Sidelined (30 page)

The connection between the Ole Miss football program and the ongoing drama of the integration effort is both direct and important. At the height of Meredith's attempts to register, Ole Miss hosted Kentucky. The atmosphere at the game resembled a Nazi-style rally. Rebel flags waved as “The Star Spangled Banner” played, and a giant Confederate flag was unveiled as Barnett took to the field to give a speech. The governor's words of defiance and vows to preserve segregation whipped the crowd
into a frenzy.
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Undoubtedly affected by the atmosphere at the football game on the previous night, the next day the campus erupted into a full-scale riot as federal marshals tried to get Meredith admitted. Two people died in the violence and President Kennedy went on national television to call for calm and commit to the integration of southern universities. Again emphasizing the important role played by football in the struggle to integrate Ole Miss, Kennedy also telephoned head football coach Johnny Vaught, appealing for his help to quell the riots.
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Once Meredith had been admitted to the university and the immediate violence had been stopped, federal authorities moved the Ole Miss homecoming game from Oxford to Jackson in an effort to avert any further trouble.
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In the weeks and months after Meredith was finally admitted to the university, hostility toward his presence remained and the forces of white supremacy continued to try to restrict the further integration of the university. Although Cleve McDowell became the second black student to enroll on campus in June 1963, he was later expelled for carrying a gun. In 1964 the university adopted laws that restricted the use of campus facilities to all but students, faculty, and staff. This effectively excluded blacks. Indeed, during a football game against Memphis State the law was invoked to remove the black families of visiting players from the cafeteria. Importantly, though, an integrated team had visited Ole Miss and left without major incident.
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It was not until the early 1970s that black players would pull on the uniform for the home team in Mississippi, however.

At the University of Alabama we can see a similar connection between mass resistance to school integration and the role of the football program. As discussed above, the importance of the Alabama football team to the state's cultural identity and its engagement with the rest of the nation was significant. By 1960 the successful Crimson Tide under the direction of iconic coach Paul “Bear” Bryant was consistently ranked among the top college teams in the nation. Andrew Doyle has observed that “Bryant and his championship team had become a potent symbol of pride and cultural vitality to white southerners in the midst of a profound social transformation.”
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Football allowed Alabama to engage with the national sporting culture despite its stance on segregation. This stance had been cemented in 1956, two years before Bryant's arrival, when black student Autherine Lucy was briefly enrolled at the university. After much harassment and legal wrangling, she was forced to withdraw from Alabama.
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This incident, combined with the success of the Crimson Tide, emboldened a defense of the southern way of life.

Bryant was a racial moderate who in fact aligned himself with members of the business community who were working for a peaceful end to segregation. Bryant was crucial in ensuring that Alabama accepted an invitation to the Liberty Bowl in 1959, where they would lose narrowly to an integrated Penn State team. Coming only three years after the Lucy affair, many saw this as a sign that the hard-line segregationist impulse was softening. Many white southerners did not view the Liberty Bowl in such terms, however. Going to play an integrated team in Pennsylvania was very different from accepting a contest against integrated opponents on home soil. Such football contests enabled white southerners to gain a sense of pride and cultural validation at the same time as they defended segregation of public schools in Alabama.
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The tension between maintaining segregation and gaining acceptance on the national sporting stage resulted in a significant setback for the Crimson Tide in 1961–1962, however. During the 1961 season Alabama won eleven consecutive games and was ranked the number-one team in the nation. They went on to defeat the University of Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl on New Year's Day, 1962. This victory was not, however, what Crimson Tide fans had been hoping for throughout the season. There had been speculation that they would be invited to the Rose Bowl in California, the scene of their triumph in 1926. This invitation never came, however. Student protests on campus at UCLA and a national media campaign drew attention to the segregationist practices of the University of Alabama. Bryant and his team came to be seen as an extension of the segregationists who beat freedom riders and the police chiefs who set dogs on civil rights demonstrators. The all-white Alabama team was accused of playing with the same violence and aggression that was little removed from white mobs.
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Rather than face this criticism head on and tackle searching questions about Alabama society and the football team that represented it, university officials chose a bowl game matchup that would enable them to sidestep these issues. The all-white Crimson Tide came to represent the resolve of Alabama authorities to fight integration to the bitter end.

This fight against the forces of integration was personified by Governor George Wallace in 1963. He chose to take the doctrine of interposition to its most extreme when he physically stood in the door of the university in order to stop the court-ordered enrollment of black students Vivian Malone and James Hood. Having seen events unfold at Ole Miss, Alabama officials made the decision to suspend applications in the summer of 1962 so that any desegregation crisis would be postponed until 1963. This also allowed the Crimson Tide to enjoy their Orange Bowl invitation. The game was attended by President Kennedy and the Tide shut out Oklahoma 17–0.
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The football team continued to project success and defend the southern way of life.

