Guest Lecture Patrick B. Miller (Northeastern Illinois University Chicago)
Over the years, black activists have largely been responsible for altering the discourse on democracy in the United States. And because they often invoked "fair play" and "sportsmanship" as guiding ideals, it stood to reason that the realm of athletics would stand out in the their attempts to transform prevailing sentiments and customs, rules and regulations. Tellingly, the 1930s marked a turning point in the history of race relations, not only because African American crusaders enlisted athletes in their battle for racial justice. It was also during the New Deal era that a "new expediency" began to characterize the attitudes and actions of some white sports officials, who for the first time since the origins of Jim Crow, began to make small compromises on the issue of racial separation. African American athletes began to gain ‘headline space’ during the Olympic Games even as they showcase their skills on the football teams of historically white colleges . . . and then in the aftermath of the Second World War, by winning positions in the “national pastime”: the Jackie Robinson moment. This paper explores those early effort with respect to the Long Civil Rights Movement, accentuating the playing fields and the sports pages as significant sites of racial reform.
Patrick B. Miller is a professor of history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and presently the 2016-2017 Fulbright Bicentennial Distinguished Chair in American Studies at the University of Helsinki. His main fields of interest are 19th- and 20th-century American history, African American history and race relations, and civil rights from a comparative perspective. He has published widely in these areas, including the monograph The Playing Fields of American Culture: Athletics and Higher Education, 1850-1945 (Oxford University Press) and the edited volumes Sport and the Color Line: Black Athletes and Race Relations in Twentieth-Century America (Routledge), The Unlevel Playing Field: A Dcoumentary History of the African American Experience in Sport (University of Illinois Press), and The Sporting World of the Modern South (University of Illinois Press).
The event is free and open to the public.
This lecture is organized by the Department of American Studies and sponsored by Fulbright Austria and the Office of International Relations, University of Graz.
Department of American Studies Graz
Institut für Amerikanistik
Attemsgasse 25/II
A-8010 Graz
Tel. +43/316/380-2465
amerikanistik(at)uni-graz.at