To Map a Hidden World: African American and Jewish Cooperation During the Age of Jim Crow -- Research Trip for a Forthcoming Book

Grant:

Lecturers' Professional Development Fund (LPDF)

Academic Year:

2013 - 2014 (June 1, 2013 through May 31, 2014)

Funding Requested:

$2,000.00

Project Dates:

Sat, 02/01/2014 - Sat, 05/31/2014

Applicant(s):

scottell

Overview of the Project:

For more than a decade I have been researching and writing a new book on forgotten precursors to the Civil Rights Movement in the American South, specifically on an illegal, racially integrated, precedent shattering—and previously unknown—college basketball game that took place in North Carolina in 1944. My book, titled The Secret Game, will be published by Little, Brown next year. Unearthing this story has required extensive and wide-ranging historical research, including site visits to more than a dozen different states, and scores of oral history interviews with elderly African American and white Southerners. This summer, however, I made a surprising discovery, one which has prompted this grant proposal.

continued in Project Objectives...

Final Report Fields

Project Objectives:

Project Overview continued

Specifically, I discovered that the road to the game was paved by two Jewish refugees, an artist named Marianne Bernhard, and a Professor of Philosophy named Ernst Manasse, who escaped Nazi Germany and landed at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham. In the months just prior to the game, they hosted secret interracial gatherings at their house—until the local Ku Klux Klan threatened to burn down their home. Bernhard and Manasse have now emerged as significant characters in The Secret Game, and in order to tell their story fully, I need to make a one week to ten day research trip to Germany and Italy, specifically to view materials housed in the archives of the University of Heidelberg, in museums in Berlin, and at the former home of the Landschulheim Firenze, a German Jewish refugee school outside of Florence.

Project Objectives

My CRLT Grant helped me to complete research on African American and Jewish cooperation on civil rights matters in Jim Crow North Carolina during the late 1930s and early 1940s, as part of a larger book project.

Project Achievements:

My book, which included the above mentioned research, was published by Little, Brown and Company in March 2015. Titled "The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph," the book chronicles both the story of a clandestine, racially integrated college basketball game that took place in Durham, North Carolina in 1944, as well as profiling forgotten wartime precursors to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. "The Secret Game" won a 2016 PEN Book Award, and was named by the Chicago Tribune as one of the Top Ten Books of 2015. It was also, for a time, the best selling African American History Book on Amazon. I've also discussed the book on a number of television and radio programs, and "The Secret Game" has received favorable reviews in daily newspapers and magazines across the U.S. The book, and the research undergirding it, has very much been impacted by my classroom experiences here at UM. My students have taught me a great deal about how to discuss scholarly matters with a more general audience, and I employed what they taught me writing the book. And come this F2016 semester, I will be teaching "The Secret Game" for the first time in one of my classes. This, of course, bodes be a learning experience as well.

Continuation:

"The Secret Game" came out in paperback in March 2016. I have also maintained an energetic speaking schedule about the book, and the issues it raises, for the past year and a half. Since February 2015, I have given public lectures about the book more than a dozen times in North Carolina, a half dozen times in Michigan, twice in Texas, once in Florida, Montana, and Oregon, and once in New York, where I delivered the 2016 Harold Seymour Lecture in Sports History at Cornell University. At present, I have an additional seven lectures about "The Secret Game" scheduled during the next seven months, five in North Carolina, two in Michigan, and one in Florida. The motion picture rights for "The Secret Game" have also been optioned, and a screenplay in currently being written.

Dissemination:

My book itself, of course, has been the primary vehicle through which my work--including that portion which I applied to CRLT for a grant for--has been disseminated to my colleagues. On an informal basis, I've also shared research techniques with UM colleagues, as well as with students and staff here in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies.

PRINTER VERSION

SEND BY EMAIL