Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South

by Andrew Maraniss

Overview

Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, 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 sneaked 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, Perry 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."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826520258
Publisher:	Vanderbilt University Press
Publication date:	12/01/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Sales rank:	335,285
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Formerly the associate director of media relations at the Vanderbilt athletic department and the first-ever media relations manager for the Tampa Bay Rays, Andrew Maraniss is now a partner at McNeely Pigott&Fox Public Relations. Andrew, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Maraniss, attended Vanderbilt on the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice sportswriting scholarship. As a sophomore, he first interviewed Wallace in 1989 for a black history class.

Read an Excerpt

Strong Inside

Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South

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By Andrew Maraniss

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2014 Andrew Maraniss
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8265-2025-8

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CHAPTER 1

Forgiveness

Bob Warren sat alone in the back of a taxi, bound for Massachusetts Avenue and the law school at American University, where he planned to deliver a message nearly forty years in the making.

As his cab sped through the streets of Washington, DC, far from his home in western Kentucky, Warren's mind raced back to the 1970s, before he became a preacher—when he was a professional basketball player—a crew-cut farm boy passing red, white, and blue basketballs to "Ice Man" Gervin in the freewheeling American Basketball Association, sharing locker rooms for nine seasons with Afro-coiffed men from places like Tennessee State, North Carolina A&T, and Jackson State University.

It was in those ABA days—in hotels, buses, cabs, restaurants, flights, and conversations with his many black teammates, in becoming familiar with their perspective on the world—that it dawned on Warren what hell one of his "brilliant and hardworking" teammates at Vanderbilt University, Perry Wallace, must have been going through in 1968, when Warren was a senior and Wallace, a sophomore, was the first and only African American ballplayer in the entire Southeastern Conference.

Warren's cab reached its destination, and the basketballer-turned-country-preacher made his way up to the fourth floor of the law school. Standing there to greet him was Professor Wallace; it was the first time these old teammates had seen each other in thirty-eight years.

"Forgive me, Perry," Warren said. "There is so much more I could have done."

CHAPTER 2

Short 26th

Long before the day Bob Warren came to visit, there was the day Perry Wallace was elected captain of the Vanderbilt basketball team, the day when he was voted as the university's most popular student. There was the day he graduated from Columbia Law School, the day he delivered a lecture on global warming entirely in French, the day when he represented the Federated States of Micronesia before the United Nations. There was the day he watched his jersey hoisted to the rafters at Memorial Gym.

But before any of that, there were days when dorm room doors were slammed in his face, accompanied by cries of "Nigger on the floor!" There were days when grown men dressed in maroon, or orange, or red, white, and blue, threatened to castrate or hang him. There were days when he cried with frustration, days when blood flowed but no referees' whistles blew, days when so-called friends laughed at his pain.

But before any of this, before Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. even came into this world, there was Short 26th. His story begins in a little shotgun house on a dead-end street on the other side of the tracks.

His parents, Perry Wallace Sr. and Hattie Haynes Wallace, had come to Nashville from rural Rutherford County, Tennessee, not long after their marriage in 1928. Perry Sr. moved to Nashville first, to furnish and decorate the three-room house on Short 26th before his wife arrived. The Wallaces, both twenty-two years old, were eager to enjoy the benefits of city life. The South remained overwhelmingly rural, with only three out of ten people living in cities, but the migration had begun, and while many blacks headed hundreds of miles north to places like Chicago and Detroit, others, like the Wallaces, made the shorter journey to nearby southern cities.

Perry Sr. was just eleven years old when his mother died in childbirth, and his father, Alford Wallace, raised twelve children with a tough-love attitude, and the help of his sisters, on a farm near Murfreesboro, about thirty-five miles southeast of Nashville. It was a typical farm in many ways, full of fruit orchards, corn, cotton, hogs, and chickens; and there was a rock formation that seemed like a vast canyon to the kids, who would run through it barefoot. But the farm was unusual in one important way—Alford, a black man whose father had fought with the US Colored Troops in the Civil War, owned it. Perry Wallace Jr. wouldn't be the first pioneer in his family.

Hattie Haynes grew up close to Perry Sr. in the Blackman community near Murfreesboro. As children they played together, went to church together, and walked together across an old wood-and-rope bridge on the way to the one-room schoolhouse they attended through eighth grade. Hattie's teachers considered her the smartest student in the school, and they often let her do lessons on the chalkboard as an example to the others. Most of all she loved music: a traveling salesman had come through her parents' neighborhood selling affordable organs, and Hattie's father bought one for her mother. Hattie learned how to play, and from then on the Haynes house was full of music, her young fingers flying through a fast melody she called "Racing Horses."

