Marion Jackson’s Conflicted Sacrifice: The Atlanta Daily World’s Black Southern Sportswriter on the Tension between Integration and HBCU Sport

Abstract

From 1947 to 1973, a Black Southern sportswriter named Marion Jackson grappled with the role of all-Black sporting organizations during the age of desegregation. As sports editor for the Atlanta Daily World, the United States’ largest Black daily newspaper, Jackson covered various parallel institutions that provided sporting opportunities for Black athletes, such as football at Historically Black Colleges and Universities and the Negro Baseball Leagues. Although Jackson initially ignored the potential for desegregation to undermine these institutions, by the 1960s he consistently argued that the benefits of integration would outweigh the loss of all-Black sport. Yet despite this decades-long struggle, Jackson and other Southern Black sportswriters remain understudied. Scholarship on the Black press has largely ignored this Southern contingent by focusing instead on the desegregation of major league baseball teams in the Northeast. Although these Northern sportswriters grappled with similar tensions as they debated the decline of the Negro Leagues, Southern journalists lived and wrote in the heart of Jim Crow segregation. For decades they covered all-Black sporting institutions and mourned their loss after desegregation. Marion Jackson, and his willingness to sacrifice all-Black sport for integration, provides a valuable starting point for the study of these significant journalists.