I think this the best way to kick off a blog is with some previous work. Here is my first class undergraduate thesis on the adverse impact that civil rights had on the all black communities of two small towns in the Deep South. (A great read in my opinion!)
Freedom on the Gridiron: The impact of civil rights on black college football at the turn of the 1960s
Black student-athletes seem ubiquitous
on today’s campuses, but the process of fully integrating the Southern football
conferences was an arduous mission not completed until 1972. Prior to that
juncture the omnipotent segregationist practices of the Deep South fragmented
the zealous fixation for the sport into two separate worlds, black and white.
Indeed collegiate football in the South was more than just a game but a civil
religion holding ‘a sense of sacrality that permeated the religious experience.’[1]
The narrative of Southern college football integration has been habitually
explored by sports historians who elucidate to the processes in which the Civil
Rights movement impacted Southern societies. Yet such habitual exploration has
failed to fully acknowledge the impact that Civil Rights has had on the
antithetical world of Southern football within the all-black institutions. For
black college football the 1960s was illustrative of a discernable reverse
correlation with Civil Rights, the further the advances of the ‘movement’ and
integration, the worse the implications for their programmes. By 1990 the vast majority of black college football teams ceased to exist.[2]Indeed
the adverse effects desegregation could be seen across black Southern society.
It impacted high schools, colleges, the media and the people themselves. To
further expound the adverse response to integration there is no greater example
than the coaches, players and staff of Florida A&M and Grambling
University, Louisiana, whose experiences within the 1960s decade are a
microcosm for the impact of Civil Rights on black college football. Coach Jake
Gaither of Florida A&M and Coach Eddie Robinson of Grambling were pioneers
in the post-war era for the sport and had conquered the world of black college
football. Whilst remaining virtually unknown to the white world, the two ‘small
schools’ sent more players to pro-teams than many predominantly white
institutions. Amidst the obscurity that black schools were accustomed to, the
schools reached national recognition from the beginning of the decade. They
would garner this fame to endorse the sentiments of racial equality and improve
the lives of blacks in America through football. After the 1964 Civil Rights
Act, paradoxically, this fame hastened the aggressive recruitment by
predominantly white institutions of the pool of black athletes, usually sought
after by the black schools.Within the climate of Civil Rights and football
integration, black college football had to discover new intrinsic means for
being that would eventually culminate in them integrating their own
institutions.
The story of college football
integration is not one that can be understood externally from the story of the
Civil Rights movement; equally, the story of the Civil Rights movement is not
one that can be told without the discussion of each integral part. As scholars
of the African American experience have focused on local activism and subtle
changes to understand the dynamics of race relations, the story of the
integration of white Southern football is unequivocally linked to the story of
black college football. The works of sports historians such as Charles Martin’sBenching Jim Crow: the Rise and Fall of the
Color Line in Southern College Sports, 1890-1980 and Lane Dumas’ Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights
and American college football, imperiously emphasise the impact civil
rights had on white college football have, yet not sought to divulge an
integral aspect of the narrative, dedicating but few words to the matter.
Similarly Danny Dressman’s Eddie
Robinson: “…he was the Martin Luther King of football” and Thomas Aiello’s Bayou Classic: the Grambling – Southern
football rivalry, have discussed the adverse effects of integration within
the contextual analysis of which their books are addressed, but without insight
into the every aspect in which this adverse narrative takes shape. It is the negative
effects of such racial progression that is imperative to include in the college
football integration narrative, more specifically, how one of the most
egregious aspects of race relations in the South was overcome is as much a
story of the small currents as it is of the major tides.
