AUBURN, Ala. — Decades before she was an award-winning journalist covering race and the South, Diane McWhorter was a student at Wellesley College, outside Boston. On Saturday afternoons in the fall, whenever she had the chance, she would watch nationally televised Alabama football games with friends. “I had to explain what a first down was,” she said.
These friends would cheer against the Crimson Tide, McWhorter said, because Alabama was “such an awful state,” a place only a few years removed from Jim Crow that had repeatedly elected the segregationist George Wallace as its governor.
But McWhorter, who later won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about the civil rights movement in her hometown of Birmingham, could not help herself.