Race, Desegregation, and the Restructuring of Southern Football Recruiting Pipelines, 1954–1984

Jeremy Anderson, Emory University

Major college football rosters are often 50–70% Black, while Black men frequently make up less than 5% of the student body at the same institutions. Yet the historical origins of this contradiction remain unexamined in the sociology of sport. In this paper, I use Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a case study to argue that this demographic fixture is due to a restructuring of high school–to–college athletic labor pipelines that incrementally sorted Black players into majority-white schools during the desegregation era. This study links the integration of college football to broader transformations in schooling, segregation, and the construction of racialized athletic labor markets. Drawing on archival records of The Advocate (the most influential newspaper in Baton Rouge), regional Black press, school yearbooks, NCAA policy records, and originally compiled data on Louisiana high school football honors and college rosters, this paper reconstructs recruiting networks linking Louisiana high schools and colleges between 1954 and 1984. The time frame for this analysis will be bound by Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and the Oklahoma Board of Regents v. NCAA Supreme Court case (1984). This era captures two overlapping trends relevant to the research. First, the period between Brown (1954) and Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971) covers the Civil Rights Movement and resistance to desegregation in the United States and the subsequent white flight that transformed residential patterns in the 20th century. Secondly, as Black men became disproportionately overrepresented on college football rosters, this period captures the 1971 NCAA policy decision to raise GPA requirements and reduce scholarships to one-year renewable contracts. The period of 1954-1984 precedes the era of commercialization of college football in which an entrenched racialized division of labor undergirded a billion-dollar business that players, mostly Black, were unable to benefit from.

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 Presented in Session 186. Confronting the White Supremacist Origins of Current Processes