Playing for Power: Black Resistance in Amateur Basketball and Football in Jim Crow Virginia

Описание: Join historian Marvin T. Chiles for a revealing look at the role of amateur Black football and basketball in Virginia before integration as a form of resistance to white supremacy.

In Playing for Power, Marvin T. Chiles offers a fascinating account of amateur sports in Jim Crow Virginia, revealing how, in addition to churches, workspaces, and civil rights organizations, sports were also a key arena for Black resistance to white supremacy. Chiles recounts the development of Black football and basketball culture at the high school and college levels in Virginia from the 1890s to the early 1970s. Looking beyond their role as leisure pastimes, Chiles demonstrates how amateur sports strengthened education, neutralized class divisions, shaped Black masculinity, mentored Black male leadership, cultivated race pride, and reflected Black desires for urban modernity. Playing for Power traces how amateur sports coalesced into a key cultural institution that fostered Black Virginians’ collective sense of community, achievement, and purpose during segregation, cornerstones of later advances in the Civil Rights Movement. Chiles’s groundbreaking work will interest historians, scholars, and individuals interested in the intersection of sports and civil rights and the history of Black sports during the Jim Crow era.

Dr. Marvin T. Chiles is associate professor of African American history at Old Dominion University. He is the author of The Struggle to Change: Race and the Politics of Reconciliation in Modern Richmond and Playing for Power: Black Resistance in Amateur Basketball and Football in Jim Crow Virginia. He serves on the editorial boards for the Journal of African American Studies and the Virginia Magazine of History & Biography and on the board of directors for the Virginia Forum.

The content and opinions expressed in these presentations are solely those of the speaker and not necessarily of the Virginia Museum of History & Culture.

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