Integration and Black Protest in Michigan State University Football During the 1960S Author(S): John Matthew Smith Source: Michigan Historical Review, Vol
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"Breaking the Plane": Integration and Black Protest in Michigan State University Football during the 1960s Author(s): John Matthew Smith Source: Michigan Historical Review, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Fall, 2007), pp. 101-129 Published by: Central Michigan University Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20174226 . Accessed: 05/11/2013 20:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Central Michigan University is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Michigan Historical Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:10:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions "Breaking the Plane": Integration and Black Protest inMichigan State University Football during the 1960s by John Matthew Smith Before top-ranked Notre Dame played second-ranked Michigan State University (MSU) in November 1966, the media built up the contest as "the game of the century." It was the first time in college meet so season. football history that the top two teams would late in the be Millions of college-football fans anticipated what they hoped would "the greatest battle since Hector fought Achilles."1 Equally remarkable team: start was the racial makeup of each Michigan State would twelve one. so black players while Notre Dame had only By 1966, MSU fielded team was to many black players that the often compared those of Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Grambling, Florida State star Agricultural and Mechanical, and Morgan State.2 For Michigan a never player Charles "Bubba" Smith, black Texas native who had an went to this be played in integrated stadium until he college, would career. State the pinnacle of his college If Smith symbolized Michigan football, Jim Lynch, a white Irish-Cathohc Ohioan and All-American linebacker, epitomized the kind of player for whom Notre Dame fans In addition to the staff of the Michigan Historical Review and the anonymous referees, I would like to thank Nora Faires, Mitch Kachun, John Larson, and Randy Roberts for their support, their careful reading of earlier drafts of this article, and their suggestions for revision. 1 as "Fans, Bets, and Alcohol Abound Nation Sets for Big Football Game," Wall Street All: Notre Journal, November 18, 1966. See also Mike Celizic, The Biggest Game of Them Dame, & a Michigan State, and the Fall of '66 (New York Simon Schuster, 1992). Celizic, journalist and a account to Poll Bowl" and the Notre Dame alumnus, provides fine of the buildup 'The a game itself. However, while his work does discuss the fact that MSU had large number of in context of the civil black players, there is little analysis of the significance of the game the movement. rights 2 was on Dame's Souvenir Alan Page the only black player Notre varsity squad. Program, versus Lawrence Michigan State Notre Dame, November 19, 1966; Casey, "Sports You Ledger," Michigan Chronicle, October 30,1965; "And He's Know What," Baltimore Afro American, October 18,1966. Michigan Historical Review 33:2 (Fall 2007): 101-129 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:10:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 102 Michigan Historical Review a were used to cheering. At pep rally two days before the game, on Notre Dame's pristine campus in South Bend, Indiana, forty-five as hundred students and fans flooded the old field house the marching band played the school's fight song. With chants of "cheer, cheer for Old Notre Dame" ringing from the rafters, the overwhelmingly white next to a male crowd hanged Bubba Smith in effigy sign that read "LYNCH 'EM."3 were Coaches and athletes often hanged in effigy by the fans and a students of opposing schools, but "hanging" Smith next to sign that some said lynch 'em suggested mixture of insensitivity and outright racial bias at Notre Dame. Two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and nearly twenty years after Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball's color barrier, the "dummy in the green uniform with a not a number 95" represented only Bubba Smith but rejection of racial equality.4 Well into the twentieth century lynching had expressed and enforced white supremacy in the South, and the powerful memory of mob rule was reinforced for African Americans in the 1960s when or were their churches were bombed, they clubbed and hosed by or was pohce stoned by white crowds. Notre Dame's rally emblematic of a dominant white sports culture that resisted integration. The racial makeup of each school's football team illustrates the uneven progress of the civil rights movement. On one end of the spectrum, Notre Dame represented how hard blacks had to struggle to move beyond token athletic integration at predominantly white institutions. At the other end, Michigan State's squad was an example of what a fully integrated team might look hke. While many northern football programs firmly beheved that it would be dangerous to play more blacks than whites, in 1966 Michigan State's defense started eight black players and three whites. The offensive backfield started two a black running backs and black quarterback, and the team's two an era captains were black. In that accepted without question the myths more that teams could not win by playing blacks than whites and that to black players did not have the intelligence handle leadership were positions, Michigan State's 1965 and 1966 football teams unhke any others in the prior history of integrated college football. Not only were Michigan State's teams in those two years fully were integrated, but also they the best that the school's head coach 3 Roy Damer, "Frenzied Irish Fans Give Heroes Sendoff," Chicago Tribune, November 18,1966. 4 Ibid. This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:10:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Michigan State University Football during the 1960s 103 ever a Hugh "Duffy" Daugherty had fielded, finishing combined 19-1 as as 1 well sharing the 1965 national championship. What separated these MSU teams from others in the country was a nucleus of talented black players, many from the South. In the late 1950s a source Daugherty took advantage of talent previously untapped (at least by coaches at primarily white schools) by developing relationships with black high-school coaches at coaching clinics in the South. era Michigan State's integrated teams were created in an when to come television had begun of age; young athletes and high-school coaches could see blacks and whites lining up beside one another. a Despite the widespread perception that Daugherty had built color-blind football program, Michigan State's black athletes later challenged the assumption that all of the university's sports programs were free of racism by boycotting spring practice in 1968. At the height of the Black Power movement, these black athletes protested racial discrimination in MSU's athletic department and transformed their privileged position into one of empowerment. Thus, football a provided way for Michigan State's black athletes to challenge on segregation both and off the field. For the first half of the twentieth century, the integration of team at same Michigan State's football moved the slow pace of most other northern schools. In the Big Ten, George Jewett in 1890 on became the first African American to play a University of Michigan football team, followed by Fred Patterson at Ohio State University, Preston Eagleson at Indiana University, Jewett again at Northwestern University, and Kinney Holbrook at the University of Iowa.5 At MSU, tackle Gideon Smith broke another barrier when he became the school's first African American varsity athlete in 1913.6 By the 1930s African Americans were making significant on contributions football fields throughout the Big Ten. Many of on these athletes played prominent roles their respective teams, including Jesse Babb and Fitzhugh Lyons at Indiana University, at William Bell Ohio State University, Ellsworth Harpole at the at University of Minnesota, Willis Ward the University of Michigan, at and James McCrary and William Baker Michigan State, among 5 to Arthur Ashe, Jr., A Hard Road Glory?Football: The African American Athlete in Football (New York: Amistad Press, 1993), 71-72; Charles H. Martin, "The Color Line in Midwestern College Sports, 1890-1960," Indiana Magazine ofHistory 48 (June 2002): 88 to 92; Gregory Bond, Madison, Wis., email author, August 27, 2006. 6 The Wolverine (Michigan State University yearbook), 1914, 151-52. This content downloaded from 35.8.11.3 on Tue, 5 Nov 2013 20:10:20 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 104 Michigan Historical Review was a others. Yet, each of these athletes victimized by "gendeman's an agreement," unwritten rule that prevented African Americans from playing against southern opponents. During the decade between 1935 and 1945, Michigan State's head coach Charles Bachman played only one black player until Horace Smith joined the squad in 1946. That season, the talented halfback played in every game except those against Mississippi were State University and the University of Kentucky, which segregated institutions.