Playing for Power: Black Resistance in Amateur Basketball and Football in Jim Crow Virginia (Modern South)

Black Resistance in Amateur Basketball and Football in Jim Crow Virginia by Marvin T. Chiles analyzes Black football and basketball culture at the high school and college levels in Virginia before the days of integration. Rather than studying amateur sports as merely leisure pastimes, Chiles argues that they coalesced into a key cultural institution that sustained Black Virginians’ collective sense of community, achievement, and purpose during segregation.