JRN 362 - Lecture Eleven

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football
Rich Hanley, Associate Professor
Lecture Eleven

Review
• Football as perceived by its critics
and the broader culture underwent a
dramatic shift in the period of the
1920s through the 1940s.

Review
• First, Hollywood took college football
and used it as the animating
motivation to tell stories centered on
the game, creating the visual
mythology of college for millions of
Americans.
• But critics had their say, too.

Review
• The Carnegie Report revealed
college football to be closer to the
entertainment than to the educational
mission of schools who fielded
teams.
• And writers such as F. Scott
Fitzgerald exposed football’s psychic
state for what it was, not as it was

Review
• Even though college football roared
in the 1930s as an extraordinary
spectacle beloved by millions, it was
no longer considered by all to be this
rite of passage toward manhood.
• College football, in fact, had matured,
as did its relationship to the pro
game.

Segregation
• But football’s greatest sin remained
unexposed even though it was visible
for all to see if they looked for it.
• The game had always been largely
segregated between whites and
blacks, and it would remain that way
despite advances in civil rights over
the mid 20th century.

Segregation
• For all his writings about poor men
and small men becoming football
heroes, Camp never included Black
Americans as players or even friends
of players in his works of fiction.
• No Blacks are athletes in his books.

Segregation
• College football as described to date
was generally played by white
students against white students.
• But there were exceptions.
• Colleges founded for African
Americans started football teams as
early as the 1890s.

Segregation
• Black colleges had been playing
football since 1892 when the first
game between historically black
colleges took place.
• Biddle and Livingstone met in North
Carolina in the first game between
colleges founded for African-
Americans.

Segregation
• William H. Lewis was the first African
American to play eastern collegiate
football, competing for Amherst from
1889 to 1891.
• He later became the first African
American to be named to Walter
Camp’s All-American as center in
1895 for Harvard, where he also

Segregation
• At Michigan, George Jewett starred in
1890 and 1892, standing as the first
African-American player at the school
and, later at Northwestern, and in the
collection of schools that would later
be called The Big Ten.

Segregation
• Whites and blacks both adopted
football as a college sport for the
same reasons, only they did so in
parallel universes that would not
intersect for generations.
• White fans watched white games;
African American fans watched
African American games.

Segregation
• Colleges such as Wiley in Texas,
presented football and other sports in
language that Walter Camp would
understand:
• “ … the best education is that which
develops strong, robust body as well
as other parts of the human makeup.

Segregation
• Patrick Smith’s study of the
emergence of athletics at historically
black colleges suggested that,
“athletics seemed to offer at least a
limited means through which
historically African American schools
could become assimilated, on their
own terms, to a national collegiate
culture.”

Segregation
• In the first decade of the 20th century,
African-American participation in
football was thought to be a
mechanism to “soften racial
prejudices“ and to advance "the
cause of blacks everywhere,” an
editorial in Howard University’s
newspaper argued in 1924.

Segregation
• “Athletics is the universal language,”
it concluded.
• Yet the press of the late 19th and 20th
centuries up until World War II did not
cover black college football under the
same rubric of that for white football:
manly courage and heroic character.

Segregation
• Instead, the press focused on the
characteristics of the physical form,
neutralizing the capacity of Black
athletes to assimilate within the
culture.
• That attitude reflected tactics to keep
Black athletes from competing with
white athletes.

Segregation
• In response to enforced segregation
and rapid growth, black colleges
formed the Colored Intercollegiate
Athletic Association (CIAA) to
regulate football, much as the NCAA
had been doing for white colleges
beginning in 1906.

Segregation
• The schools developed traditions
distinct from white colleges.
• One was known as the rabble, a
halftime event in which students who
carried their instruments to the game
performed and the crowd took the
field alongside them to dance.

Segregation
• Yet like white college football in the
1920s,Black college football was not
immune to criticism or scandal.
• W.E.B Du Bois, a leading black
intellectual of the 20th century,
delivered a scathing critique on the
standing of college athletics during a
1930 speech.

Segregation
• “Our college man today, is, on the
average, a man untouched by real
culture. He deliberately surrenders to
selfish and even silly ideals,
swarming into semi-professional
athletics and Greek letter societies,
and affecting to despise scholarship
and the hard grind of study and
research."

