As the Super Bowl approaches, Professor Charles Ross of the University of Mississippi will examine the fraught racial history of the nation’s most popular sport and the ways that Black players’ concerted activism helped to fundamentally transform the game. Among the key themes will be the integration of the sport, Black struggles to be given opportunities on the field, especially at the quarterback position, and the abysmal number of opportunities extended to African Americans as head coaches.

The lecture builds on Ross’s distinguished career as one of the foremost historians of Black players’ efforts to fight racial discrimination within professional football. His first book—Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the National Football League¬—was published by New York University Press in 1999, and his second—Money, Mavericks, and Men: The AFL, Black Players, and the Evolution of Modern Football (Temple University Press, 2016)—examines how players leveraged the emergence of the NFL’s main rival during the upheavals of the 1960s to change the sport and improve race and labor conditions.