“100 yards to Glory”:
Fame, Civil Rights and Black college football
The
1960’s would define black college football’s transition from near obscurity to
national recognition. In 1965 Doc Young, the influential black sports writer
for national black paper the Chicago
Defenderstated, ‘Quietly, as in a mornings sunrise – Negro colleges are
edging into the athletic big time’. Preceding the 1960’s ‘Every Negro school,
no matter how influential, was […] described as being “small” […] But this is a
new day.’[3]
The process of gaining recognition was not an instantaneous one, Gaither and
Robinson had been encouraging recognition of their Southern programmes from
when they first began coaching in the 1940’s.[4]The
climate of the Civil Rights movement that engulfed the era provided a forum of
fervent interest from white and black audiences. Gaither could boast of Olympic
champion Bob Hayes who was still his starting Running Back in Florida. He could
also vaunt his Orange Blossom Classic, a Negro sponsored unofficial black
championship game that in 1962 attracted 60,000 fans to Miami forcing their
Hotels to integrate during Classic time.[5] In
Grambling a similar growth of program-recognition was occurring. Segregated
Louisiana had inadvertently produced a veil hiding all-black Grambling from
white audiences for 25 years until Howard Cosell adopted the story of
Robinson’s unprecedented winning programme to create an hour length documentary
on the school for television network ABC. Coined ‘Grambling College: 100 yards
to glory’[6]
the film was to put not only the story of Robinson’s success into every white
and black living room but also to contextualize the success of black athletes amidst
the struggles of poverty-stricken black Louisiana, ‘the other side of the great
society’.[7]
Cosell’s documentary took the poverty and plight of black Southerners out of
the precipice and towards the attention of the wider public. Additionally, it
excelled Robinson’s programme and allowed him to devise a philanthropic game,
the Invitational Football Classic, to be held in the prolific New York Yankee
Stadium for the efforts of the New York Urban League.[8]
Gaither pushed the colour barrier even further as he organized integrated
coaching clinics that, even if for only a brief moment in time, blurred the
colour lines that fragmented the two worlds of college football in the South.
Within these clinics the coaches shared strategies, ideals and values in order
to better the programmes of their Floridian schools. The transference of
knowledge came regardless of racial distinction and exemplified the push beyond
segregation that the movement envisioned.[9]
‘Negro Players Move In’: The Impact of Integration
on black college football
Gaither
and Robinsonhad reached national prominence in the 1960s using their recognition
to become an annex to the wider social movement. By both defying social mores
and exemplifying the ability of the black athlete, their efforts illustrated a
precocious civil rights attitude that only a few predominantly white schools
were willing to endorse in the South.The dynamic between the ‘movement’and
Gaither and Robinson provided an unbounded arena in which black college
football could create not only a positive change for African Americans in the
South but also alter the thinking process of all Southerners in regards to race
relations, a notion which once must have seemed an irreconcilable antagonism.Title
III and IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act demanded the desegregation of public
schools and authorized the withdrawal of federal funds from programs that
practised discrimination,[10] this
finally brought the tides of integration sweeping into Southern football
conferences. Predominantly white institutions that hoped to integrate but were
unable due to political and societal pressures were now finally able to do so.
For Grambling and Florida A&M the integration of white institutions also
preordained the drain of their athletic pool. Ironically, the underlying reasonfor
the recognition of these black athletes from small Southern towns was the
national attention that black college football had gained throughout the
decade.
The
black press developed their own sports pages when mainstream papers refused to
report on black games. Many black sportswriters emerged in the late 1950s and
early 1960s following the pioneer reporting of Frank ‘Fay’ Young. Reporters
such as Doc Young, Al Monroe and Frye Gaillard contributed a voice to black
college sports. Since its inception, the archives of black newspapers
illustrate that the black press maintained an unwavering fidelity with black
college football even into the 1960s when integration began to dominate the
main headlines.The double entendre of integration, however, placed the black
press at a crossroad facing an inevitable dichotomy. They now had to decide
whether to further unquestionably endorse the development of black college
football as they had previously done, or embrace the notions of integration and
support the black athletes and white institutions that embraced the goal of the
civil rights movement.
When
black players began to integrate the final bastion of segregation in college
football, the South Eastern Conference (SEC), the future of Southern college
football had been foreshadowed. The black press understood this and theperplexity
could be seen in the articles that deliberated the issue. Frye Gaillard
reported on the record number of blacks joining the SEC. Gaillard’s concerns
lay with the players themselves as they received racial abuse from fans and
teammates. Gaillard concluded ambivalently, stating that ‘it remains to be seen
whether the SEC will simply repeat the mistakes of (other) schools […] or
whether, in an ironic twist, the last conference to desegregate will learn from
the racial blunders of others and avoid them.’[11]
Less ambivalent however was the press’ exultance in the progression of the
views of white Southern coaches.This was, in part, due to the successes of
coaches such as Gaither and Robinson who had produced insurmountable numbers
black pro-athletes. Indeed ‘SEC coaches, noting the disproportionately large
number of blacks playing professional athletics, point out that it is
self-defeating for their conference to continue a policy of racial exclusion.