Hattie was twenty years old when her mother died, and just two years later Perry Sr. came calling on her father to ask for Hattie's hand in marriage. They were married on April 1, 1928—their children would later joke about the April Fool's Day wedding—and soon they were on their way to Nashville, a bit apprehensive about the people and the pace of the city but excited about the opportunities. Two of Perry Sr.'s older brothers were already there; Joe and James Wallace helped the young couple get settled. Perry took jobs at a granary, then a chemical company, then with the railroad, then as a bricklayer, while Hattie rode the bus to clean homes and offices. Perry and Hattie were doing the best they could; these were the standard jobs available to blacks in Nashville at the time—and for decades to come. As late as 1940, nearly 80 percent of working black women in the city were employed as domestic servants or waitresses.

The city where Perry and Hattie began their lives together had been settled after the Revolution, emerging as an important frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century. As the young nation entered an era of Manifest Destiny, Nashville served as a key launching point in the western expansion. Up until the time of the Civil War, most Nashvillians considered their town more western than southern. Located roughly halfway between Chicago and New Orleans, about as close to parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana as to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, Nashville's crossroads location made the city more open to new people and new ideas than its Deep South peers.

It also made the city a major railroad hub for the occupying Union army during the Civil War, an especially important depot for General William T. Sherman's march on Atlanta. More than fifty thousand Federal troops occupied the city from 1862 to 1865 (more than three times the size of the city's 1860 population), what one historian called "perhaps the first, continued occupation of a city by any American army." While those troops cleared the city of thousands of trees—needed for firewood—they did leave some things behind: namely themselves. Dozens of Union soldiers married southern belles and remained in Nashville after the war, and one Federal fort was converted into a "college for Negroes" in 1866: Fisk University, named for Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk.

Ten years later, the first medical school for blacks in the South, the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College of Nashville, was established. The school later became known as Meharry Medical College, and for generations afterward it produced most of the black doctors in the country. In 1912 another black college was founded in the city, Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, which later became known as Tennessee A&I State and then simply Tennessee State.

Clustered in what locals call North Nashville but what is more accurately the near-west side of the city, these three institutions gave Nashville a larger concentration of highly educated, upwardly mobile blacks than most cities in the South. Still, most blacks in Nashville lived in deep poverty, many in a near shantytown just yards from the state capitol building downtown.

The center of black life was near those universities, and one road—Jefferson Street—was the place where everything happened. In a segregated society, the Jefferson Street area was where Black Power flourished long before the slogan was invented. Living in the "black cocoon," as Perry Wallace would describe it decades later, meant patronizing black-owned businesses, entering the front doors of black movie theaters, eating in black restaurants. Inside the cocoon, poor as it was, there were no whites-only lunch counters or back-alley entrances. Rather, there were institutions like Isom's Beauty Shop, Frank White's Cleaners, Green's Grocery, and the Ritz Theater. The leading black entertainers of the mid-twentieth century, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole to Little Richard and Ella Fitzgerald, included Nashville on their itineraries, playing at the Silver Streak and the Del Morocco and staying at the Brown Hotel.

Perry Sr. and Hattie, the laborer and the cleaning lady, made a life in this cocoon. It was humble—this was Short 26th after all, just a stub of a road around the corner from Jefferson Street, not even the real 26th Avenue. Their house was small—living room, bedroom, kitchen, bedroom, porch—but soon enough it filled up with kids. First there was Annie, who became known simply as Sister, and then along came James, known as Brother, and Bessie, Jessie, and Ruby Jean.

While some neighbors succumbed to the temptations born of the marriage between a new urban existence and poverty—moonshine, gambling, and violence among them—Perry Sr. and Hattie lived a straight life, and they were determined, in the face of significant peer pressure, that their children would do the same. Of all the traditions and values in the Wallace home, the two most important were religion and education, and church life was especially important to Hattie. She was a regular at the Jefferson Street Church of Christ, a conservative congregation that forbade drinking, dancing, and instrumental music in the sanctuary.

