All Guts and No Glory: An Alabama Coach's Memoir of Desegregating College Athletics

As the recent film Glory Road reminded, the early desegregation of college sports often was neither easy nor pleasant. Here Bill Elder recalls how he and a courageous group of white and black student athletes broke racial barriers at a small college in northeast Alabama in the early 1970s. The setting was Sand Mountain, an area which four decades earlier had given rise to the Scottsboro Boys case, and where racial attitudes for some had not changed much.

Elder has recently retired from …