And some, like Vanderbilt’s Bill Pace, add that recruiting without regard to
race is simply the right thing to do.’[12]
In December 1967, black magazine Ebony,
in an article titled ‘Gridiron color bars topple at white Southern colleges’,[13]
celebrated the achievements of the numerous black athletes and white coaches
who had broken the colour barrier of the Dixie South. The black press by the
latter half of the century appeared to place the advances in Civil Rights,
which meant integration,principle to the advances of black college football.‘There is no clear evidence that the
black press had a major impact on the increasing integration of football, as it
did in the case of MLB, but newspapers such as the Defender and Courier at
least guaranteed that such decisions would not go completely unnoticed’.[14]Ironically, the black press’
decision to further integration over black college footballheld similar adverse
implications for their institution. When the mainstream press began to report
on the processes of the Civil Rights movement, including black players
integrating predominantly-white institutions, the demising importance of the
black press was also foretold.[15]
The integration of college football in
the South also held severe personal and professional implications for Coach
Gaither and Coach Robinson. It forced the coaches to define explicitly their outlooks
regarding integration. In 1967 the Chicago
Defender reported that ‘Jake Gaither jokingly opposed the growing
integration’[16]
but when Gaither voiced his qualms his ‘jokes’ personified the sentiment of
black coaches in the latter half of the 1960s, ‘You know integration is going
to be a good thing but the ones that are going to be hurt are the black
schools’.[17]
Gaither was correct, and by 1969, the year after Florida State and the
University of Miamirecruited their first black players, he announced his
retirement from Florida A&Mleaving behind an overwhelmingly winning record[18].‘Kids
used to ditch rides in here’, he had previously said regarding recruiting ‘now
I have to go out and pay air fare for them’.[19]
Robinson expressed fears alike, yet his statements suggested the principality
of his fears were for the players and not for the institutions, ‘there was a
time when a black player worried about being recruited just by a Grambling or a
Jackson State or an Alcorn […] now, he’s got a lot of schools interested in
him. Yes, it’s tough on the coaches. But more than anything, it’s tough on the
athlete’.[20]Gaither
agreed stating that black schools are better for black athletes as ‘white
schools usually have little to offer a black athlete off of the field and often
have no interest in seeing him graduate […] We don’t want that at Florida
A&M. We want to see our boys graduate and go on to become contributing
members of the society.’[21]Gaither
and Robinson expressed the fear that many coaches would synonymously sense.
Athletes at black colleges were coached not just to be players but to be men,
within white institutions, as they feared succinctly, black players were there
solely to integrate.
Robinson and Gaither werejustified in
their fears for black players. In black institutions players would not have to spend
their four years perturbing about being ostracised by the wider society, but breaking
the racial barrier of predominantly white institutions meant enduring the
hardships of being separated from one’s own community.In 1968,for example, Calvin
Patterson and Ernest Cook integrated Florida State University. Even before
arriving on campus the two were inundated with hate mail which prompted Cook to
leave and play elsewhere. But Patterson ignored them and stayed telling Jet Magazine ‘I guess I’m a crusader’.[22]
Patterson had a difficult time at Florida State. The
black students renounced Patterson because he dated a white woman,the students
at nearby Florida A&M also resented Patterson because he was enrolled at
the white school. ‘Back in those days, if
you were black you didn't fit in well at Florida State,’ a friend of
Patterson’s later recalled. ‘There weren't many black students there, so it was
a pretty close-knit community of folks. When they found out Calvin was dating a
white woman, they considered him a sellout. He was definitely between a rock
and a hard place.’[23] The loneliness Patterson experienced from all sides of
the community proved fatal when in 1972 he committed suicide. The integration
of college football had placed black students at black institutions at odds
with black players attempting to integrate white schools. As integration progressed
and was encouraged by the black press and the wider social movement it
disseminated and divided the black student body who would have at one point
been attending the same institutions. It was the black coaches, such as
Robinson and Gaither that fully foresaw the immediate predicaments that black
players would have to face in the climate of integration.
