How Texas Changed Sport in America

How did sport become a national obsession in the United States during the 1960s and 70s? How was the growth of the sport industry during this period shaped by the Civil Rights and feminist movements? Dr. Guridy's lecture will tell the story of the decisive role of Texas-based sports entrepreneurs and athletes in the growth of big-time professional and college sports during this revolutionary era. His lecture will show how sport and society were changed by the unlikely alliance of entrepreneurs, coaches, and athletes while underscoring the limits of those transformations.

Biography

Frank Andre Guridy is an award-winning historian and a professor of History & African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. His recent book, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics was published by the University of Texas Press in 2021. His first book, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (University of North Carolina Press, 2010), won the Elsa Goveia Book Prize from the Association of Caribbean Historians and the Wesley-Logan Book Prize, conferred by the American Historical Association. He has written and lectured widely on sports and social justice. He has received a number of fellowships and awards throughout his career, including the Scholar in Residence Fellowship at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award from the University of Texas at Austin, the Ray A. Billington Professorship in American History at Occidental College and the Huntington Library, and the Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching at Columbia.

Assigned Reading

Frank Guridy, The Sports Revolution: How Texas Changed the Culture of American Athletics (University of Texas Press, 2021)