Sidelined (31 page)

The forces maintaining segregation in the SEC were particularly potent. Eventually it was a border state member, Kentucky, that took the lead in integrating the football conference. This was consistent with a general pattern of less successful and established institutions taking the lead in the desegregation of playing squads. Even so, there was a large time lag between the integration of the university itself and of the athletics program. In 1954 the University of Kentucky enrolled twenty black undergraduates, and it continued to accept black students thereafter. It was not
until 1967, however, that a black player made his debut for the Wildcats in a varsity game. Black players Greg Page and Nat Northington signed letters of intent in December 1965 and reported to the
Middlesboro (Ky.) Daily News
in May 1967 that they faced “no problems” in the integration process. Coach Charlie Bradshaw explained his desire to improve the football program with talented players of any race, and supporters focused mainly on the prospects of a winning team. Northington and Page reported that their focus on football was total and that they had experienced no problems. Tellingly, though, the article reported that the Wildcats' schedule for 1967 required them to visit the Deep South for only three games, at Auburn, Louisiana State, and Florida.
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The integration process was perhaps aided by the tragic death of Greg Page after a freak training accident in August 1967 in which he broke his neck. Page was in the hospital for thirty-three days before dying. The injury and Page's progress became a topic of conversation and focal point for the community in his hometown of Middlesborough, Kentucky, and for all connected with the university.
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Shared sympathy for Page and his family provided a backdrop that reduced the possibility of racial tensions surrounding the integration of the team. Nat Northington overcame considerable emotional pain by competing in the Wildcats game against Ole Miss the day after Page's death. It was in this game that the SEC was integrated.
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Four months earlier the University of Tennessee had signed halfback Lester McClain as their first black football player.
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McClain made his varsity debut in 1968 and had a successful four-year career with the Tennessee Vols.
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McClain recalled that he was well received by his teammates and supporters of the team. In fact, when he took the field in his first home game, against the University of Georgia, he was given a standing ovation before he had even touched the ball.
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Both Northington and McClain were recruited by schools with a longer tradition of enrolling black undergraduates than Deep South schools in the SEC. Furthermore, the University of Tennessee campus was located in Knoxville. Condredge Holloway, who played quarterback for the Vols in the early 1970s and in so doing became the first black to play that position in the SEC, described Knoxville as something of a racial melting pot. The university was not as heavily influenced by the forces of segregation as other SEC institutions were.
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It is also worth noting that the Tennessee coach, Doug Dickey, had managed integrated football teams while in the military. His successor, Bill Battle, had previously coached at West Point and so too had been
exposed to integrated teams.
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Here we see racial changes in other areas of society affecting the integration of the SEC.

With integration in wider society and on campus progressing in the South, however tentatively, the SEC had only two integrated football teams by the end of the 1960s. In 1970 four more members integrated their football teams. Vanderbilt, Florida, Auburn, and Mississippi State all included black players on their varsity roster that year.
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With the scales tipping as more SEC teams were integrated than not, the schools in the Deep South finally began to integrate in 1971. Central to this process was the University of Alabama. Their team was the dominant football force in the region and the most recognizable to the rest of the nation. Something of a myth has developed around the integration of Alabama's Crimson Tide squad. The teams of Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant had brought great sporting prestige to the University of Alabama in the 1960s. A popular image of Alabama leading the way in the integration of the SEC has perverted the actual historical record, however.

As the 1960s progressed Bryant inched closer to integrating the Crimson Tide as other SEC teams followed the lead of Kentucky and Tennessee. Folklore points to the early 1970 season defeat at the hands of the University of Southern California as prompting a radical shift in Alabama recruiting policy. Black player Sam Cunningham ran around, through, and over the Tide defense during that game. Alabama assistant coach Jerry Claiborne said that Cunningham had done more to integrate Alabama in sixty minutes on the field than Martin Luther King Jr. had done in the previous decades. In reality, however, the move toward integrating the Crimson Tide had already been taken. Wilbur Jackson watched from the stands that night as the first black player to be recruited for the freshman team.
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At Alabama in October 1969 fifty black students staged a sit-in in the university cafeteria to draw attention to a series of issues. One of these was a call by the Black Student Union for the Alabama athletic program to recruit some black athletes.
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It is apparent that on many southern campuses athletes were not involved in student activism and civil rights struggles in the way they were on campuses like Wyoming, Marquette, and California. There was not a black athletic revolt on the campus at Alabama because there were no black athletes.

Coach Bryant had an immensely loyal following in the state of Alabama and could have made the decision to integrate the SEC in the mid-1960s, taking a stand against the segregationist demagoguery of Governor Wallace. Nevertheless, he believed that his primary
responsibility “was to win football games, not to promote social justice.”
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In this respect we again see that sport was not used to run ahead of changes in wider society in the South. By the time the Alabama football team was integrated significant moves had already been made to integrate public schools in the state and the formal elements of Jim Crow segregation had been dismantled. For Wilbur Jackson and his teammate John Mitchell, just pulling on the uniform of the University of Alabama represented significant progress.

In 1971 the University of Georgia also included a black player on its varsity team. Horace King went to play for the team after he was recruited by Coach Vince Dooley. King was impressed by the way Dooley coached the team, and once he had received assurances that he was going to be given the chance to play and was not a “token black recruit” he had no hesitations about signing. Dooley argued that the integration of public schools in Georgia a few years before King joined the team helped with the transition to interracial Bulldog rosters. Players themselves and fans in Georgia had already begun to adjust to interracial contests and integrated teams before the university team was desegregated.
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The student newspaper reported in January 1971 that the “best move” the Bulldogs had made during the off-season was to sign some black players. The athletics department commented that they were simply interested in recruiting good players, regardless of their race.
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A decade after undergraduate education on campus had been integrated the football team began to recruit and field black players.