The children went to Sunday School, read the Bible, and attended services with their mother. Mrs. Wallace brought the lessons of the church back to Short 26th, and the kids experienced what they would later call a "home-based" religion, a "vehicle for motivation and inspiration and healing when that was necessary," said Jessie. Much of that motivation and inspiration was directed at schooling. The Wallaces believed that a strong education was a necessary ingredient if their children were to succeed in a society that was not only becoming more urban and fast paced but also was engineered to restrict the opportunities for black people. The Wallace kids were smart, so smart that they encountered more than a little jealousy, more than a few strange looks from friends, neighbors, and other parents. Were those really French-, Spanish-, and German-language records you could hear Annie practicing with when you walked past the little shotgun house on Short 26th? What was that all about? That family is different.

On February 19, 1948, this straitlaced family of seven got quite a surprise: Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. was born at Meharry Hospital.

Can a birth really be that much of a surprise?

For some it was quite unexpected, given that the oldest Wallace child, Annie, was a sophomore in college and the youngest, Ruby Jean, had been born ten years earlier.

For Jessie, then thirteen, it was a real shock. She had had no idea that her mother, who wore billowing smocks around the house, was pregnant; when she heard her mother was in the hospital, she thought she must be dying. So traumatized by the thought, Jessie didn't ask anyone for days what was going on. Just then learning about menstruation in school, she thought about how this baby was made, and she was traumatized all over again. For Perry Sr. the birth of a healthy baby boy was no small pleasant surprise. Jessie's fear that her mother was dying was closer to the truth than she could have known. For Hattie, then forty-two years old, childbirth was life threatening. She was in the hospital for more than two weeks before Perry was born, and doctors discovered a tumor on her colon, which at the time they believed to be benign. Still, they took special precautions when Hattie gave birth to Perry. "Daddy was tickled to death," Jessie recalled, "because his wife had survived and he had gotten a little boy."

When mother and son were healthy enough to return home, Perry Sr. drove them back to Short 26th. As they rolled down Jefferson Street and neared the house, a train passed overhead on a railroad trestle. "Oh, son," Perry Sr. whispered to his infant boy, "before you could even get home you've gotten run over by a train." Jessie would later say that she believed her father's joke foretold "the trials and tribulations of life" that her baby brother would endure.

The girls gave little Perry baths, brushed his hair, and hauled him around everywhere, using the infant to draw the attention of boys at Hadley Park. The only time they let go of him was when Daddy came home from work. "Have to have my boy, have to have my boy," he would say, and then he wouldn't let his son out of sight all night, putting the "miracle baby" to sleep in a white bassinet at the foot of his and Hattie's bed.

Nearly as soon as one boy arrived in the house, the other left. Brother James, realizing that his parents would be struggling to put the girls through college while raising another child, enlisted in the air force as soon as he turned eighteen the November following Perry's birth. "He sacrificed for the family," Jessie recalled. "He was gone, and that was devastating."

As his sisters grew older and eventually all moved out of the house, Perry became even closer to his mother. He developed an uncommon sensitivity and was called a mama's boy; the love and values Hattie passed along to her son began to shape his behavior. In a world of chaos, much of it soon to be directed squarely at him, he would remain above the fray. Some observers would later remark on Perry's unflappable character when they saw him remain cool under pressure in places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Auburn, Alabama. They should have seen him in kindergarten.

Perry Wallace's education began in 1954, the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation decision, at a school for black children named Jewel's Academy. Every day Perry the kindergartner walked from Short 26th down Howard Street over to the complex of chapels and schoolrooms at the academy, a private school run by the Church of God and Christ. Along the way, he passed by a factory and railroad tracks and, most exotic to him, a retirement home and its constant parade of elderly people with canes, walking by "real slow."

Run by a female bishop known as Chief Jewel, whom Perry considered a "big, strong, charismatic woman," the school included a mandatory, midday chapel session. Whether it was the imposing figure of Chief Jewel or the lessons on respect he had learned from his parents, Perry was the most even-tempered kid in kindergarten. This didn't necessarily sit well with his sister Jessie, who occasionally picked up her little brother from school.

