This book focuses on the massive student protest at New York University (NYU) in 1940–41 against the administration's refusal to allow the football team's African American star, Leonard Bates, to accompany it to play at the University of Missouri, which did not admit Blacks. It was standard practice for northern universities to withdraw their Black athletes from competitions at southern schools. If the southern school requested the withdrawal when they were the visiting team up north, their northern opponent often complied. In this case study, Donald Spivey provides insight into racist practices in college sports and how a student movement challenged them in the period and emerged as a potent force.
Spivey's interviews with Bates, conducted in the 1980s, and later with six members of the “Bates 7,” the NYU students who initiated the challenge to the administration's decision to comply with southern/border state Jim Crow requirements, are an important...