Segregation
• Du Bois and George Streator
proposed sweeping changes to black
college football that would anticipate
reforms in the white college game,
including three-year eligibility limits,
forcing players who changed schools
to sit out a year, and the institution of
faculty control over athletics.

Segregation
• Even with such reforms, Black
college football teams and Black
players remained on the outside of
white college football.
• Colleges in the south would generally
not play teams from the north,
midwest or west that refused to
bench their Black players for games.

Segregation
• The integrated schools outside of the
south largely complied.
• Schools in the mid-southern states
such as North Carolina would relax
the requirement from time to time if it
presented a chance to secure a bowl
bid. But that was rare.

Segregation
• Meanwhile, southern colleges sought
to achieve parity on the gridiron with
schools elsewhere.
• Scholars Christopher Nehls and
Andrew Doyle concluded that the
south did this to “restore southern
masculinity” and to “gain some
revenge.”

Segregation
• In the 1920s, the University of
Georgia president S.V. Sanford said:
“football meets that unforgotten
needs of the race which in the days
of chivalry had to be satisfied by the
tournament and the joust.”

Segregation
• When the Rose Bowl committee
invited the University of Alabama
under coach Brown alumni Wallace
Wade to Pasadena in 1926 to meet
Washington, the South rallied behind
its all-white team for representing the
region’s culture of masculinity and
traditional values.

Segregation
• It did not matter that three other
teams had declined invitations before
the committee reached out to
Alabama.
• It would serve as “a sublime tonic for
a people buffeted by a historical
legacy of military defeat, poverty, and
alienation …, ’’ wrote Doyle.

Segregation
• It turned out to be so much more.
Thousands gathered in a
Montgomery, Alabama, theater and in
newspaper offices to listen to reports
read off the telegraph.
• Alabama won a hard-fought 20-19
battle, and the south rejoiced and
credited its traditions for the win.

Segregation
• Alabama returned to the 1927 Rose
Bowl and tied Stanford, 7-7.
• School president George Denny said:
“I come back with my head a little
higher and my soul a little more
inspired to win the battle for this
splendid Anglo-Saxon race of the
South.’’

Segregation
• Southern university presidents built
on Alabama’s success by raising
money for new stadia to showcase
the teams and the region’s way of
life.
• Segregation would harden because
of it.

Segregation
• Schools outside of the south could be
said to have supported segregation at
least indirectly by referring coaches
such as Wade of Brown to schools in
the region and directly by agreeing to
play in front of all-white crowds.

Segregation
• Yale, which did not have a Black
football player until 1946 when Levi
Jackson of New Haven enrolled at
the school, helped the University of
Georgia beyond a simple agreement
to play there when the school was
seeking to establish its football
reputation.

Segregation
• On October 12, 1929, Georgia beat
Yale, 15-0, in the stadium’s
dedication game.
• The crowd of 30,000 – including the
governors of nine southern states –
was the largest at the time to watch a
football game in the region.

Segregation
• Yale gave the host university half of
its share of the gate receipts to help
pay off the construction loans.
• That illustrates how schools outside
the region gave southern football and
its tradition of segregation credibility –
and financial support.

Segregation
• The UGA stadium was named for
Sanford, its president at the time of
construction.
• It still stands – greatly expanded –
today – and the expression “between
the hedges” it spawned remains part
of college football.

Segregation
• That all leads to a question of why
the south became and remained
segregated under what amounted to
a system of apartheid for more than
100 years after the Civil War and
Reconstruction.

Segregation
• Given the reaction to Alabama’s
Rose Bowl win, the white South
looked upon football as an instrument
to showcase its masculinity and pride
and this used the game to promote its
“heritage” during a time of change.

Segregation
• “Alabama's break-out win restored
faith in southern masculinity and
gained some revenge for the region
in general,” wrote scholar Christopher
Nehls

Segregation
• And the use of the Confederate flag
at college football games stands as
an example of that expression.

Segregation
• In a speech at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville in 1954,
historian C. Vann Woodward said
that southern whites adopted
segregation as a strategy to suppress
upwardly mobile African-Americans.
• The Confederate battle flag stood as
a symbol.

