The Bob Graham Center for Public Service provides a wide variety of programs for students and the larger public on topics related to public service, public leadership and civic engagement.
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Name, Image and Blackness: Race and College Football
February 22 @ 8:00 am - 5:00 pm
This lecture by Dr. Leonard Moore looked at the racial dynamics of college football in the South in light of recent developments: the transfer portal, NIL, conference realignment, anti-DEI legislation, and the 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.
The most dynamic of these developments has been Name, Image, and Likeness. Ironically, just several years ago college football fans said that they would never support a team that pays its players. However, those same fans are now demanding that their favorite school pay whatever salary is necessary to recruit the best players.
Leonard N. Moore is the George Littlefield Professor of American History and a former vice president at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Moore has authored four books on black politics, including Carl B. Stokes and the Rise of Black Political Power, Black Rage in New Orleans, The Defeat of Black Power, and Teaching Black History to White People. Dr. Moore teaches more than 1,000 undergraduate students in the fall semester in his two classes: History of The Black Power Movement and Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow. Dr. Moore also directs summer programs in Beijing, China, Cape Town, South Africa, and Dubai. In the Austin community, he serves as Board Chair of the Austin Area Urban League.
He delivered the talk on Feb. 15, 2024 at 4 pm in Smathers Library Rm. 100. It was the second in the 2023-2024 Speaker Series: Scales of Belonging, sponsored by the UF Center for Humanities in the Public Sphere, (Rothman Endowment), College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, UF Research, George A. Smathers Libraries, A. Quinn Jones Museum and Cultural Center, African American Studies Program, Bob Graham Center for Public Service, Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship, Department of Anthropology, Department of Geography, Department of History, and the Department of Political Science.