Author to Give Historical Perspective on Race in College Athletics in Public Talk Monday

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Andrew Maraniss

Author Andrew Maraniss will talk about the challenges, including racial epithets and death threats, faced by the first black basketball player in the Southeastern Conference when Maraniss visits the University of Arkansas on Monday, Feb. 6.

The talk by Maraniss is scheduled for 7 p.m. in Room 103 of the HPER Building. It is free and open to the public. Members of the public should enter from Meadow Street, through Door 1, adjacent to UREC Outdoors.

Books will be available for purchase, and Maraniss will sign them.

Steve Dittmore, associate professor of recreation and sport management, uses the story of Perry Wallace, who played basketball for Vanderbilt after enrolling in 1966, as a case study in a unit on integration of college athletics. Maraniss published his book detailing Wallace's experiences, Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South, in 2014, and it became a New York Times best-seller.

Dittmore's students will attend the talk.

"I hope students will gain a perspective of the struggle African-Americans had as colleges came to terms with integration, both in the student body and athletics," Dittmore said. "It is relevant to students interested in working in college athletics because as Shaun Harper at the University of Pennsylvania noted in a study of racial inequities 2.5 percent of undergraduate students in his sample were black men while 56.3 percent of football teams and 60.8 percent of men's basketball teams were made up of black students."

Maraniss described the mental toll the harassment and ostracism took on Wallace, who went on to earn a degree in engineering and then a law degree from Columbia University. Wallace is a professor of law at Washington College of Law. Several colleges recruited the Nashville native before he chose Vanderbilt.

The author wrote in a blog post that he wanted to be sure the book appealed to both historians and sports fans. It received two major civil rights book awards and was the all-freshman read at Vanderbilt. Both the SEC Network and National Public Radio, among other media sources, interviewed Maraniss and Wallace.