Political Football: Race,College Football, and a Decade to Desegregate Ed Krzemienski Purdue University
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Purdue University Purdue e-Pubs Open Access Dissertations Theses and Dissertations January 2015 Political Football: Race,College Football, and a Decade to Desegregate Ed Krzemienski Purdue University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations Recommended Citation Krzemienski, Ed, "Political Football: Race,College Football, and a Decade to Desegregate" (2015). Open Access Dissertations. 1305. https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/open_access_dissertations/1305 This document has been made available through Purdue e-Pubs, a service of the Purdue University Libraries. Please contact [email protected] for additional information. Graduate School Form 30 Updated 1/15/2015 PURDUE UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL Thesis/Dissertation Acceptance This is to certify that the thesis/dissertation prepared By Edward D. Krzemienski Entitled POLITICAL FOOTBAL: RACE, COLLEGE FOOTBALL, AND A DECADE TO DESEGREGATE For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Is approved by the final examining committee: Randy Roberts Frank Lambert Chair James Farr Kathryn Brownell To the best of my knowledge and as understood by the student in the Thesis/Dissertation Agreement, Publication Delay, and Certification Disclaimer (Graduate School Form 32), this thesis/dissertation adheres to the provisions of Purdue University’s “Policy of Integrity in Research” and the use of copyright material. Approved by Major Professor(s): Randy Roberts Approved by: R. Douglas Hurt 11/9/2015 Head of the Departmental Graduate Program Date i POLITICAL FOOTBALL: RACE, COLLEGE FOOTBALL, AND A DECADE TO DESEGREGATE A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of Purdue University by Edward D. Krzemienski In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy i December 2015 Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii PROLOGUE. THE PHONE CALL .................................................................................... 1 BOOK ONE. THE MULE ................................................................................................ 31 CHAPTER ONE. "SHE'S THE FAIREST OF THE SOUTHLAND" .................. 33 CHAPTER TWO. "FLIM FLAM BIM BAM, OLE MISS BY DAMN!" ............. 50 CHAPTER THREE. "DIXIE'S FOOTBALL PRIDE" .......................................... 73 CHAPTER FOUR. "LIKE KNIGHTS OF OLD WE FIGHT TO HOLD" ........... 99 BOOK TWO. THE CARROT ....................................................................................... 120 CHAPTER FIVE. BIRDS OF PASSAGE ........................................................... 123 CHAPTER SIX. FISHERS OF MEN .................................................................. 143 CHAPTER SEVEN. SEPARATE BUT EQUAL ................................................ 164 CHAPTER EIGHT. A LEVEL PLAYING FIELD ............................................. 188 BOOK THREE. THE STICK ........................................................................................ 210 CHAPTER NINE. CHEERING IN THE PRESS BOX ....................................... 213 CHAPTER TEN. RADICALS AND MUCKRAKERS ...................................... 231 CHAPTER ELEVEN. FOOT SOLDIERS ........................................................... 256 CHAPTER TWELVE. NATURAL GRASS ....................................................... 277 ii CHAPTERTHIRTEEN. "HIS NIGGERS ARE HOLDING MY COLORED BOYS" ................................................................................................................... 301 EPILOGUE. CAN'T OR WON'T .................................................................................. 324 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................. 333 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 341 iii ABSTRACT Krzemienski, Edward D. Ph.D., Purdue University, December 2015. Political Football: Race, College Football, and a Decade to Desegregate. Major Professor: Randy Roberts. This dissertation examines college football in the south primarily during the 1960s. It describes four of the major segregated programs, explores the avenues taken by African- American southerners to compete in football, and examines the processes to desegregate the game at the flagship universities of the deepest south. iii 1 PROLOGUE. THE PHONE CALL A man slipped through a crowd of men half his age. He worked his way toward a table filled with dessert plates, coffee cups, and saucers. Several of the young men at the table continued to pick at their pie slices and drink their coffee, but the person he sought sat away from the table with his chair