Derrick White to Speak on Foundations of Black College Football

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AMHERST, Mass. — Author and historian Derrick E. White, visiting associate professor of African and African American studies at Dartmouth College, will speak on “Sporting Congregations: The Foundation of Black College Football” on Monday, Oct. 22 at 5 p.m. in the University of Massachusetts Amherst Commonwealth Honors College (CHC) Events Hall, 157 Commonwealth Ave.

The talk, which is sponsored by CHC and the Mark H. McCormack Department of Sport Management, is free and open to the public.

White will discuss his work involving historically black colleges and universities’ (HBCUs) college football and athletics and their impact on black cultural and communal attraction.

White is a scholar of modern black history, sports history and intellectual history. He is the author of “The Challenge of Blackness: The Institute of the Black World and Political Activism in the 1970s” and co-editor of “Winning While Losing: Civil Rights, the Conservative Movement, and the Presidency from Nixon to Obama.”

His forthcoming book, “Blood, Sweat, and Tears: Jake Gaither, Florida A&M University, and the Golden Age of Black College Football,” is scheduled for release in the fall of 2019. “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” will be the first scholarly analysis of the development, dominance and decline of college football at HBCUs. 

Born and raised in Lexington, Kentucky, White earned his doctorate in history from The Ohio State University. He was a dissertation fellow at the University of California-Santa Barbara black studies department and was awarded the inaugural Julian Pleasants Visiting Scholar Grant at the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program at the University of Florida.