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African American athletes have experienced a tumultuous relationship with mainstream white America. Glory Bound brings together for the first time eleven essays that explore this complex topic. In his writings, well-known sports scholar David K. Wiggins recounts the struggle of black athletes to participate fully in sports while maintaining their own cultural identity and pride. Wiggins examines the seminal moments that defined and changed the black athlete's role in white America from the nineteenth century to the present: the personal crusade of Wendell Smith to promote black participation in organized baseball, the triumph of Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics and the proposed boycott of the Games, and the response of America's black press and community. Glory Bound demonstrates how the civil rights movement changed the face of American athletics and society forever. With the genesis of the black power movement in sport, Wiggins notes a significant shift in black—and white—America's attention to the African American athlete.
The autobiography of Lou "The Toe" Groza, who played for the Cleveland Browns longer than anyone (1946-1967), vividly recalls a golden age of pro football. Filled with great personal anecdotes about fellow Browns legends like Jim Brown, Paul Brown, and Otto Graham. Groza was a gentleman in a rough game; he tells his story with warmth and humor.
An encyclopedia of Tennessee genealogy, Acklen's "Bible Records and Marriage Bonds" is one of the foremost Tennessee source-books in print. It consists almost entirely of records of births, marriages, and deaths, plus marriage licenses of Dickson, Knox, Lebanon, and Wilson counties. Sections devoted exclusively to marriages generally run chronologically, giving exact dates and full names of brides and grooms. The bible records, however, offer the most substantial evidence of family connections and, in the manner of such records, are actually organic family records listing names and dates of birth, marriage, and death through several generations, depending, of course, on the extent to which a particular bible was handed on in the family and kept up to date. The work is complemented by a surname index of nearly 15,000 entries.
Bill Russell was not the first African American to play professional basketball, but he was its first black superstar. From the moment he stepped onto the court of the Boston Garden in 1956, Russell began to transform the sport in a fundamental way, making him, more than any of his contemporaries, the Jackie Robinson of basketball. In King of the Court, Aram Goudsouzian provides a vivid and engrossing chronicle of the life and career of this brilliant champion and courageous racial pioneer. Russell’s leaping, wide-ranging defense altered the game’s texture. His teams provided models of racial integration in the 1950s and 1960s, and, in 1966, he became the first black coach of any major professional team sport. Yet, like no athlete before him, Russell challenged the politics of sport. Instead of displaying appreciative deference, he decried racist institutions, embraced his African roots, and challenged the nonviolent tenets of the civil rights movement. This beautifully written book—sophisticated, nuanced, and insightful—reveals a singular individual who expressed the dreams of Martin Luther King Jr. while echoing the warnings of Malcolm X.
"From the earliest records relating to Virginia, we learn the basics about many of these original colonists: their origins, the names of the ships they sailed on, the names of the "hundreds" and "plantations" they inhabited, the names of their spouses and children, their occupations and their position in the colony, their relationships with fellow colonists and Indian neighbors, their living conditions as far as can be ascertained from documentary sources, their ownership of land, the dates and circumstances of their death, and a host of fascinating, sometimes incidental details about their personal lives, all gathered together in the handy format of a biographical dictionary" -- publisher website (January 2008).