ABSTRACT
In 1963 three freshmen Negro athletes at the University of Illinois at Urbana sought out a Negro graduate student and complained to him about racial discrimination against them. The Negro graduate student arranged for the athletes to sign affidavits charging the Athletic Association, which administers inter-collegiate athletics at Illinois, with discrimination. This was the precipitating incident in the search for what is called the "phantom racist". Armed with the affidavits from the three freshmen athletes, a group of graduate students, most of them Negro and members of the campus chapter of the NAACP, formed an ad hoc committee of Students for Human Dignity and Social Peace. The alleged discrimination within the Athletic Association was an issue seized upon to express symbolically an ineffable and inchoate feeling of mistreatment. There was much more than a case of discrimination at issue here.