Segregation
• For example, students at the
University of Virginia and elsewhere
in the south adopted the Confederate
flag as part of their presentation of
support for their schools and
mythological heritage.

Segregation
• Virginia students, in fact, brought the
flag to New Haven in October 1941
for a game against Yale, waving it in
the stands as the two teams – all
white – played.

Segregation
• All-white southern schools refused to
play teams with black players, often
offering to bench their best players if
the opposing northern team sat their
African-American players as
happened in 1934 when Michigan
and Georgia Tech played.

Segregation
• As on the field, the stands at college
football games in the south were
white. When African-Americans were
permitted entry into a game, they
were segregated in a far corner of the
end zone.

Segregation
• With their access foreclosed by
segregation, more and more African-
American students enrolled in
colleges outside of the south.
• Football teams in the East, Midwest
and West were integrated but not
necessarily the towns such as
Lancaster, Ohio.

Segregation
• Jack Trice at Iowa State became the
first African American to play for Iowa
State in 1923.
• Even though the team was now
integrated, many hotels in the
Midwest were not.

Segregation
• On the night before the Oct. 6, 1923,
game at Minnesota, Trice had to stay
in a separate hotel from his
teammates.
• And he wrote a letter while there.

Segregation
• “To whom it may concern: My
thoughts just before the first real
college game of my life. The honor of
my race, family, and self is at stake.
Everyone is expecting me to do big
things. I will! My whole body and soul
are to be thrown recklessly about on
the field tomorrow.

Segregation
• “Every time the ball is snapped, I will
be trying to do more than my part. On
all defensive plays I must break
through the opponent’s line and stop
the play in their territory.

Segregation
• “Beware of massive interference,
fight low with your eyes open and
toward the play. Roll block the
interference. Watch out for
crossbucks and reverse end runs. Be
on your toes every minute if you
expect to make good.”

Segregation
• Trice was injured in the game but
continued to play.
• Two days later and after a
Minneapolis doctor cleared him to
travel, he died of internal bleeding.
• Iowa State refused to play Minnesota
until 1989.

Segregation
• Iowa State held Trice’s funeral on its
campus.
• The university would later name its
football stadium in his honor.
• It is the only stadium in Division I
football named after an African-
American player.

Segregation
• Darryl Hill became the first Black
player to compete in a southern
conference when he took the field for
Maryland against North Carolina
State on Sept. 21, 1963.
• Hill, a running back, was recruited by
assistant coach Lee Corso, now of
ESPN.

Segregation
• "I, by far, had my best games in the
south," Hill said in a news story on
the 50th anniversary of when he first
enrolled at Maryland in 1962. "When
they shut my mother out at Clemson
and wouldn't let her into the stadium,
I set an ACC single-game pass-
catching record …"

Segregation
• Football in the Southwest
Conference, a collection of schools
mainly from Texas, formed in 1915,
remained segregated until September
10, 1966, when John Westbrook took
the field late in a game against
Syracuse to become the first Black
player in SWC.

Segregation
• In 1965, coach Hayden Fry of
Southern Methodist University
recruited Jerry LeVias, a running
back and wide receiver, making a
public commitment to an African-
American player as a potential star.

Segregation
• Historian Richard Pennington wrote
that LeVias, whose first varsity
season began a week after
Westbrook’s in 1966, was “truly the
Jackie Robinson of the SWC,
suffering the same kinds of hateful
treatment Robinson had in integrating
major league baseball in 1947 ...

Segregation
• “Some, though not all, of his
teammates and coaches were not
happy to have him there, opponents
regularly taunted and sought to hurt
him in ways both obvious and subtle,
some officials were biased against
him, some fans screamed racial
abuse, and there were countless
mean-spirited letters and phone
calls.”

Segregation
• In the Southeastern Conference,
Nate Northington became the first
African-American player in the league
when he played for Kentucky in 1967.

Segregation
• Several Southeastern Conference
teams incrementally recruited
African-American football players
after that but the league would
become fully integrated until 1972
when Mississippi and Louisiana State
University became the last schools to
do so. Alabama, Georgia and
Vanderbilt integrated football in 1971.

Segregation
• In 1969, Texas became the last all-
white team to win a national
championship.
• The university celebrated the 50th
anniversary of the championship in
2019 without remarking on the team’s
segregated status.

