Join us on a literary world trip!
Add this book to bookshelf
Grey
Write a new comment Default profile 50px
Grey
Subscribe to read the full book or read the first pages for free!
All characters reduced
Strong Inside - Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South - cover

We are sorry! The publisher (or author) gave us the instruction to take down this book from our catalog. But please don't worry, you still have more than 500,000 other books you can enjoy!

Strong Inside - Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South

Andrew Maraniss

Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press

  • 0
  • 0
  • 0

Summary

New York Times Best Seller2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition2015 Lillian Smith Book Award2015 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."
Available since: 12/01/2014.

Other books that might interest you

  • Rise - In Defense of Judeo-Christian Values and Freedom - cover

    Rise - In Defense of...

    Brigitte Gabriel

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    "You never really own freedom, you only preserve it for the next generation."Issuing a bold wake-up call to America, New York Times best-selling author Brigitte Gabriel reveals the people, organizations, and forces at work to dismantle our Judeo-Christian values and freedoms, destabilize and threaten our national security, and radically redefine our very way of life. Gabriel regularly faces death threats from terrorists, condemnation from critics, and attacks from the "PC police," yet she refuses to back down.Rise will empower you by: Providing a plan for preserving your values and freedoms before it's too lateEducating you on how to identify behaviors and ideas that could threaten the local community and ultimately national securityMotivating you to unite with other patriots who wish to preserve our endangered Judeo-Christian values and freedomsHelping you understand what you can do to fight the forces that aim to undermine our nationThis book is critical to your family and your personal freedom. Will you sit back and watch the greatest country our world has ever known slowly fade away? Or will you rise?
    Show book
  • Lake - cover

    Lake

    Matthew Arnold

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Matthew Arnold was an English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools. Matthew Arnold has been characterised as a sage writer, a type of writer who chastises and instructs the reader on contemporary social issues.He is sometimes called the third great Victorian poet, along with Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning.This week's poem is the first part of Arnold's Lyric Poem 'Switzerland'. - Summary by Wikipedia
    Show book
  • Walking Through the Fire - My Fight for the Heart and Soul of America - cover

    Walking Through the Fire - My...

    Steve King

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Just two weeks after winning reelection to his ninth term in Congress, Steve King was stunned to learn the “Swamp” was poised to unleash a treacherous media blitzkrieg designed to kill his Congressional political career on the spot. The words “They believe they can force you to resign” still ring in his ears today. He knew Democrats and the media would pile on. Unfortunately, the threat was from within his party, and it was far more dangerous. The Republican establishment, RINOs, elitists, globalists, and NeverTrumpers needed him out of the way. This is the full story.
    Show book
  • The End of Roe v Wade - Inside the Right's Plan to Destroy Legal Abortion - cover

    The End of Roe v Wade - Inside...

    Robin Marty, Jessica Mason Pieklo

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    In the past decade, right-wing efforts to end legal abortion in the United States have reached a fever pitch, with anti-abortion legislation being introduced in several "red"—and even some "purple"—states. This war on abortion has had a chilling effect on women's reproductive health, making abortion accessible in name only in multiple parts of the country due to a lack of clinics, high cost, extensive waiting periods, and other issues. And if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is now quite possible with a conservative Supreme Court, half of the states in the US will likely make abortion completely illegal within their borders.The End of Roe v. Wade examines the systematic destruction of legal abortion on a state by state basis, as well as detailing the Trump administration's unprecedented efforts to end access to abortion and contraception on a federal level. This timely and urgent book also offers a harrowing glimpse into what a post-Roe America will look like, previewing the next major battle over abortion rights-pitting those who chose to end their pregnancies outside of the legal medical system against those who will prosecute them.
    Show book
  • Roar - The New Conservative Woman Speaks Out - cover

    Roar - The New Conservative...

    Scottie Nell Hughes

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    Are you sick and tired of watching your city, state and country spiral out of control and into the hands of liberals, whether Democrats or "Republicans in Name Only?" If so, you will be inspired to make a difference as you read the passionate battle cry of Scottie Nell Hughes.In the past, conservative women worked hard to nurture their homes, their churches and their communities, committing their time, talents and resources to the betterment of all concerned. Wherever there was a need, they worked together to meet it…and that was enough. Not anymore.Thanks to the ongoing efforts of the progressive media and the liberal political leadership, today's American political and social language has completely changed. Our God-given, constitutionally-protected rights are being threatened on multiple fronts. Our children are being taught ideas we would never want them exposed to. It's time to take a stand. It's time to ROAR!
    Show book
  • Cry from the Deep - The Sinking of the Kursk - cover

    Cry from the Deep - The Sinking...

    Ramsey Flynn

    • 0
    • 0
    • 0
    A “superb account” of the disastrous loss of a Russian submarine off the nation’s northern coast and its repercussions (Publishers Weekly). 
     
    On August 12, 2000, during one of the most important military demonstrations in post-Soviet history, an enormous explosion sank Russia’s most prized nuclear submarine, the Kursk. When Vladmir Putin’s men failed to rescue the 118 young submariners trapped under the icy Barents Sea and refused timely help from “foreigners” for four days, the Russian president assured his angry nation that all the men had died within minutes of the blasts. An earlier rescue would not have changed anything. 
     
    Two months later, recovery divers brought up the dead submarine’s first twelve bodies, one of which had a soggy note clinging to the burned remnants of his breast pocket. Addressed to his wife, it read: 
     
    There are twenty-three of us here . . . None of us can get to the surface. Let's hope someone will read this. Don’t despair. —Kolesnikov 
     
    The “Kolesnikov Note” became the cry from the depths of Russia’s tormented soul, as an anguished people confronted their government about what matters more—guarding secrets and pride or protecting human life. 
     
    What were Russian officials thinking when they waited forty-eight hours to acknowledge that their most treasured submarine was in trouble? Why did they track the desperate tapping noises that seemed to be coming from the sub without sending an international SOS? 
     
    For a world community still mystified by deadly Russian deceits surrounding the Kursk submarine disaster, Cry from the Deep solves the riddles once and for all. What emerges from Flynn’s exhaustive reporting is the definitive account of this pivotal moment in Russia’s rocky emergence into the community of free nations. 
     
    By turns thrilling, heart-wrenching, and absorbing, Cry from the Deep exposes the truths behind an event that riveted the world, devastated and enraged the Russian people, and ultimately defined a new era of Russian politics.
    Show book