- Hi, my name is Andrew Marni, and I'm the author of Strong Inside Perry Wallace in the Collision of Race and Sports in the South 10th Anniversary edition.

At the most basic level, this is a biography of Perry Wallace, who is the first black basketball player in the SEC.

But what it's really about is examining racism and the civil rights movement through the eyes of a black teenager in the 1960s, and then seeing the impact that this person had as a pioneer on a larger community.

How - Does he describe his treatment playing for the SEC playing in the SEC when he was, what was the - Worst he encountered?

So his sophomore year, he becomes the first black player ever to play a game in Oxford.

Perry was hit intentionally with an elbow bleeding from his nose.

He's dizzy, he can't see out of one of his eyes.

The referees don't even call a foul.

And so it's not until the ball rolls out of bounds that the student manager is able to come out to assist Perry.

And he said the crowd stood and cheered the fact that Perry was injured and was bleeding.

They both felt this like wetness on their back of their neck, and fans were spitting on them and dumping cokes on them.

But what he said was the most difficult part of that experience was what happened at halftime, actually, and this gets to this idea of Perry saying that it wasn't being treated poorly.

That was the hardest part.

It was not being treated at all.

And so in the locker room, he's sitting on the training table with a bag of ice on his face.

All the other players, all the coaches, the student managers and trainers run back onto the court and they leave Perry on that train table by himself, and he knows he's gonna have to walk back through that tunnel out onto the court where these fans have been harassing him the whole first - Half.

What draws you to this?

What draws you to this intersection of sports and justice?

- I think what sports does it is exposes inequity and hypocrisy in ways that are so blatant because we're told that sports is a level playing field, you know?

And all that matters is your talent, right?

- Yeah.

- But then we see in so many of these cases that I write about, well, that's not exactly true.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm such a fan of your books and you as a person, and I'm just thrilled that you were able to be here today, Andrew.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you so much Jeremy.

And thank you for watching a word on words.

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading - My Future Father-in-law, obvious question was, well, what do you wanna write your book about?

And I said, I don't know.

And I think he probably thought, this is not the guy for my daughter.

Right.