“It's All About the U”

Abstract

Abstract Long before Colin Kaepernick kneeled and after Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists, University of Miami football players revolted against the white establishment and brought national attention to Black Miami. This analysis considers how “the U,” the first predominantly Black program outside of HBCUs challenged blue-blood programs in both a demographic sense and through a style of play antithetical to the political and cultural aims of the Reagan narrative. It broadens traditional understandings of the revolt of the Black athlete beyond the 1960s and 1970s and argues that, historically, Miami boosterism erased Black contributions to the city that the 1980s Black football players’ hypervisibility and hip-hop aesthetic confronted and exposed.