Affirmative Action’s End Will Underline Jim Crow Divide in College Sports
Today’s guest columnist is Victoria Jackson, a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State.
Half a century ago, the federal government mandated that colleges across the United States were legally obligated to “make affirmative efforts” to accommodate students whose educational opportunities “have been previously limited” and to “improve and expand” those opportunities so that members of the historically-discriminated-against group would have equal access, treatment and benefits.
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Those efforts to create civil rights compliance policies for schools 50 years ago were met with vociferous opposition from politicians, such as North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.
But Helms, and the administrators at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with whom he corresponded, failed. That historically-discriminated-against group now makes up 60% of the undergraduate student body at UNC, a heavy majority and more than their representation in the state.
No, this is not some alternative history; I am referencing Title IX and the civil rights effort to eradicate gender discrimination in education.
This form of affirmative action has been wildly successful at the University of North Carolina. The other—the effort to expand access for Black North Carolinians to the state’s flagship public university, which you might have been thinking about during that opening history lesson—never was. And recently, the U.S. Supreme Court said schools can’t try anymore anyway, by ending race-conscious admissions.
We like to talk about college sports serving as the “front porch” of the university. So, if we are really paying attention to what college sports are telling us about the nature of higher education after the end of affirmative action, we should be very concerned. This Supreme Court decision, which came down on June 29, will only bring the Jim Crow divide in college sports into sharper relief, imparting an important and tragic lesson about the failed effort to equalize Black access to higher education.
UNC, which was chartered in 1789, was the first public institution in the U.S. to open its doors in 1795. The exclusive flagship public university of the UNC system, considered among the most academically prestigious institutions in the country, is the pride of North Carolinians. This university is by the people and for the people of North Carolina; since 1986, at least 82% of admitted first-year students must be in-state residents.
Of course, UNC is in the South, which means it was an all-white school for 161 years. It was built by slave labor and occupied by Union troops during the Civil War. It erected a monument to Confederate soldiers during the height of Jim Crow terror and named the football stadium for a paramilitary captain of the Wilmington Massacre. (UNC was an all-male school for over a century, just to share a reminder that fully opening up the school to historically barred groups is possible.)
Like with other southern state flagships, North Carolinians also take incredible pride in Tar Heel sports. And, like other formerly all-white institutions, Carolina athletics has played an outsized role in efforts to desegregate the university by race.
About a decade after Black undergraduate students broke the color barrier, Charlie Scott and Ricky Lanier became the first Black scholarship athletes in basketball and football, in 1966 and 1967. By the 1970s, successful firsts led to expanded opportunities and the affirmative recruitment of more promising young Black athletes. Elsewhere in the university, Black students admitted under the school’s affirmative action efforts excelled in the classroom just as their athlete peers did on playing fields and courts.
However, administrators resisted the lesson. Instead of significantly expanding the affirmative action program, the school kept the number of students low. Additionally, the language employed to describe two categories of admission shows the school’s reluctance to admit Black students. Athletes of all races who were noncompetitive compared to the pool of student applicants and academically ineligible per the Trustees’ baseline admissions standards (and about half of whom were white) were granted admission for a “special aptitude or talent.” Black students who were not athletes but were academically eligible were admitted under the “high-risk probationary admissions program.”
To this day, those special talent slots remain for UNC athletes. A rolling average of 160 slots are available each year and distributed across 28 sports teams.
This history shows how UNC has valued Black athletes more than Black students. And it’s not alone; in the Power Five conferences, about 55% of football and men’s basketball players are Black, and 48% of women’s basketball players are Black. The Black population in California is about 6.5%, but at Cal Berkeley, African American students only make up about 3% of the undergraduate student body. In Michigan, Black residents make up 14% of the state but only 5% of the flagship in Ann Arbor.
Both the California and Michigan higher education systems were forced years ago to stop their affirmative action policies, and, despite pouring resources and creativity into the effort, have struggled to equitably serve the Black people of their states.
But other states with exclusive flagship universities that maintained race-conscious admissions until the Supreme Court’s opinion in June have never equitably served Black residents. In North Carolina, Black people make up 22% of the population but represent only about 9% of the undergraduate student body in Chapel Hill. According to The Hechinger Report, 13 flagship state universities have a gap of greater than 10% between the percentage of Black students who graduated from public high schools in the state and Black undergraduate enrollment.
The effort to desegregate by gender has reached and continues to influence all parts of higher education; white women have benefitted most from Title IX’s affirmative action. However, the effort to desegregate by race has largely stayed within the confines of athletics. That means, because residential racial segregation persists and K-12 education in much of the country largely remains separate and unequal, if you are Black, the best way of increasing your chances of gaining access to the premier institutions of this country is through playing a sport. You have to give something to get something; you have to provide entertainment for the other students who enjoy the privilege of going to class, working toward degrees and planning for careers. You have to play in the revenue-producing sports of football and basketball in order to subsidize other college sports with rosters filled with majority white athletes, such as swimming, crew, water polo and field hockey.
Most other beneficiaries of affirmative action—legacies, country club sport athletes, children of faculty—see their special status as a righteous entitlement. After decades in which the exclusive universities of our nation were required but never fully opened their doors to Black citizens, the Supreme Court has slammed that door shut.
Victoria Jackson is a sports historian and clinical associate professor at Arizona State University. She is a former NCAA champion and retired professional track and field athlete.
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