Ole Miss was the last of the SEC football programs to racially integrate when Robert Williams and James Reed were recruited in December 1971. Again we see the athletics program running behind developments on the campus as a whole. In late 1969 the newly formed Black Student Union, supported by some liberal white classmates, began to articulate concerns about the school's athletics program. The lack of black players and the shouting of racial slurs and use of Confederate symbols during Rebel football games were particular problems. These calls for change were reinforced by the dismal performance of the team on the field, with a string of humiliating defeats suffered at the hands of local rivals.
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This pressure affected a change of policy by Ole Miss administrators and so the SEC was finally fully integrated. Again, the Black Student Union could not engage with student athletes as it did elsewhere. It put pressure on administrators to recruit black athletes rather than enlisting such athletes in an attempt to press for further concessions.

The integration of the SEC in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a large step forward, and the few black pioneers in the league carried with them a great responsibility. The first black young men to compete on previously all-white sports fields, they were charged with proving they were worthy of selection and could set an example that others would follow. Certainly in the first decade of integration the black players selected were of a high quality. As a disproportionately high number of black athletes lettered, it is fair to conclude that the quality of the black players was slightly better than that of the white players.
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These first black players also had to face the inevitable racial problems that accompanied the initial integration of SEC football. Horace King recalled not just racial insults on the field and from the stands but also difficulties when traveling as part of a team in certain areas of the South.
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Haskel Stanback recalled a game in Oxford against the University of Mississippi in which the crowd howled “kill that nigger” throughout the contest.
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Eddie Brown remembered that visiting team accommodations in places like Alabama and Mississippi were approached with caution, especially in relation to arrangements off the field. Brown recalled, “In Knoxville, pretty much that was open and friendly, but if you were on the road or out of town then you had to watch some places that you went to … it could get ugly.”
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Yet it would be wrong to paint a picture of blanket racial problems that greeted black players when they visited rival teams. Condredge Holloway of the University of Tennessee argued that the amount of racial tension was directly related to whether the team was winning or losing. Racial problems within a team or from fans surfaced only when that team was losing. Holloway's coach, Bill Battle, remembered, “I don't think [it] was a racial thing, it was a win and lose thing.”
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Black players who excelled were given great respect by opponents. Holloway's flamboyant style won him many plaudits. His “unreal” play was applauded by the opposition. Coach Vince Dooley explained, “I've never seen a quarterback as complete as Holloway” after an impressive performance against Dooley's Georgia Bulldogs in 1973.
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The rivalry between different teams could also produce some bizarre racial abuse from fans. Lester McClain recalled being told that when he was tackled by a black opponent during a match one supporter was heard to shout, “You niggers get off our colored boy!”
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The important point is that these black pioneers in the late 1960s and
early 1970s were engaging in integrated competition at the college level for the first time. They were experiencing this breakthrough many years after black athletes in other areas of the nation. This had an important impact on attitudes toward the intrusion of civil rights activism on the sporting arena. Of the thirty-seven major college campuses that Edwards claims witnessed black athletic revolts in 1968, none were SEC schools.
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In the course of this research I have not found any documentary evidence of a black athletic revolt at any of these schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Unlike schools such as UTEP, which had taken a lead in recruiting black athletes, institutions in the SEC were slow to integrate their teams. As a consequence, there is not the same sort of evidence of student athletes getting involved in activism in the way they did at UTEP and other campuses around the country.

There is evidence, however, that black student activism was a feature of some of these campuses and had the potential to affect athletics programs. In 1970 when Coolidge Ball was recruited by Ole Miss to play basketball there were overtures from the Black Student Union for him to become a racial leader on campus. He was not interested in engaging with political activism, however. As Nadine Cohodas has explained, “Ball's first family on campus was his team…. The brotherhood of athletes was stronger than the brotherhood of skin color.”
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Horace King was approached by representatives of the Black Student Union at the University of Georgia about supporting a campaign to force concessions from the institution's administrators.
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At the University of Tennessee black students sponsored by the Afro-American Student Liberation Force held demonstrations in 1972.
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Haskel Stanback remembered black Olympian Ralph Boston talking to a lot of the black athletes on campus at Tennessee and offering advice to them in their role as African American athletes.
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There was not an absence of political activity relating to the civil rights struggle on these southern campuses; however, a black athletic revolt did not manifest itself in the way it did in other parts of the country.

There was a sense that many of the black athletes, especially those born and raised in the South, were reluctant to get involved in any form of overt civil rights activism. Lester McClain argued, “We kept our mouths closed, found out that you get too much resistance when you open your mouth and say too much.”
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Horace King believed it was his role to give 100 percent as a football player, which was why he had been given a scholarship. He did not need to wear a banner or make an overt statement, as this would just distract him from his job as a football player.
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Holloway
explained that he stayed away from racial politics outside of the football arena. He asserted, “I let Martin Luther King be Martin Luther King…. I appreciate everything that he did but that was not my intent. My intent was to play football and get a degree.”
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White University of Alabama player Johnny Musso remembered that he did not know any African Americans who conformed to the angry black militant athlete stereotype. His black teammates just wanted to get out on the field and play. They did not want to draw attention to themselves as black but simply wanted to be treated like any other student.
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At Ole Miss black football star Ben Williams let his football do the talking. Williams blanked out the band playing “Dixie” and the waving of the Rebel flag. The fans still cheered for him when he brought success for the team.
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Black athletes on many southern campuses were less politically active and more conservative in their outlook than those exposed to more radical influences on the East and West Coasts.