turned sideways, facing the large open floor at the center of the ballroom. There would be dancing shortly. “Mr. Grier,” he said, putting a hand on the shoulder of the man’s blue sport coat. “You have a telephone call.” Looking down at the embroidered cursive “Pitt” on the left breast of the jacket, and with a smile a bit overlarge, he added, “It’s your mother.” * * * It had been a long trip to the 1956 Sugar Bowl—much longer than the thousand miles separating Pittsburgh and New Orleans. The game marked the return of Pitt to national football prominence. In his first year as the Panthers’ head coach, John 1 Micholson led the team to a 7-3 record and its first bowl game in nineteen years. It had been an even longer trip for Bobby Grier. At Massillon High School in Ohio, the most famous prep football program in the nation, Grier led the Tigers to three consecutive state championships, and was a major recruiting victory for the Pitt program. He knew how to win and moving from a high school powerhouse to a collegiate one 2 suited him well. What made his trip to the Sugar Bowl difficult was something much more basic than even the simplicity of playing a game and running with a ball. Grier was black and set to be the first African-American to play in the Sugar Bowl, but for a few intense weeks it looked as if his participation might get held up at the border of southern tradition.1 In November 1955, the Georgia Tech Board of Regents accepted the Sugar Bowl committee’s bid to play in the January 2nd bowl at Tulane Stadium. That the University of Pittsburgh fielded a black player did not go unnoticed. Roy Harris, founder of the Augusta “States’ Rights Council Executive Committee,” urged Tech head coach Bobby Dodd not to play the game to prevent “any breakdown of our laws, customs and traditions of racial segregation.” In response, Robert Arnold, Chairman of the Board of Regents, pointed out that tradition was, in fact, at work. On several occasions in the past five years, both the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech played teams with blacks, including Tech’s 1953 game with Notre Dame. If a decision against Grier occurred, Arnold continued, it had to come from the Sugar Bowl committee since it was their town 2 hosting the “offending” player. Also, Grier was listed as a back-up and had only played a few minutes since mid-season.2 Arnold’s response failed to reassure the likes of Harris for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, the desegregated games he mentioned occurred at the northern school’s field. The game with Notre Dame, for instance, took place in South Bend and certainly 1 Two articles deal specifically with the 1956 Sugar Bowl. See Charles H. Martin, “Integrating New Year’s Day: The Racial Politics of College Bowl Games in the American South.” Journal of Sport History (Fall 1997), 358-77 and Gilbert Caldwell, “Sugar Bowl 1956: A Southern Armageddon?” American Renaissance (December 2001), 1, 3-5. 2 Atlanta Constitution, December 1, 1955. 3 held to northern tradition of integration. Including an African-American player in a game held in the south would constitute a departure from tradition—the southern tradition of Jim Crow segregation. Whether it was the decision of Tech’s Board of Regents or New Orleans’s Sugar Bowl committee made no difference. A game with a black player on southern soil was an affront to all southern society and its historic social standards. On the other hand, and really more to the point, games held in 1953, like the Georgia tilt with the Fighting Irish, might just as well have been examples from another millennium. For segregationists, the line in the sand that defined their stance a century before had been re- traced in 1954 by the U.S. Supreme Court, when it ruled separate but equal public schools unconstitutional and demanded desegregation with “all deliberate speed.” With the ink on the Brown v. Board of Education decision still wet, segregationists were not just up for a fight, they were in one. If Arnold and the Board of Regents believed that only a fringe group from Augusta opposed a desegregated football field, they were incorrect. The day after Arnold issued the Board’s response to the Augusta group, but a full week after Tech accepted the 3 bid, Georgia governor Marvin Griffin stated his position on the subject. The 1954 campaign trail for southern governorships was littered with promises to fight to the death against the Brown decision. Marvin Griffin ran on a platform that promised to maintain the division of the races, “come hell or high water.” It worked, and now on the eve of 1956 Griffin proved to be true to his word. On December 2nd, he sent the Georgia Tech Board of Regents a telegram that began by reiterating his