High
school integration also held negative implications for black college football. One
major factor that made ‘the college move toward integration of their (white)
sports programs easier [… was]the integration at the high school level’ argued
one reporter from the Chicago Defender,
‘people get used to seeing Negro athletes at the professional and high school
levels’.[24]Certainly
this was to become the case in Louisiana as the black press reported in 1963
that four schools were to integrate.[25]
But high school integration possessed a problem for college staff at black
schools as it did for high school black staff, as Fidelia Johnson, daughter of
Charles P. Adams, the founder of Grambling, indicated, ‘coaches in black
schools have been made, not head coaches like they were, but made assistant
coaches, or they have been moved into administration or somewhere else in the
school, you see.’ Johnson continued, ‘take for example, there is a school in
Ruston that’s known as Ruston High School; it was all black. When it was
integrated with the high school in Ruston, you see, this moved out some of the
black teachers in teaching fields over at the white school […] the coach in the
black school was made assistant coach to someone they just brought in […] they
had to, by court order, make him head coach.’[26]
As Johnson’s oral history explains, with the coming of integration in high
schools like Ruston, which neighbours Grambling, black staff were simply
displaced into different positions to ‘qualify for some federal law’.[27]
This displaced the black high school coaches that had relationships with
schools like Grambling to produce their freshmen athletes. Eventually, black
players from integrated high schools would find it as foreign to attend a predominantly
black school as to attend a predominantly white one. Now, as Robinson thought,
'that same black player worried about adjusting to a predominantly black school
because he probably came up through an integrated system’.[28] For
the black college prospect, integration allowed more autonomy in the decision
making process of where he wished to play. If he wished to remain in-state he
would have other options than the local black school. But players that left to
go to white institutions fragmented black society creating rifts between black
students, like Patterson. For Grambling and Florida the disconnection from
black high school coaches would eventually provea fatal disconnection from
their athletic pool and be evident of another fragmentation of a black world
that had been developing in the South since the post-war era.Black college
football had provided a sense of community that the civil religion of college football
had provided for many Southern football towns. As Cosell stated in his documentary, ‘Grambling is still an
all-negro community but it’s as much a college town as Stillwater, Oklahoma or
Madison Wisconsin’.[29] Grambling developed an
identity for the players, coaches and people of Grambling. A gentleman in the
local Barbershop amply summed up the sentiments of the town to Cosell
exclaiming ‘sports were born in Grambling, and whenever we see one of our boys
run out there we feel like we are running, and when they holler and when they
say Grambling everyone around their television claps their hands’.[30]
With
the threat of extinction from the predatory recruiting tactics of predominantly
white schools black football programmes such as Grambling had to find new means
of subsistence. By 1968 a game such as the Invitational Football Classic became
a strategy in which ‘social welfare […] provided black college football with an
intrinsic reason for being’.[31] The proceeds
of the game would go to the Urban League’s ‘Street Academies and Storefront
Schools which had been set up to help earlier dropouts regain lost ground in
their education’.[32]
Contested between Grambling and Morgan State of Baltimore the Classic was a
resounding success. The stadium sold out to 64,000 raising $200,000 for the
foundation. It was such a popular event that even Presidential nominee Richard
Nixon hoped to garner some of the publicity by paying for eight hundred boys
from Harlem to attend the game.[33]
Robinson hoped the game would illuminate that a new audience for black college
football would also assert a new legitimacy for the sport as ‘Mixed crowds ranging
between 35,000 fans […] turn out to see Negro college football games. Team
scores and team records are listed along with all the rest. Any scout who
doesn’t include the smallest school on his beat is either an amateur or a
knucklehead.’[34]In accordance to this notion new
football ‘Classics’ were derived at the turn of the century with similar
philanthropic efforts. The 68,000 people that attended the LA Coliseum for a
game between Grambling and Alcorn A&M of Mississippi in the first ‘Freedom
Classic’, this timesponsored by the Los Angeles Urban League,illustrated the ability
of Grambling to uphold their popularity within the black communityand display
‘racial pride and Negro-college football’.[35] In this respect, Robinson’s
philanthropist games held a dual purpose:the games illustrated his desire to
garner the spirit of the Civil Rights Movement to enforce change for blacks in
America.However additionally it culminated from a fear of extinction and became
a method of survival that was felt and attempted by all black college coaches
in the South.