Segregation
• Meanwhile, the pro game was
integrated from the start, as some 13
African-Americans played in the NFL
between 1920 and 1933.
• But African-Americans were
unofficially banned from the NFL from
1933-1946.

Segregation
• Owners claimed the ban was
imaginary, but the facts show that no
African-American players participated
in NFL games during that period.

Segregation
• Ray Kemp, the last African-American
to play before the segregationists
assumed control of the league, said
this after his release from Pittsburgh:
• “It was my understanding that there
was a gentlemen’s agreement in the
league that there would be no
blacks.”

Segregation
• Joe Lillard was another player who
excelled in the NFL until the ban. A
Boston columnist wrote:
• “Lillard is not only the ace of the
(Chicago) Cardinal backfield, but he
is one of the greatest all-around
players that has ever” played.

Segregation
• Lillard brought swagger to the field,
which disturbed players who thought
he violated the code of humility as
established by Walter Camp in the
19th century.
• Chicago released Lillard at the end of
the 1932 season as the NFL moved
to segregation.

Segregation
• His former coach Paul Schlissler
said:
• “ … he was a marked man, and I
don’t mean that just the southern
boys took it out on him either; after a
while whole teams Northern and
Southern alike, would give Joe the
works, and I’d have to take him out.”

Segregation
• The owner of the Washington
franchise echoed Schlissler’s
remarks.
• George Marshall founded the Boston
Braves from the remnants of the
Newark Tornadoes in 1932, changed
the team’s name to the Redskins in
1933, and moved them to

Segregation
• According to a scholar who studied
the ban, George Marshall said “that
‘white players, especially those from
the South, would go to extremes to
physically disable them,’ so they were
kept off the field in their own best
interests.

Segregation
• George Halas, founder of the
Chicago Bears and a key figure in
NFL history, reportedly said, “I don’t
know. Probably the game didn’t have
the appeal to black players at the
time.

Segregation
• But an African-American player by
the name of Fritz Pollard who played
against Halas in high school and later
coached against him in the NFL saw
something different: racism.
• That was something Pollard endured
his entire life.

Segregation
• Pollard stands as the most prominent
African-American football player of
the first third of the 20th century who
excelled on the field and successfully
sought to integrate the NFL from his
start as a pro.

Segregation
• Born in 1884 in Chicago, Pollard was
the son of a Civil War veteran and
successful barber who named him
Frederick Douglass, after the
abolitionist.
• But his German and Luxembourger
neighbors called him Fritz, a
nickname in those countries.

Segregation
• Pollard’s older brother Leslie, who
played at Dartmouth, coached
football at Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania, and influenced him to
attend college after his high school.
• Fritz Pollard enrolled at Brown, in
Providence, Rhode Island.

Segregation
• “Pollard appeared on the collegiate
scene at the right time for his shifty
brand of play,” wrote Julie Des
Jardins in her biography of Walter
Camp (2015). “The legalization of the
forward pass had opened up the
ground game and allowed his
sidestepping to become a formidable
weapon.’’

Segregation
• In 1916, Pollard became the first
African-American to play in the Rose
Bowl after he led Brown to a 5-3-1
record entering the game, including a
3-0 win over Yale at the Yale Bowl as
fans shouted the n-word at him.
• Washington State contained Pollard
and won, 14-0.

Segregation
• One of Pollard’s teammates in that
Rose Bowl? Wallace Wade.
• As noted earlier in this lecture, Wade,
coached Alabama and led that team
to the 1926 Rose Bowl victory that
gave southern football national
credibility despite segregation that
barred blacks from the field and

Segregation
• Also, ironically as it would turn out,
William Henry “Lone Star” Dietz, who
posed as a Native American for
decades, coached Washington State.
• That links Dietz to Pollard and he
would later connect to Marshall and
current Washington owner Dan
Snyder.

Segregation
• Deitz was born in Illinois and claimed
to be a Native American. He played
football with Jim Thorpe for the
Carlisle Indian Industrial School in
Pennsylvania from 1909-11 under
coach Pop Warner.
• In Carlisle’s upset over Harvard in
1911, Dietz played tackle.

