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

Strong Inside

STRONG INSIDE

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

ANDREW MARANISS

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
NASHVILLE

2014 by Andrew Maraniss

All rights reserved

Published by Vanderbilt University Press

Nashville, Tennessee 37235

First printing 2014

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file

ISBN 978-0-8265-2023-4 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-8265-2025-8 (ebook)

For Alison, Eliza, and Charlie, my home-court advantage, and for my parents, David and Linda

List of Illustrations

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer.

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

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, Warrens mind raced back to the 1970s, before he became a preacherwhen he was a professional basketball playera crewcut 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 daysin hotels, buses, cabs, restaurants, flights, and conversations with his many black teammates, in becoming familiar with their perspective on the worldthat 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.

Warrens 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.

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 universitys 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 wayAlford, a black man whose father had fought with the US Colored Troops in the Civil War, owned it. Perry Wallace Jr. wouldnt 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. Hatties 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 Hatties 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 Hatties hand in marriage. They were married on April 1, 1928their children would later joke about the April Fools Day weddingand 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 timeand 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, Nashvilles 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. Shermans march on Atlanta. More than fifty thousand Federal troops occupied the city from 1862 to 1865 (more than three times the size of the citys 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 treesneeded for firewoodthey 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.