," he spoke truth to power in describing the daily slights and abuses he had overcome and what Martin Luther King had called "the agonizing loneliness of a pioneer."

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Black Studies
• Political Science
• Civil Rights
• Sports
• Africana studies
• History of the United States
• Region
• Civil and political rights
• Education
• Regional
• History

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780826520258
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Strong Inside
STRONG INSIDE
Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South
ANDREW MARANISS
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS NASHVILLE
2014 by Andrew Maraniss
All rights reserved
Published by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
First printing 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper. Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file
ISBN 978-0-8265-2023-4 (cloth)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2025-8 (ebook)
For Alison, Eliza, and Charlie, my home-court advantage, and for my parents, David and Linda
Contents
List of Illustrations
1. Forgiveness
2. Short 26th
3. Woomp Show
4. They Had the Wrong Guy
5. Harvard of the South
6. These Boys Never Faltered
7. Somewhere Like Xanadu
8. Reverse Migration
9. Growing Pains
10. Icicles in Raincoats
11. Articulate Messengers
12. A Hit or Miss Thing
13. Inferno
14. Subversion s Circuit Rider
15. Trouble in Paradise
16. Season of Loss
17. Ghosts
18. Memorial Magic
19. Deepest Sense of Dread
20. A Long, Hellish Trauma
21. Destiny of Dissent
22. Revolt
23. The Cruel Deception
24. Black Fists
25. Nevermore
26. Bachelor of Ugliness
27. Ticket Out of Town
28. Time and Space
29. Embrace
30. Rising
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Author Biography
List of Illustrations
Perry Wallace as an elementary school student in Nashville
Reverend James Lawson is arrested after organizing sit-ins at downtown Nashville lunch counters in February 1960
The colorful and reactionary Nashville Banner publisher, Jimmy Stahlman
Vanderbilt basketball coach Roy Skinner with legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp
James Douglas, Perry Wallace, and Walter Fisher pose with a rim they broke in the 1966 Tennessee state tournament
Pearl High Coach Cornelius Ridley in the minutes before the Tigers played in the 1966 Tennessee state championship
Pearl High School fans celebrate after the Tigers won Tennessee s first-ever integrated state basketball tournament
Pearl s players receive the championship trophy from Gov. Frank Clement
Vanderbilt custodian Richard Baker hands Perry Wallace a net after the state championship game
Pearl players celebrate their state championship
Wallace meets Louisville stars Butch Beard and Wes Unseld during a senior-year recruiting trip
Wallace officially announces his commitment to Vanderbilt
Godfrey Dillard grew up in the Boston-Edison neighborhood of Detroit
Wallace fights for a rebound in the 1966 freshman-varsity game
Godfrey Dillard s Detroit style took some Commodore teammates by surprise
Wallace in action against the Kentucky Wildcats
Stokely Carmichael greets Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1967 Impact Symposium
Stokely Carmichael and Vanderbilt chaplain Bev Asbury eat lunch on April 8, 1967
Carmichael speaks at Memorial Gym
Vanderbilt students unfurled a Confederate flag during Carmichael s remarks
Nashville police took to Jefferson Street and other parts of North Nashville on the night of Carmichael s Impact speech
Wallace limited his aggressiveness on the court to prevent accidental blows that could ignite fights
In this 1967-68 publicity slick, Godfrey Dillard is still depicted as a member of the varsity
Wallace s leaping ability and court sense made him one of Vanderbilt s all-time greatest rebounders
Wallace and teammate Bob Warren listen to Coach Skinner during a game in 1968
Vanderbilt Chancellor Alexander Heard listens to a speaker at the 1968 Impact Symposium
National Guardsmen ring the Tennessee State Capitol in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King
Wallace said his interaction with kids-unburdened by racial prejudices-buoyed him during his darkest days
Wallace blocks the shot of Pistol Pete Maravich, the high-scoring LSU sensation
Perry Wallace, Rudy Thacker, and Thorpe Weber celebrate after Vanderbilt s victory over Kentucky in 1970
Perry Wallace remains the lone black player in this senior-year team photo
Wallace is now a professor of law at American University in Washington, DC
Wallace was inducted into the Vanderbilt Athletic Hall of Fame as part of the Hall s inaugural class in 2008
Perry Wallace is flanked by Godfrey Dillard and Bill Ligon at Wallace s jersey retirement ceremony in 2004
Wallace, his wife, Karen, and their daughter, Gabby, today live in Silver Spring, Maryland
Wallace and his daughter, Gabby, on one of the family s visits to Paris
One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer .
-MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. Letter from a Birmingham Jail
1
Forgiveness
Bob Warren sat alone in the back of a taxi, bound for Massachusetts Avenue and the law school at American University, where he planned to deliver a message nearly forty years in the making.
As his cab sped through the streets of Washington, DC, far from his home in western Kentucky, Warren s mind raced back to the 1970s, before he became a preacher-when he was a professional basketball player-a crewcut farm boy passing red, white, and blue basketballs to Ice Man Gervin in the freewheeling American Basketball Association, sharing locker rooms for nine seasons with Afro-coiffed men from places like Tennessee State, North Carolina A T, and Jackson State University.
It was in those ABA days-in hotels, buses, cabs, restaurants, flights, and conversations with his many black teammates, in becoming familiar with their perspective on the world-that it dawned on Warren what hell one of his brilliant and hardworking teammates at Vanderbilt University, Perry Wallace, must have been going through in 1968, when Warren was a senior and Wallace, a sophomore, was the first and only African American ballplayer in the entire Southeastern Conference.
Warren s cab reached its destination, and the basketballer-turned-country-preacher made his way up to the fourth floor of the law school. Standing there to greet him was Professor Wallace; it was the first time these old teammates had seen each other in thirty-eight years.
Forgive me, Perry, Warren said. There is so much more I could have done.
2
Short 26th
Long before the day Bob Warren came to visit, there was the day Perry Wallace was elected captain of the Vanderbilt basketball team, the day when he was voted as the university s most popular student. There was the day he graduated from Columbia Law School, the day he delivered a lecture on global warming entirely in French, the day when he represented the Federated States of Micronesia before the United Nations. There was the day he watched his jersey hoisted to the rafters at Memorial Gym.
But before any of that, there were days when dorm room doors were slammed in his face, accompanied by cries of Nigger on the floor! There were days when grown men dressed in maroon, or orange, or red, white, and blue, threatened to castrate or hang him. There were days when he cried with frustration, days when blood flowed but no referees whistles blew, days when so-called friends laughed at his pain.
But before any of this, before Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. even came into this world, there was Short 26th. His story begins in a little shotgun house on a dead-end street on the other side of the tracks.
His parents, Perry Wallace Sr. and Hattie Haynes Wallace, had come to Nashville from rural Rutherford County, Tennessee, not long after their marriage in 1928. Perry Sr. moved to Nashville first, to furnish and decorate the three-room house on Short 26th before his wife arrived. The Wallaces, both twenty-two years old, were eager to enjoy the benefits of city life. The South remained overwhelmingly rural, with only three out of ten people living in cities, but the migration had begun, and while many blacks headed hundreds of miles north to places like Chicago and Detroit, others, like the Wallaces, made the shorter journey to nearby southern cities.
Perry Sr. was just eleven years old when his mother died in childbirth, and his father, Alford Wallace, raised twelve children with a tough-love attitude, and the help of his sisters, on a farm near Murfreesboro, about thirty-five miles southeast of Nashville. It was a typical farm in many ways, full of fruit orchards, corn, cotton, hogs, and chickens; and there was a rock formation that seemed like a vast canyon to the kids, who would run through it barefoot. But the farm was unusual in one important way-Alford, a black man whose father had fought with the US Colored Troops in the Civil War, owned it. Perry Wallace Jr. wouldn t be the first pioneer in his family.
Hattie Haynes grew up close to Perry Sr. in the Blackman community near Murfreesboro. As children they played together, went to church together, and walked together across an old wood-and-rope bridge on the way to the one-room schoolhouse they attended through eighth grade. Hattie s teachers considered her the smartest student in the school, and they often let her do lessons on the chalkboard as an example to the others. Most of all she loved music: a traveling salesman had come through her parents neighborhood selling affordable organs, and Hattie s father bought one for her mother.
Hattie learned how to play, and from then on the Haynes house was full of music, her young fingers flying through a fast melody she called Racing Horses.
Hattie was twenty years old when her mother died, and just two years later Perry Sr. came calling on her father to ask for Hattie s hand in marriage. They were married on April 1, 1928-their children would later joke about the April Fool s Day wedding-and soon they were on their way to Nashville, a bit apprehensive about the people and the pace of the city but excited about the opportunities. Two of Perry Sr. s older brothers were already there; Joe a