Segregation
• Dietz coached the service football
Mare Island Marines to the 1918
Rose Bowl against Camp Lewis, an
Army team.
• In 1919, Dietz faced charges that he
falsely represented himself as a
Native American to avoid the World
War I draft, spending 30 days in jail.

Segregation
• After coaching at several colleges,
the NFL’s Boston Braves hired Dietz
as coach in 1933.
• Two months later, Marshall changed
the team name to the Redskins when
he moved them from Braves Field to
Fenway Park.

Segregation
• Dietz designed the Redskins’ new
uniforms, selecting the red and gold
colors of the Carlisle Indian Industrial
School and designing the logo that
featured a headdress.

Segregation
• At the time, Marshall said he changed
the name of the team because he
didn’t want them to be confused with
baseball’s Boston Braves.
• Later, Marshall said he named the
team in honor of Dietz, who claimed
to be a Native American when he
wasn’t.

Segregation
• In 2014, evidence from a 1933
Associated Press dispatch revealed
Marshall’s original reason –
marketing – to rename the team.
• Snyder would defend the name of the
team as an homage to Deitz ‘s
heritage – fake as it turned out to be -
until 2020.

Segregation
• Pollard, meanwhile, continued to play
football after the Rose Bowl loss to
Dietz’s Washington State team.

Segregation
• In 1917, Walter Camp selected
Pollard to his All-America team,
making the Brown halfback the first
African-American to be named to a
backfield position.
• Pollard graduated from Brown in
1919 and pursued a pro career,
signing with Akron to play against all-

Segregation
• Pollard was not the first African-
American to sign a pro contract.
• Charles Follis, of Ohio, signed a pro
contract with the Shelby Blues in
1904.
• Among his teammates? Branch
Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson.

Segregation
• Pollard encountered racism from the
start.
• “Akron was worse than Georgia at
that time, because it was full of
Southerners who had gone up there
to work during the war,” he said in an
interview years later.

Segregation
• “Dire threats have come from the
Tiger camp of just what they are
going to do the little colored chap,” a
newspaper reported before the game.
• Massillon taunted Pollard en route to
a 13-6 victory.

Segregation
• But in his first full season in 1920,
Pollard led the team – now known as
the Pros – to a record of 8-0-3.
• Akron was declared the league’s first
champion, remaining as one of only
four unbeaten teams in NFL history.

Segregation
• From 1919-1926, he played and
coached in the American
Professional Football Association and
the NFL, becoming the first African-
American quarterback in the NFL, for
Akron in 1923, and the first head
coach, for Hammond, Indiana.

Segregation
• Pollard played for the Providence
Steamrollers against the Chicago
Bears at Braves Field in Boston. •
That December 1925 game was
promoted as a all-star match between
Pollard – and Red Grange.

Segregation
• Pollard sought to get back into the
NFL in the 1930s, but to no avail.
• In 1937, the NFL permitted Marshall
to move the team to Washington to
give the league a toehold in the
segregated south. Dietz was longer
with the team.

Segregation
• Pollard endured other indignities
throughout his life despite his
accomplishments.
• In 1954, the Brown Alumni Club
barred the greatest player in school
history from its rooms.

Segregation
• That year, Pollard was inducted in the
College Football of Hall of Fame.
• The Pro Football Hall of Fame
enshrined Pollard in 2005, 19 years
after his death in 1986 at the age of
92. His grandson delivered the
acceptance speech. In part, it read:

Segregation
• “During both his college and pro
careers he was a target of multiple
incidents of racial abuse. Many times,
he was the only black player on either
team, and probably the only person
of color in the stadium. He was
singled out for rough play and
endured racial taunts that were
customary for the time.

Segregation
• “The haunting sounds of Bye-Bye
Black Bird, a song that was sung in
his college days, still stung until the
day he passed away. The abuse was
at times so bad that he had to be
escorted to the field just before the
kickoff.”

JRN 362 - Lecture Eleven

Recomendados

Recomendados

Más contenido relacionado

La actualidad más candente

La actualidad más candente (10)

Similar a JRN 362 - Lecture Eleven

Similar a JRN 362 - Lecture Eleven (18)

Más de Rich Hanley

Más de Rich Hanley (20)

Último

Último (20)

JRN 362 - Lecture Eleven