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

Awards:   Winner of Lillian Smith Book Awards (Fiction) 2015
Author:   Andrew Maraniss
Publisher:   Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN:  

9780826520234


Pages:   472
Publication Date:   30 December 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Our Price $52.67 Quantity:  
Add to Cart

Share |

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


Add your own review!

Awards

  • Winner of Lillian Smith Book Awards (Fiction) 2015

Overview

"This fast-paced, richly detailed biography, based on more than eighty interviews, 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 twelve-year- old, he snuck 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."

Full Product Details

Author:   Andrew Maraniss
Publisher:   Vanderbilt University Press
Imprint:   Vanderbilt University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 17.80cm , Height: 3.60cm , Length: 25.40cm
Weight:   1.200kg
ISBN:  

9780826520234


ISBN 10:   0826520235
Pages:   472
Publication Date:   30 December 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In stock   Availability explained
We have confirmation that this item is in stock with the supplier. It will be ordered in for you and dispatched immediately.

Table of Contents

Reviews

I covered basketball during the years Perry Wallace was at Vanderbilt, learning firsthand the stories of so many African American athletes. Many of them were pioneers in one respect or another, but none whom I ever spoke with endured such an experience as did Wallace--as related so thoughtfully and comprehensively in this sensitive biography by Andrew Maraniss. Arthur Ashe entitled his history of the black athlete A Hard Road To Glory . No road could have been harder than Perry Wallace's, no glory more satisfying. --Frank Deford, NPR, HBO, and Sports Illustrated contributor


.. .powerfully told... -- New York Times


What Perry Wallace accomplished in breaking the color line in the Southeastern Conference has been one of the great untold stories of the last 50 years. Now, thanks to Andrew Maraniss and Professor Wallace, it has become one of the great TOLD stories of the last 50 years with this unforgettable book. --John Feinstein, author of Foul Trouble and Where Nobody Knows Your Name


Author Information

Formerly the associate director of media relations at the Vanderbilt athletic department and the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays, Andrew Maraniss is now a partner at McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations. Andrew, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, attended Vanderbilt on the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice sportswriting scholarship. As a sophomore, he first interviewed Wallace in 1989 for a black history class.

Tab Content 6

Author Website:  

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

No review item found!

Add your own review!

Countries Available

All regions
Latest Reading Guide

ls

Shopping Cart
Your cart is empty
Shopping cart
Mailing List