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

JRN 362 / SPS 362 - Lecture Twelve

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Page 1: JRN 362  / SPS 362 - Lecture Twelve

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of FootballRich Hanley, Associate ProfessorLecture Twelve

Page 2: JRN 362  / SPS 362 - Lecture Twelve

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Page 3: JRN 362  / SPS 362 - Lecture Twelve

JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Review• Football as perceived by its

critics and the broader culture underwent a dramatic shift in the 1920s and 1930s.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 Fitzgerald exposed football’s psychic state for what it was, not as it was imagined.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 nipping at its heels for attention.

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Review• 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 decades.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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, for example.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• At Harvard, William H. Lewis was

among the first African Americans to play football at an Eastern school.

• He was the first African American named All-American, in 1895.

• Lewis coached at Harvard from

1895-1906.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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."

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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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.

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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.

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Segregation• Instead, the press focused on the

characteristics of the physical form in its primitive state, neutralizing the capacity of black athletes to assimilate within the culture.

• That attitude reflected a determination to keep black athletes from competing with white athletes.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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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.

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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 commencement address in 1930.

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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."

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Meanwhile, southern colleges

sought to achieve parity on the gridiron with schools elsewhere in the U.S.

• Scholars Christopher Nehls and Andrew Doyle concluded that the south did this to “restore southern masculinity” and to “gain some revenge” for the region.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• When the University of Alabama

under coach Wallace Wade was invited to the Rose Bowl in 1926 to meet Washington, the South united behind its all-white team for representing the region’s culture of masculinity and traditional values.

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Segregation• It did not matter that three other

teams had declined invitations before the committee reached out to Alabama for the trip to Pasadena.

• It would serve as “a sublime tonic for a people buffeted by a historical legacy of military defeat, poverty, and alienation …, “ wrote Doyle.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 wires.

• Alabama won a hard-fought 20-19 battle, and the South rejoiced and credited its traditions for the win.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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."

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Yale went so far as to help the

University of Georgia beyond a simple agreement to play there when the school was seeking to establish its football credentials – and begin to pay off bonds for its new stadium.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 one of the most endearing in college football today.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 there (that sign is from Lancaster, Ohio, left).

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 because of it.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• So how long did the segregation

in the south last?

• The last two college teams to integrate did so in 1972.

• The teams: Alabama and Mississippi.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• 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 National Football League from 1933-1946.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Owners claimed the ban was

imaginary but the facts show that no African-American players participated in NFL games during that period.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Joe Lillard was another player

who excelled in the NFL until the ban. A Boston columnist wrote this:

• “Lillard is not only the ace of the Cardinal backfield but he is one of the greatest all-around players that has ever displayed his wares on any gridiron in this section of the country.”

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Segregation• Lillard, however, was a

boisterous player who brought swagger to the field, which disturbed players who thought he violated the unwritten code.

• Lillard was released at the end of the 1932 season.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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Segregation• Evidence from the owner of the

Washington Redskins confirms the statements by the coach.

• George Preston Marshall founded the Boston Braves in 1932, changed the team’s name to the Redskins in 1933, and moved the team to Washington in 1937.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.”

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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.”

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 sought to integrate the game from the start as a pro.

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Pollard’s older brother who

coached Lincoln University influenced him to attend college after his high school.

• Fritz Pollard enrolled at Brown, in Providence, Rhode Island.

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Segregation• In 1916, Pollard became the first

African-American to play in the Rose Bowl (vs. Washington) as he led Brown to the game.

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Segregation• One of Pollard’s teammates in

that game?

• Wallace Wade, who later coached Alabama and led that team to the 1926 Rose Bowl win that gave southern football national credibility despite segregation that barred blacks from the field and stands.

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Segregation• In 1917, Walter Camp selected

him to his All-America team, making Pollard the first African-American to be so named to a backfield position.

• He graduated from Brown in 1919 and pursued a pro career when he signed with the Akron Indians to play a game against the Massillon Tigers, an all-white team.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

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 was Branch Rickey, who signed Jackie Robinson.

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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.

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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.

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Segregation• But in his first full season in

1920, Pollard led the name – 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.

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Segregation• In all, 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.

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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.

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JRN 362/SPS 362 Story of Football

Segregation• Pollard sought to get back into the

NFL in the 1930s, but to no avail.

• The NFL’s decision to permit Boston to move to Washington gave the league a toehold in the segregated South, away from the football crescent and the cradle of the game in the East.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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. During his pro career, there were times when he had to change his uniform at Mr. Mead's cigar store or even in his car.”