Black Americans in the Jim Crow South could not escape the grim reality of racial segregation, whether enforced by law or by custom. In Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides, author Derek Charles Catsam shows that courtrooms, classrooms, and cemeteries were not the only front lines in African Americans' prolonged struggle for basic civil rights. Buses, trains, and other modes of public transportation provided the perfect means for civil rights activists to protest the second-class citizenship of African Americans, bringing the reality of the violence of segregation into the consciousness of America and the world. In 1947, nearly a decade before the Supreme Court voided school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, sixteen black and white activists embarked on a four-state bus tour, called the Journey of Reconciliation, to challenge discrimination in busing and other forms of public transportation. Although the Journey drew little national attention, it set the stage for the more timely and influential 1961 Freedom Rides. After the Supreme Court's 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia that segregated public transportation violated the Interstate Commerce Act, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other civil rights groups organized the Freedom Rides to test the enforcement of the ruling in buses and bus terminals across the South. Their goal was simple: "to make bus desegregation," as a CORE press release put it, "a reality instead of merely an approved legal doctrine." Freedom's Main Line argues that the Freedom Rides, a turning point in the Civil Rights Movement, were a logical, natural evolution of such earlier efforts as the Journey of Reconciliation, their organizers following models provided by previous challenges to segregation and relying on the principles of nonviolence so common in the larger movement. The impact of the Freedom Rides, however, was unprecedented, fixing the issue of civil rights in the national consciousness. Later activists were often dubbed Freedom Riders even if they never set foot on a bus. With challenges to segregated transportation as his point of departure, Catsam chronicles black Americans' long journey toward increased civil rights. Freedom's Main Line tells the story of bold incursions into the heart of institutional discrimination, journeys undertaken by heroic individuals who forced racial injustice into the national and international spotlight and helped pave the way for the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides (Civil Rights and Struggle)

History

Catsam, Derek Charles

Americas

University Press of Kentucky

Forty years ago, a South African rugby tour in the United States became a crucial turning point for the nation's burgeoning protests against apartheid and a test of American foreign policy.In Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement, Derek Charles Catsam tells the fascinating story of the Springbok's 1981 US tour and its impact on the country's anti-apartheid struggle. The US lagged well behind the rest of the Western world when it came to addressing the vexing question of South Africa's racial policies, but the rugby tour changed all that. Those who had been a part of the country's tiny anti-apartheid struggle for decades used the visit from one of white South Africa's most cherished institutions to mobilize against both apartheid sport and the South African regime more broadly. Protestors met the South African team at airports, chanted outside their hotels, and courted arrests at matches, which ranged from the bizarre to the laughable, with organizers going to incredible lengths to keep their locations secret.In telling the story of how a sport little appreciated in the United States nonetheless became ground zero for the nation's growing anti-apartheid movement, Flashpoint serves as a poignant reminder that sports and politics have always been closely intertwined.

Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

A significant examination of how athletes have fought for inclusion and equality on and off the playing field, despite calls for them to “stick to sports.” 
The claim that sports are—or ought to be—apolitical has itself never been an apolitical position. Rather, it is a veiled attempt to control which politics are acceptable in the athletic realm, a designation intricately linked to issues of race, gender, ethnicity, and more. 
In Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s Fight against Injustice, Derek Charles Catsam carefully explores this disparity. He looks at how, throughout recent sports history in the United States, minority athletes have had to fight every step of the way for their right to compete, and how they continue to fight for equity today. From African Americans and women to LGBTQ+ and religious minorities, Catsam shows how these athletes have taken a stand to address the underlying injustices in sports and society despite being told it’s not their place to do so. 
While it’s impossible for a single book to tell the entire history of exclusion in the sporting world, Don’t Stick to Sports looks at key moments from the World War I era to the present to shatter the myth of sports as a meritocracy, of sports-as-equalizer, highlighting the reality as something far more complicated—of sports as a malleable world where exclusion and inclusion are rarely straight-forward.

Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s Fight against Injustice

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Catsam, Derek Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Catsam, Derek Charles

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Catsam, Derek Charles. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides (Civil Rights and Struggle)

Flashpoint: How a Little-Known Sporting Event Fueled America's Anti-Apartheid Movement

Don't Stick to Sports: The American Athlete’s Fight against Injustice