- Home
- Strong Inside
Strong Inside
Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South
Foreword by Derrick E. White and Louis Moore
2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition
2015 Lillian Smith Book Award
2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title
When Strong Inside was first published ten years ago, no one could have predicted the impact the book would have on Vanderbilt University, Nashville, and communities across the nation. What began as a biography of Perry Wallace—the first African American basketball player in the Southeastern Conference (SEC)—became a catalyst for meaningful change and reconciliation between Wallace and the city that had rejected him. In this new edition, scholars of race and sports Louis Moore and Derrick E. White provide a new foreword that places the story in the context of the study of sports and society, and author Andrew Maraniss provides a new concluding chapter filling readers in on how events unfolded between Strong Inside’s publication in 2014 and Perry Wallace’s death in 2017, as well as his continuing legacy.
Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended “separate but equal.” As a twelve-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville’s lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 19, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee’s first integrated state tournament—the same day Adolph Rupp’s all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-Black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game.
The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined.
Foreword
1. Forgiveness
2. Short 26th
3. Woomp Show
4. They Had the Wrong Guy
5. Harvard of the South
6. These Boys Never Faltered
7. Somewhere Like Xanadu
8. Reverse Migration
9. Growing Pains
10. Icicles in Raincoats
11. Articulate Messengers
12. A Hit or Miss Thing
13. Inferno
14. Subversion’s Circuit Rider
15. Trouble in Paradise
16. Season of Loss
17. Ghosts
18. Memorial Magic
19. Deepest Sense of Dread
20. A Long, Hellish Trauma
21. Destiny of Dissent
22. Revolt
23. The Cruel Deception
24. Black Fists
25. Nevermore
26. Bachelor of Ugliness
27. Ticket Out of Town
28. Time and Space
29. Embrace
30. Rising
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Author Biography
Andrew Maraniss is a New York Times bestselling author of sports nonfiction for adults, teens, and children. His first book, the bestseller Strong Inside, became the first sports-related book ever to receive the Lillian Smith Book Award for civil rights and the RFK Book Awards’ special recognition prize for social justice. His Young Readers adaptation of Strong Inside was named one of the Top Biographies for Youth by the American Library Association. Andrew’s second book, Games of Deception, tells the story of the first U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. It was a Sydney Taylor Book Award Honor recipient and a Junior Library Guild selection. His third book, Singled Out, is a biography of Glenn Burke, the first openly gay Major League Baseball player. Esquire magazine hailed it as one of the “top 100 baseball books ever written.” His fourth book, Inaugural Ballers, tells the story of the first U.S. women’s Olympic basketball team at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. It was named a “book of the year” by Kirkus and School Library Journal. In the spring of 2024, Andrew launches a series of early chapter books for young readers, Beyond the Game, featuring athletes who have done significant work for humanity outside of their sport. Andrew is Director of Special Projects at the Vanderbilt University Athletic Department and lives in Brentwood, Tenn., with his wife, Alison, and children, Eliza and Charlie. Follow Andrew online at andrewmaraniss.com.
Also of Interest
