The Color Line of Scrimmage and Sporting Congregations

2019 ◽  
pp. 16-39
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
College Football ◽  
Black College ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Color Line ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
White Institutions ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter examines the beginnings of college football at HBCUs from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. Black college football started as a separate institution distinct, yet similar, to the game played at predominately white institutions. This chapter uses Gaither’s early biography to examine how the pieces of the sporting congregation came together to support Black college football.

Championships and Civil Rights

2019 ◽  
pp. 101-146
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Black College ◽  
Board Of Education ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Racial Change ◽  
White Institutions

This chapter explores how Black college football and FAMU reckoned with the civil rights movement. Gaither preferred interracial cooperation rather than direct action as a means for racial change. The civil rights movement, beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, and including the bus boycotts of the mid-1950s and the sit-ins of the early 1960s, undermined Gaither’s reputation with activists. Gaither’s opposition to immediate desegregation not only was an attempt to hold on to his powerful football program but also showed an understanding of how integration would perpetuate athletic dominance by predominately white institutions. Gaither’s experiences with structural racism in building Bragg Stadium provided an alternative perspective to the civil rights movement.

Blood, Sweat, and Tears

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick E. White
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
College Football ◽  
Black College ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Central Character ◽  
Predominately White Institutions ◽  
Predominately White ◽  
Football Programs

Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M’s Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White’s sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

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