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."
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(1)
