Now in an updated edition, the story of the first African American basketball player in the SEC, set in the civil rights conflicts of the tumultuous Sixties

New York Times Best Seller
2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition
2015 Lillian Smith Book Award
2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title

WhenStrong 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 tenth-anniversary 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 adds a concluding chapter filling readers in on how events unfolded betweenStrong Inside’s publication in 2014 and Perry Wallace’s death in 2017 and exploring Wallace’s continuing legacy.

Wallace entered kindergarten the year thatBrown 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.

List of Illustrations 
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