"This book adds significantly to our understanding of the interconnections among sport, race, and the civil rights movement in the United States."—David K. Wiggins, coeditor of Rivals: Legendary Matchups That Made Sports History
"[Sidelined] is an outstanding book that contributes to our understanding of the history of sport in the United States and to our understanding of race relations and civil rights. It provides valuable insights into post-1945 United States history."—Derek Charles Catsam, author of Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides
"Henderson offers a unique analysis of the 1960's black athletic revolt and places it in the broader context of sport and African American history. This book challenges popular understandings of the relationship between sport and desegregation. Placing athletes' voices front and center, Sidelined draws from over fifty new oral histories collected by the author."—Lane Demas, Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football
Drawing on historical materials and more than 40 oral histories, this book explores how athlete activists in professional and college sports promoted the struggle for civil rights in the late 1960s.
~Publishers Weekly
Sidelined is the first work to grapple significantly with the social belief that integrated sports indicated a significant advance in race relations, demonstrating that sports institutions disseminated the belief and that politics should not be interjected into sports, for example, as it was to undermine a proposed black boycott of the 1968 Olympics and related student-athlete protests. The book makes excellent use of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and International Olympic Committee (IOC) files that demonstrate those organizations viewed athletes' protests as public relations crises and were rarely concerned with addressing athletes' concerns. The book advances discussion of sports' social utility by demonstrating that much of society expected sports to reflect the liberal status quo and that dissenting athletes, like other progressives, were repressed by the (sports) establishment. [...]Sidelined is insightful concerning the connections between the black freedom movement and black athletes' protests and is well researched.
~Journal of Sports History