High school football games during the 1950s at Victory Stadium had programs sponsored by Coca-Cola. Pictured is an example from 1952 for a game between Andrew Lewis and Jefferson High Schools.
Learn more about the role of Victory Stadium in national history on February 13 at 7pm at Roanoke College’s Logan Gallery, inside the former Farmers National Bank building.
In “Victory Stadium: How a Lawyer, a Minister, and Twenty Football Players Helped End Segregation in Virginia and Professional Sports,” Professor Alex Long of the University of Tennessee College of Law will deliver a talk on the significance of this civil rights milestone. In 1961, the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Baltimore Colts were scheduled to play at Victory Stadium in Roanoke. However, a Virginia statute required that seating had to be segregated. In response, a local civil rights lawyer and a local minister worked together to bring national attention to the injustice of the law by organizing the first successful civil rights boycott of a professional sporting event. Join the Salem Museum, the Historical Society of Western Virginia, the Roanoke College Anthropology Concentration, the Roanoke College Center for Studying Structures of Race, and the Roanoke Valley Preservation Foundation for this talk.