The ‘White Tiger’: Reverse Integration and black
college football
The integration of Southern college
football and the prerequisites for federal funds from the Civil Rights Act made
an indelible impact on the recruiting tactics adopted by the Southern all-black
colleges. The insistent debate regarding black autonomy and football
integrationfinally prompted the integration of black colleges who, just like
white colleges, couldno longer justify maintaining racial exclusivity in their
programmes. Of course the reasoning behind their exclusivity was more down to
white segregationist practices than their own. Reverse integration, a term
first popularly used by Ebony
magazine in 1994, connotes white integration into predominantly black
institutions.[36]For
black college football in the late 1960s it embodied two factors for black
schools in the South: the advancement of civil rights was one but the assurance
of longevity for black football, an ‘intrinsic reason for being’.The black
press’ ambivalence of predominantly white institutions took a not-so-ambivalent
tangent to focus on the integration of predominantly black institutions. In the
latter half of the 1960s the press was adamant in demanding that the black
coaches adopt the same kind of integration practice that the white football
coaches had begun to endorse in the South. Doc Youngin 1965was quick to
applaudthat the recent Orange Blossom Classic ‘included a Caucasian lad’.[37]
Young remarked ‘Sports gets the integration job done. FAMU (Florida A&M)
has done such a good job of it’.[38]
Yet Young was even quicker to condemn black schools for not integrating. In
1967 he exclaimed ‘Southern Negro prep and college coaches are griping about
integration […] they should quit complaining… and integrate their own teams!’[39]
For the upcoming 1966 season Virginia
Union and Virginia State College integrated their Deep South predominantly
black schools bringing in seven white players. When asked the reason for
integration Tom Harris, the Virginia Union coach told the Daily Defender, ‘the reason for the switch is that Negro athletes
are getting harder to recruit due to the recruiting tactics of larger schools
throughout the country.’[40]
Later that month Young again addressed the debate in his column claiming that
‘the law of supply and demand forces Coach Harris’ hand’[41].
Young praised Harris for ‘the foresight and courage’ that the Negro baseball
moguls could have used to survive organized baseball integration, the ‘Negro
college move is somewhat overdue’ Young stated as ‘predominantly-white schools
in certain Southern and Southwestern states have done something about it’.[42]
With other black colleges taking the
plunge, and with white schools siphoning off black athletes, for Robinson, the
need to compete prompted integration in Grambling with its first white athlete,
James Gregory, a quarterback from California. ‘If our program at Grambling is
as good as they say it is, why isn’t it good enough for some whites?’ Robinson
declared, ‘I can’t stand up and preach and tell another guy what he has to do
if I don’t do it myself.’[43]Robinson’s
assertions illustrate that unlike Gaither he openly invited the desegregation
of Louisiana and the corresponding integration of football programmes.Although
Gaither had previously quipped about being oppositional to integration, like
Robinson, he too had integrated his school and boasted to the Chicago Defender how ‘things are
changing down our way […] we have a white lad on our team too. His name is
Brown. he says he never has been treated better in his life’.[44]Reverse
integration was not ostentatious but culminating from dual factors, the increasing
competition for black athletes and an endorsement of a new integrated South. Gregory
was the press’ dream, becoming the subject of a book My Little Brother’s Coming Tomorrow in 1971, and later a film Grambling’s White Tiger in 1981, both of
which were all too keen to discuss the irony of conversely integrating a black
football dynasty. Robinson however upheld the colour-blind notions that had
begun the Civil Rights Movement at the beginning of the decade,declaring ‘When
you put a helmet on a young man, he loses his color… Man, he ain’t no white
boy, he’s a Tiger!”[45]By
stating this Robinson not only expressed his belief that race had no place in
football, but also exemplified that, unlike the white schools treatment of
black athletes, his intentions for Gregory were exactly the same for his other
players.