Jessie arrived at Perry's classroom one day, and the teacher, Miss Davis, was nowhere in sight. With free reign, the kids were going berserk, running around screaming, bouncing off walls and windows—total pandemonium. All but one kid, that is. As his classmates went bonkers, there at his tiny desk sat Perry Wallace, not saying a word, waiting patiently for his sister.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Strong Inside by Andrew Maraniss. Copyright © 2014 Andrew Maraniss. Excerpted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations, ix,
1 Forgiveness, 1,
2 Short 26th, 2,
3 Woomp Show, 17,
4 They Had the Wrong Guy, 39,
5 Harvard of the South, 49,
6 These Boys Never Faltered, 68,
7 Somewhere Like Xanadu, 87,
8 Reverse Migration, 106,
9 Growing Pains, 112,
10 Icicles in Raincoats, 122,
11 Articulate Messengers, 131,
12 A Hit or Miss Thing, 138,
13 Inferno, 159,
14 Subversion's Circuit Rider, 167,
15 Trouble in Paradise, 188,
16 Season of Loss, 200,
17 Ghosts, 215,
18 Memorial Magic, 222,
19 Deepest Sense of Dread, 245,
20 A Long, Hellish Trauma, 252,
21 Destiny of Dissent, 264,
22 Revolt, 285,
23 The Cruel Deception, 298,
24 Black Fists, 306,
25 Nevermore, 321,
26 Bachelor of Ugliness, 328,
27 Ticket Out of Town, 352,
28 Time and Space, 366,
29 Embrace, 392,
30 Rising, 415,
Acknowledgments, 419,
Notes, 423,
Bibliography, 449,
Index, 451,
Author Biography, 468,

Editorial Reviews

"In a magnificently reported, nuanced but raw account of basketball and racism in the South during the 1960s, Andrew Maraniss tells the story of Perry Wallace's struggle, loneliness, perseverance and eventual self-realization. A rare story about physical and intellectual courage that is both shocking and triumphant."
--Bob Woodward, Washington Post associate editor and author

"I covered basketball during the years Perry Wallace was at Vanderbilt, learning firsthand the stories of so many African American athletes. Many of them were pioneers in one respect or another, but none whom I ever spoke with endured such an experience as did Wallace--as related so thoughtfully and comprehensively in this sensitive biography by Andrew Maraniss. Arthur Ashe entitled his history of the black athlete A Hard Road To Glory. No road could have been harder than Perry Wallace's, no glory more satisfying."
--Frank Deford, NPR, HBO, and Sports Illustrated contributor

"Andrew Maraniss has written a gripping account of the tortured ordeal suffered by Perry Wallace, the celebrated college basketball star, who, in 1966, as a Vanderbilt Commodore, broke the color barrier in the Southeastern Conference. It is a story of a young black student's courage in the face of taunting abuse from hostile opposing fans--and the dissension that faced him on the Vanderbilt campus."
--John Seigenthaler, Founder, First Amendment Center

"Andrew Maraniss's father, David, once said, 'History writes people out of the story. It's our job to write them back in.' In the case of Perry Wallace, Andrew has done that superbly. He writes with equal ability of race and class, talent and ambition, and the possibilities and limits of each. I did not know Perry Wallace's story. Andrew has brought it to us, and we should be happy he did."
--Howard Bryant, author of The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron

"What Perry Wallace accomplished in breaking the color line in the Southeastern Conference has been one of the great untold stories of the last 50 years. Now, thanks to Andrew Maraniss and Professor Wallace, it has become one of the great TOLD stories of the last 50 years with this unforgettable book."
--John Feinstein, author of Foul Trouble and Where Nobody Knows Your Name

From the Publisher

11/15/2014
Playing for Vanderbilt University's Commodores in 1967–70, Perry Wallace broke the color barrier in Southeastern Conference basketball. In his debut book, media relations specialist and Vanderbilt graduate Maraniss tracks Wallace's years at the university, from his childhood in segregated Nashville to high school basketball champion and All-American and onward to his becoming a law professor. Maraniss's life-and-times treatment of the 6'5" front-court scorer, rebounder, and shot blocker weaves Wallace's daily disappointments and frustrations as a black athlete with the problems and controversies surrounding him on and off campus. The author spotlights media coverage and university politics as he mixes scores and highlights, sometimes moving play by play, with descriptions of the continually hostile environments of cramped gyms against conference and nonconference foes, the changing landscape of college basketball, the South as a region, and American sports in the 1960s. VERDICT With insight into the motivation and maturing of a African American man amid rabid hostility in the age of desegregation, Maraniss presents social and sports historians and interested readers with an engaging tour that exposes the challenges of change in the South and in college sports with the arrival of black athletes center stage in the white world.—Thomas J. Davis, Arizona State Univ., Tempe

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