new public history touches on college football and student protest history
Routledge published my public history book this week on April 30.
Before I continue, know that I always write those two words “public history” with great caution.
I am not a public historian.
I am a historian. I say as much from the outset of my book, which is really a memoir about my life and how I became a college professor and how I came to teach the way I teach.
People who do public history sometimes say my work with students in and outside the classroom at the University of Alabama resonates against their work. The idea here is that my interest in the landscapes and historic sites around us are wonderful places to explore our shared past, something public historians themselves often know.
I have always been interested in getting my students outside the classroom. My effort to do so is partly tied to my training in dance. I know how happy hormones, or the endorphins, as well as fresh air, lift our spirits. For example, this video showcases some of my students learning about the nineteenth century urban history outside the classroom after earlier completing many assignments at home and inside a classroom building.
Delving into the spaces surrounding us while keeping our spirits uplifted is important during our present tough times.
Tough times.
Few can argue that we live in a strained world. As I watch student protests over the issues in Gaza, I see ties to some of the content in my book.
I have a chapter on sport history. Building on my earlier research on black Miami housing, I make linkages between UA’s football program under Paul “Bear” Bryant in the sixties and the University of Miami, my alma mater, circa 1980s. Doing so accomplishes several things. First, it allowed me to share how I have used UA’s Bryant-Denny Stadium and UA’s Paul W. Bryant Museum to delve into our complicated shared past.
I say “shared past” because we can all agree, no matter our politics, that our past is “shared.” No one just appeared on this planet. We descend from someone. We descend from plenty of people, in fact.
Here’s the thing: that past is complicated by how we come together and part amid lots of social conflict. I won’t say too much more as I address these matter in my book (You can order e-copies of single chapters as the book is pricey. Or please ask a library or museum you frequent to order it).
Essentially, I think it is important to find meaning in the arrival of Ray Bellamy, UM’s first African American player on scholarship, and Bellamy also being the first African American in the South to receive a football scholarship.
Moreover, it is also important to see the degree to which Bellamy eventually became UM’s first black SGA president following an injury. He is a significant historical figure not just because he played football. He did so while coming of age as a young man in a changing world. This Florida native came of age while students and other people were protesting on many fronts.
Indeed, he arrived at UM in 1967, the year I was born. When students led a sit-in in UM’s Ashe building, he was on campus. Also, he was at UM when Miami, my hometown, was on fire a year later. Some local African Americans protested ongoing unjust conditions in South Florida. We did so as some of us, including my parents, integrated white neighborhoods.
Not unlike many people protesting on and off college campuses today, everyday people — including young folks — spoke up about an array of issues. Bellamy himself later joined such people.
How does this relate to UA? Bellamy spoke up as a student campus leader around the time the legendary Alabama coach Bryant — who orchestrated Alabama’s historic early sixties’ wins at the moment UA was at last integrating its student body in 1963 — was integrating UA’s football program. Also important: Bryant was a mentor to Howard Schnellenberger the first UM coach to secure Miami’s first national championship in 1983 shortly before Bryant died.
Let all of that sink in.
It’s important to see the many moving parts to a very layered history.
To solely focus on Miami’s “swagger,” as many often do after the 2009 ESPN “30 for 30" documentary on the rise of UM football in the eighties, which tells in part the story of the team largely being energized by young black men from Florida initially under Schnellenberger without addressing larger histories, among those, one about a black student-athlete-turned-student leader being part of significant change in America — is to lose a precious opportunity to see the degree to which nothing happens in a vacuum.
Rising conservativism in this country since the Second World War, an apparent backlash to Civil Rights Movement and other social change, happened alongside student-athletes integrating college sport programs. Some did as much while the people overseeing their programs saw value in winning with very specific landscapes and people including black athletes and even non-student athletes in mind.
I was with a friend earlier this week who told me how Florida International University now has a building named for Harold Long Jr. and H.T. Smith, two African American men who attended UM when young people were making demands on UM administrators.
Smith was one of the honorees whose name appeared in more than a few stories I’d later write for The Miami Herald, my first employer after graduating from that school. Nadege Green, the friend in question and UM Global Black Studies program’s first fellow shared this important larger history about Smith and Long Jr. with students who appreciated hearing her words. She is truly a griot for black Miami Dade. In short, she tells stories that offers important context. I try to do the same.
In short, I know UM football history must be discussed alongside all kinds of histories involving African and white Americans, young and old. When some ask people nowadays ask “Where are student-athletes with this Gaza issue?” those same people should also be looking at past and present student-athletes historical significance on college campuses on and off the football field.
Another thought: UM football’s specific history must be discussed alongside UA’s football history. Certainly, Bryant understood the degree to which recruiting from one own’s backyard could energize a team as shared kinship matters, an idea that Miami’s coaches — beginning with Schnellenberger — also understood by the eighties. Other coaches do, too. Florida is a known state for talented ball players. In my ongoing black Miami housing research, I say as much. In fact, I make linkages between this reality and narratives involving black housing in Miami and the south at large.
But many historic sites and landscapes provide opportunities to discuss these intricate linkages. These are nuances that we flee because they’re not easily understood. During my students’ tour of Bryant Museum, they had a chance to complete a scavenger hunt while also seeing an exhibit about John Mitchel and Wilbur Jackson, Alabama’s first two African American players. Also, while visiting Bryant-Denny stadium, another class had a chance to run through the same tunnel now-retired head coach Nick Saban ran with a team filled with many athletes who did not look like him but found a way to trust him.
Being in such charged spaces pushes the possibilities for what we can learn about how complex our shared past and present is.
If we want to call that public history, so be it. I think I am just teaching. Whatever is happening, I am glad I have been able to do it to unflatten the stories that circulate without deep thought.
Unrelated but not entirely, two weeks ago, I oversaw UA’s participating in Slow Art Day, an annual international event asking people to slowly look at an object or work of art in museums, art galleries and elsewhere.
The impetus for this event held at UA was a tiny blue bead found on our campus. It dates back to the antebellum period. It is generally assumed to have belonged to an enslaved person who worked in a cooking area behind Gorgas House Museum, the oldest dwelling on UA’s campus. I discovered that indigenous people likely brought it to the South after receiving it in a trade in the Pacific northwest. The original owners of this bead were European. Our Slow Art Day event invited visitors to Gorgas House to make a blue bead bracelet and to see the blue bead.
We could have made blue bead bracelets anywhere on campus.
But doing so in a historic site dating back to 1829, added another layer to what could be learned about our very complicated past and present.
Postscript I wrote this story before leaving a hotel for Ft. Lauderdale’s airport. As I shared with my Lyft driver, an exceptionally open Afro-British brother, being open to studying the pot holes in our flattened storytelling is hard. Far too many want to cling to the old ways of describing power struggles. This is regrettable as we are truly living through some pivotal moments and some of these moments involve young people speaking up, no matter their politics.
But such speaking up is part of a larger pattern.
It takes time to slowly see the many layers and be attuned to both the similarities and particularities of various moments. To be clear, the brother himself said with great passion that what we are seeing today is without question huge.
We may ask “why?”
We may ask “why” while also staying open to revisiting or visiting the histories we’d rather bypass for many reasons.
We’re part of those histories.
The past we bypass is, indeed, “shared.”
