Integrating the gridiron: Civil rights and American college football, 1935--1970

This study seeks to unite a study of racial integration in collegiate athletics with the broader narrative of the Civil Rights Movement, specifically by investigating case studies that exemplify how reaction towards a game affected the mainstream discourse of race in America. It emphasizes the nebulous history of athletic integration by analyzing some of the largest conflicts over race and intercollegiate sport---episodes that drew national media attention and transcended the world of athletics. It also implores historians to shift their focus away from the biographies of professional African American sporting figures, arguing that collegiate integration was a movement of young athletes that more closely resembled the broader African American struggle for civil rights in the twentieth century. Because institutes of higher education embraced sport with such fervor, the study allows for unparalleled regional comparisons of popular racial discourses---most notably the acceptance and treatment of black student athletes by peers, coaches, fans, and television audiences.;By examining public reaction to black athletes at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1937-1942, the dissertation illuminates how critics and fans symbolically appropriated popular African American students on the West Coast---attempting to comprehend the liminality of college football within the established binary frameworks of "race figures," "color lines," and Jim-Crow segregation. The study then turns to a national scandal involving the physical assault of a popular black player at Oklahoma A&M College in 1951, using the incident to show how many in the Midwest used intercollegiate football to challenge and transform their perceptions of race. The dissertation next uncovers the racial politics of sport in the Deep South, exploring segregationists' attempts to ban African American players from nationally televised football games in Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana in the mid 1950s. Finally, the study focuses on a rash of racial protest that permeated college athletics in the late 1960s---especially agitation by black athletes at predominately white schools in the Mountain West. Not confining itself to a narrowly construed subfield of "sport history," the dissertation makes significant contributions to the broader historiography of race, media, and popular culture in modern America.