Robinson needed the reverse integration
experiment to be a success, to not only present Grambling as a part of a new
progressive integrated South but also to substantiate Grambling’s relevance in
such a climate. Indeed Robinson acknowledged that every decision regardingGregory
had racial implications. For example when Gregory had wished to move positions
Robinson would reply ‘every black quarterback at that time had always been made
into a defensive back or a wider receiver in the pros [… I] wasn’t going to
take the first white quarterback at Grambling and turn him into a wide receiver
or defensive back’.[46] A
further reasoning for the recruitment of Gregory was Robinson’s undying efforts
to prepare his players for a new supposedly desegregated world.As Gregory
recalled, ‘I knew I was getting used in two ways […] by society and by
Grambling. I was helping to bring about an integration program that the federal
government wanted to happen, and that coach Rob wanted […] at the same time he
wanted his athletes to deal with the situation… he saw it as a natural thing
for his other players to become better people’.[47]For
Gregory, becoming the Calvin Patterson-in-reverse could have been almost as
fatal. Gregory acknowledgedthat his experience was not all positive and at
first the student body and opposing teams made his life difficult. Nemiah
Wilson, a teammate of Gregory recollected: ‘when Eddie brought that white
quarterback to Grambling, if it was any other coach, that kid would have been
dead.’[48]Growing
up in a somewhat integrated community he was more than prepared to become
Grambling’s first white player. Gregory admitted that ‘there were people in the
community who thought my parents were crazy for letting me think about doing
it’.[49]The
reverse integration of Grambling proved successful and other black schools
within Louisiana began to follow suit. By 1996 both major black schools of
Louisiana, Grambling and Southern, would boast white quarterbacks in their
annual intrastate clash, the Bayou Classic.[50]However
reverse integration was also an exemplification of why black football would not
endure the full integration process. When black schools decided to include
white athletes on their rosters theytook an integrated stance on recruiting
just like the predominantly white institutions. Being small schools without
nearly the vast resources of the larger institutions, coaches like Robinson,
who in the 1960s was second to only Notre Dame in sending players to the pros,[51]
would not be able to compete within the now integrated nature of recruitment.
In 1969 Gaither illustrated
furtherindication that the motives of integrating the black gridiron were
beyond mere survival tactics. In what would be his second to last game Gaither
used his warm relationship with white Floridian coaches that he refined over
years of integrated coaching clinics to organise a meeting between the Rattlers
and the University of Tampa, a predominantly white institution. The game would
be the first ever contest between a black team and white team in the South. ‘This
is an end of an era, and I’m very glad it’s come to a halt’[52]
Gaither told The St. Petersburg Times.
The intrastate battle would illuminate Gaither’s vision for an interracial
dynamic that not only contested old social mores but forged new traditions and
cultural experiences, yet for the players it was so much more. For Gaither’s
Rattlers, to win would be an affirmation of black college football and black
athletic prowess. As the 1969 team gathered in Tallahassee in 2009 they recollected
their discernment of the implications of the game. ‘It was an opportunity for
us to be measured against white schools on an equal basis’, Melvin Rogers
stated, ‘and it’s not egotistical, but the reality is we always felt we were
competitive’.[53]
Gaither invited his long-time colleague
and rival Coach Robinson to experience the momentous occasion as his guest.[54]
Though both Gaither and Robinson were aware of the double entendre that
integration posed to their programmes they remained fervent in promoting the
wisdom of pushing the racial boundaries. As Robinson told a Tampa Tribune reporter after the game,‘there
are enough people who are concerned about seeing good football to make it
possible for us, too. They know we have to live together now.’[55]Coach
Curci, the head coach of Tampa later, evoked the memory of the many critics who
contested that the game would culminate in a riot. However, in the aftermath of
the game Gaither expressed to theDaily Defender
that ‘he takes most pride in […] his inter-racial game in the south […] there
were 47,000 people attending and not one incident of a racial nature on the
field or in the stadium, or in the city of Tampa that night […] that proved to
me it could be done in the south’.[56]Unlike
what Gaither had joked to the black press, he in fact placed paramount
importance of hisintegrated game, which he won 34-28, on the message that it
delivered to the South of a new interracial dynamic and less importance on the
pressures and exigencies of integration itself.
