To Live and Play in Dixie: Pro Football's Entry into the Jim Crow South by Robert D. Jacobus
To Live and Play in Dixie: Pro Football's Entry into the Jim Crow South by Robert D. Jacobus
While the story of the reintegration of professional football in 1946 after World War II is a topic that has been widely covered, there is a little-known aspect of this integration that has not been fully explored. To Live and Play in Dixie tells the story of this part of U.S. history. After World War II and up until the mid-to-late 1960s, professional football teams scheduled numerous pre-season games in the South. Once African American players started dotting the rosters of these teams, they faced Jim Crow conditions. Author Robert D. Jacobus tells how black players were barred from playing in some cities and how most encountered segregated accommodations when they stayed in the South, as well as how African American spectators were relegated to segregated seating areas when they came to see their favorite black players perform.
To Live and Play in Dixie includes information on professional football's move to start placing franchises in still-segregated cities as early as 1947. Now, instead of just visiting a Southern city for a day or so to play an exhibition game, African American players had to live in these segregated cities, with many of them hailing from the North or the West Coast, with no prior exposure to de jure or even de facto Jim Crow laws. If they didn't "toe the line" or fought back, they were traded, cut, and even blackballed from the league. Eventually, however, as the civil rights movement gained steam in the 1950s and 1960s, African American players were able to protest the conditions with success.
Prometheus Books, Hardcover, 2021
THIS IS A BRAND NEW BOOK.