Sports Media History by John Carvalho

Author:John Carvalho [Carvalho, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367254285
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2020-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

In 1978, eight years before the first observation of a federal MLK holiday, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference called for a moment of silence during the Super Bowl pregame ceremonies to honor King’s birthday (Kaplan 2014). In 1984, when the Washington Redskins were preparing to play in the Super Bowl against the Los Angeles Raiders, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington held a program called “Celebration of Life” honoring King. At the reception following the program, the partisan crowd started cheering when the orchestra broke into “Hail to the Redskins” (Farrell et al. 1984).

The first official federal MLK holiday was observed in January 1986, at the same time that Chicago Bears running back Walter Payton was set to start in Super Bowl XX. New York Times sports columnist George Vecsey wrote at the time that Payton had been a key figure in football integration in Jackson, Mississippi:

How fitting it is, too, that a Delta black man should be the reigning superstar of this Super Bowl in the first year the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. has been celebrated as a national holiday. In the years after Walter Payton was born in 1954, a black child could see and hear tumultuous and sometimes dangerous events around him.

In Jackson, where Payton would attend Jackson State College, Medgar Evers, secretary of the Mississippi chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was shot down in the dark outside his home in June 1963.

(Vecsey 1986, p. 7B)

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