The choice made by Gaither and Robinson to
integrate their teams despite being at the height of their careers exemplifies
the pressures Civil Rights integration puton black college football. The black
press may not have had the power and influence on wider society that the
mainstream press had, but within the black community it seemed to grasp
significant influence. As sports writers questioned the lack of reverse
integration Gaither and Robinson were forced to respond. They placed pressures
on Southern black coaches similar to the pressures that the mainstream northern
press began to place on Southern white coaches who refused to integrate. The
insistent debate between black autonomy and college football integration came
to a head and integration was the victor.Gaither and Robinson were vindicated
in their fears as they knew that black college football would never be able to
compete with the larger schools facilities and appeal. Though the sentiment of
reverse integration was positive for the movement and for progress in the South,
it was also the signing of an inevitable death warrant for black college
football.
Back To Black: The 1974
Bayou Classic
Though
the fatal path laid for black college football was inevitable it did not sojourn
the progression of the sportthat began the 1960s, into the 1970s. For black
college football within Louisiana, the amalgamating black and white worlds of
football could be combatted through the reversion of black football culture. Robinson
embraced the consolidation of the parallel worlds, but rather than retire like
Gaither, he pushed the worlds together whilst reinforcing black college
football within Louisiana. In 1974 Grambling would name their annual intrastate
rival game against Southern University the Bayou Classic. The Classic would not
merely be a football game but a ‘black pride event’,[57] a
testament to Louisianan black culture and talent that would contribute to the
survival of Grambling’s program. The 76,000 black fans that attended Tulane University
stadium would reinvigorate the black press’ indulgence with black football in
the post-civil rights era. The ‘Big 10-sized marching bands which are musically
superb. When they play, even the MGM Lion will agree: “That’s entertainment!”
Young exclaimed, ‘the writer must pay tribute to both teams, to both schools,
to both coaching staffs, which, incidentally, are integrated.’[58]
Through retracting into one’s own culture as a testament to the progression of
black college football, Robinson’s Bayou Classic succeeded in portraying both
black autonomy and integration synonymously. Yet even Robinson was not to
maintain such success and would eventually become but a minor football program
in the world of desegregated football. The Bayou Classic illustrates the
strategy that Robinson adopted in order to preserve Louisianan black college
football where the many other black schools in other states vanished.
Conclusion
Conclusion
Monumental Civil Rights history
certainly deserves its place. Yet without exigent insight into every integral
aspect it lacks important facets of the story. Similarly the fallacy that black
college football is not integral to the larger narrative of integration is
misguided. Southern college football integration is an imperative aspect of the
Civil Rights movement and the reverse implications of which is an imperative
aspect of that narrative. The history of Coaches Jake Gaither and Eddie
Robinson throughout the sixties has exemplified ways in which black coaches
approached their double entendre of integration.The adverse effects of
integration pervaded into all aspects of the parallel world of college
football. It forced the black press to question its adherence to black autonomy
and endorse college integration. It impacted high schools, displacing staff and
students, destroying the link between the many ex-Grambling players that, for
example, became high school coaches. For the black athletes,being split between
predominantly black institutions and predominantly white institutions it caused
a rift between the black student-body that alienated integrating players. It
also impacted the black school community. Robinson and Gaither adopted
strategies of survival to remain relevant in the climate of integration by
devising philanthropic games and reversely integrating their own teams. However
reverse integration inevitably uncovered the reality that they would never be
able to equally compete with the larger schools’ resources when on equal
grounds. Notwithstanding,what is apparent throughout this journey is the
indisputableintegrity and poise that these schools displayed throughout the 1960s
spell of integration. Their stories portray the ironic zenithintegration culminated
in effectively curtail the progress of black college football. Throughout the 1960s
black college football impacted civil rights, but it was at the turn of the decade that
the processes after Civil Rights legislation adversely impacted black college
football. Indeed the black coaches knew all too well the implications of their
actions as Robinson and Gaither commented on the process of integration and
what it could do for both white institutions and Southern race relations. Behind
these words was their true sentiment, that change was coming, and regardless of
their outlook and response,the world and culture of black college football
would never be the same.
