Abstract

More than a football game

After seventy seasons of play in what remain segregated conferences of the NCAA's Division 1AA, the football team Bulldogs of the Citadel Military College of South Carolina finally met the team Bulldogs of South Carolina State College. It was the first time that the Citadel, self-declared defender of Southern tradition, had shared the field or the stands with the athletes and supporters of a predominantly black college. The two schools, only an hour's drive apart, represent alternate sides of the Southern coin, and this contest and the issues and attitudes surrounding it, a telling chapter in the continuing story of the "New South." Only about 50 percent of those who wear the Citadel ring enter the military, and the notion that the school is a training ground for leadership lives on as long as its graduates continue to occupy South Carolina's antebellum mansions, its corporate board rooms and the chambers of its State-House. In the black community, however, State College has traditionally been looked to for leadership, educating the poor and middle class and producing a fair proportion of South Carolina's black professionals.