Coaching and community during Jim Crow: A history of the golden era of the CIAA

Formed in 1912, the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA) was the first of its kind, and therefore an important part of a larger story. That story, a narrative of athletics and the institutions, relationships and possibilities that it can establish and reveal, is one worth telling. The tale of how athletics unfolded in countless communities and across different time periods in American history is particularly illuminating in the context of African American history. As a growing body of scholarship continues to demonstrate, athletics was an integral part of African American communities in the segregated South, and a crucial chapter in the African American higher education of the period. The CIAA reveals a great deal about the complicated history of how athletic teams at black colleges served to provide a social and cultural focal point for the local African American communities in which they competed. Black college teams were valuable tools in the larger construction and liberation project that defined African American higher education.;The central thesis argued here is that team and individual sports became a vital tool in black institution-building, education, and the quest for equality. My goal in this dissertation is to place sport in the African American South during the age of segregation by focusing on coaching figures in the development of the CIAA. To accomplish my goal, this dissertation presents a history of the CIAA through the lens of four protean figures: Clarence E. "Big House" Gaines (1923--2004), John B. McLendon, Jr., (1915--1999), LeRoy T. Walker (born 1918), and Russell E. Blunt (1908--2004). Each of these outstanding coaches embodies an aspect of sport in the African American community during the Jim Crow era that merits description and analysis. Oral histories, autobiographies, personal records and memories of associates are indispensable sources for telling their life stories.;The lives of these remarkable coaches provide a valuable insight into the significant impact that the organized athletic competitions of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) had on their students and their communities. Indeed, once the CIAA had been operating for a generation, it began producing its own coaches and creating its own networks. Its infrastructure produced a Golden Era of athletic achievement from the 1940s until the crumbling of segregation in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the civil rights movement. Drawing on a diverse set of HBCU archival records and recently collected first person accounts, an examination of the CIAA can yield fresh insights into a broad range of issues, including African American education, the transmission of core values and traditions, resistance and accommodation to Jim Crow, and the assertion of black identity. After all, the CIAA as an institution functioned both to shape and reflect the values of its communities. The implications of this dissertation are far-ranging, helping to answer questions in the fields of sport history, southern and African American history, especially on human agency and the role of athletic institutions in developing and sustaining community.