This defense was finally breached in 1963 when Hood and Malone were admitted to the university. Wallace had ensured that there would not be the same level of violence as had been witnessed in Mississippi. The Kennedy administration federalized the Alabama National Guard; Wallace made his stand before being forced to step aside. The Alabama campus was integrated, but the football team remained all white. The symbolic links between the Crimson Tide and the battle to hold back the forces of segregation that continued throughout 1963 and beyond were clear. As Birmingham became the epicenter of the civil rights struggle in the summer of 1963, notorious police chief Bull Connor erected barbed-wire cages in Legion Field to hold demonstrators. In the public imagination the connections between segregation and the Alabama football team were hard to ignore. It was not until the late 1960s that the Crimson Tide finally included black players in its ranks.

Given the struggles to integrate many of the most well-established campuses in the Deep South and the importance of football to these institutions, it is no surprise that breaking the color line in the SEC was a slow process. There was a significant time lag between the integration of the campus and the integration of the locker room. This slow process and the challenges faced by pioneering black athletes help explain why a black athletic revolt did not emerge in the South as it had in other parts of the country.

As southern colleges adopted football as an important part of their athletics programs in the early twentieth century, a large Southern Conference with over twenty teams from twelve states evolved. In 1932 thirteen members broke away and formed the SEC. By 1966 ten members remained.
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SEC teams rejected contests against integrated northern teams on southern soil well into the 1960s, and the first black varsity player did not turn out for one of the ten members of the football conference until 1967.

Even in other parts of the South where games against integrated teams did take place there was considerable racial tension. Willie Brown, a black player for the University of Southern California, recalled problems on a
trip to play Southern Methodist University of the Southwest Conference in Dallas. Brown received death threats, and when he ran back a kickoff for a touchdown he was surrounded by security on the sidelines. He and his teammates had to leave the stadium with rain capes over their heads so that he was less easily identifiable to an angry mob. “I had to put on a big cape and everything … so that they did not know where I was, because they did not know if the [death] threat was real.”
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Racial segregation on the sports fields of the South was a part of the region's racial mores well into the 1960s. Bill Richardson grew up in Alabama and played for the university team in the early 1960s. He remembered Little League baseball games between white and black children, but high school football was strictly segregated. Richardson and fellow Alabamian George Patton, who played for the University of Georgia in the mid-1960s, recalled watching the black high school football teams compete. The black teams used the white high school football stadium on a Saturday night after the white teams had used it for Friday evening football.
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Despite appreciation for the skills of the players of another race, integrated sporting contests were strictly prohibited by Jim Crow customs. These customs were accepted by young athletes as a way of life. Richardson recalled, “It was nothing that we ever brought up to our coaches or anybody … why are we here and they [black players] over there at their training school…. I can't quite explain it … that was just the way it was.”
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When high school teams were slowly integrated after 1965, black and white athletes faced a difficult adjustment to the new situation. Horace King, who went on to become the first African American player for the University of Georgia football team, recalled problems with his high school experience. As the schools began to integrate there were problems with the way the coaches brought the football team together. Black and white players failed to do blocking assignments for each other and the coaches failed to forge a team ethos.
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For some black students joining a newly integrated—and so predominantly white—school there were many problems. Black students often felt isolated, and struggles to fit in at school dissuaded many black athletes from making the commitment to join a previously all-white team. Black players also faced the problem of white coaches speaking down to them, as prevailing white supremacist attitudes continued.
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Not all black athletes faced negative experiences, however. Lester McClain, the first black varsity player at the University of Tennessee, remembered a relatively smooth transition from his all-black high school to his senior year at an integrated institution. His
excellence on the football field helped him gain the respect of his fellow students.
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As these young men adapted to the changing racial patterns of the South and their impact on the high school sports fields of the region, the SEC remained exclusively white. The SEC was described as the “final citadel of segregation” as it held out against the changes taking place in wider society.
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In late 1961 the president of the University of Kentucky predicted that the SEC would be desegregated within a few years. Representatives of Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Alabama, and Auburn reacted with alarm over his proposals. Worried about being isolated in the conference, Kentucky proceeded with caution.
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A recruitment letter sent out to junior colleges around the country by the Alabama track and field coach emphasized the racial attitudes of many in the SEC. The correspondence asked for nominations of any “good white boys” who could meet the challenges of competition in the SEC.
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An article in the University of Tennessee student newspaper, the
Daily Beacon,
argued in October 1965 that “the forces behind the segregationist policies of the Southeastern Conference are strong and powerful.” It noted that alumni of schools in the SEC threatened to withdraw funding if their alma mater integrated their athletics programs. The author of the article, Jack Topchik, drew attention to a young black sprinter, Willie Dawson, who ran the 100 yards in 9.4 seconds. Dawson expressed his desire to attend the University of Tennessee, but the athletics director argued that all the athletics scholarships were filled. Dawson was an exceptional sprinter and was snapped up by a northern university. University officials in the SEC were worried about making the first move toward integration and the subsequent drop in attendance and financial support that could follow.
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With integration of the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Southwest Conference already apparent in the mid-1960s and with high school sports programs increasingly becoming interracial, SEC officials held out against the forces of racial change.