Word: rowan
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...South Africa, Eric Rowan is as heroic a figure as Joe DiMaggio or Babe Ruth is in the U.S. Playing cricket against England last summer, Rowan, vice captain of his team and opening batsman, scored 236 runs, highest individual score any South African player ever made in a test match. But later, at Old Trafford, the Manchester cricket ground, Rowan made a different kind of sensation. When the crowd decided, he was "stonewalling" (i.e., batting a wholly defensive game), it gave him cricket's equivalent of a Bronx cheer-slow, rhythmic handclaps. Infuriated, Rowan sat down on the "pitch...
This was definitely not cricket. Last fortnight the South African Cricket Board, without explanation, fired Rowan from the team. Last week, while local sportwriters and cricket fans were demanding that the board break its stony silence, Rowan was planning to sue it for "smirching my good name." What's more, said he indignantly, "it's not cricket...
...Rowan met white Southerners who were fighting race bias. An editor told him: "White supremacists are not thinking people." A businessman, whose parents had taught him race prejudice, said: "My children won't be that...
Often, Southerners, wary of offending a dark-skinned man who might turn out to be a United Nations diplomat, would ask: "Are you colored?" Angrily, Rowan would retort: "Can't you see I'm colored? What you mean is, am I an American? Yes, I am an American." Thus assured, they would make him keep to the color line...
...Kentucky, Rowan found Negroes attending universities with whites, and though some students protested, their professors approved. Concluded Rowan: "A dying generation of the Old South will not give [segregation] up without bitterness. A misled portion of the new generation will not relinquish segregation without a battle . . . But it is evident that soon-very soon-segregation will vanish...