Inventing Custer: The Making of an American Legend by Edward Caudill and Paul Ashdown (review)

Abstract

men who navigated often hostile terrain to find athletic and academic success. An important claim Jacobus makes is that, despite differences in racial tensions from one city to the next, common themes often reverberated as African Americans negotiated a nuanced Jim Crow system designed to keep African Americans in an inferior status. Jacobus also argues that resistance to desegregation could be explained by the demographics and geography of a particular desegregating town. According to Jacobus, for cities where African American populations were smaller in size, the process of desegregation was easier than in spaces where the numbers of black residents were large enough to rival their white counterparts. Jacobus also claims that proximity to the former Confederacy helped to determine resistance to desegregation. The result was that spaces like Dallas, Houston, and East Texas were slower to desegregate while spaces like Corpus Christi and San Antonio desegregated relatively early. One of the reasons Jacobus’s text is valuable is that it analyzes the reasons why black players elected to stay at black high schools or colleges and why they chose to enter desegregated spaces. Jacobus probes black former student athletes who traveled outside the South to play college football. He reveals that close ties, academic resources, and the presence of other black students helped to provide black student athletes with enough incentive to persist, matriculate, and ultimately graduate from white colleges located outside the South. Jacobus’s book is an excellent addition to the study of school desegregation and the desegregation of sports institutions. This is a text for both fans and scholars of sport history. It uses firstperson accounts to explain how players— black, white, and Latino, along with their coaches— negotiated this complex set of social, political, and athletic issues related to desegregation in the post– Brown v. Board of Education era to achieve athletic and academic success.