What about the Gridiron?

The highlights of race relations in the South are succinctly as follows.

1869 -The end of the War Between the States. (You won't hear me call it a "Civil War" here because civil means that it was within one country and it was actually two countries fighting each other.)

1896 - Plessy vs. Ferguson divides the races into "seperate but equal" sections of the South.  It never was equal and it stunted the growth of the South because it was more expensive than integration.

1954 - Brown vs The Board of Education rules that seperate schools for Black and White children are unconstitutional and the educational breakdown begins.

1955 - Rosa Parks decides that she doesn't want to get in the back of the racially divided bus that was taking her home from work in Montgomery, AL.  She was a prominent member of several Civil Rights organizations including the NAACP, the WPC and her church.  She had also been kicked off a bus seven years earlier by the same driver that was drving that day for not paying the fare and then walking around to get in the back door of the bus so some historians have suggested that this was premeditated.  Whatever her motivations she rocked the racial world of the South that day.  The driver had her arrested which precipitated a flurry of bus boycotts that brought the economy of the bus system to a screeching halt.  Martin Luther King Jr. became a prominent figure during this time.

1962 - James Meredith becomes the first Black Man to attend the University of Mississippi through nothing short of a full on war.

1963 - MLK gives his famous "I Have a Dream Speech."

1964 - The Civil Rights Act strikes down segregation all together.

So if the impact of an action is directly proportional to its relevance to everyday living then where does college football fall in all of this?  The freedom rides that began in the early 1960s affected the transportation facet of peoples lives and Brown did the same for education as the South began to break down the walls, but just because it was legislated didn't mean it was accepted. 

The NFL had been integrated for decades as had professional baseball and basketball and yet the South remained seperate and unequal.  Football has been played in America since 1869 in the North and 1888 in the South but only in the South was it segregated.  In 1888 an African-American named William Henry Lewis played football at Harvard, one the earliest recorded instances of its kind.  Black athletes dotted the subsequent history as walk-ons and substitutes but widespread dependence on the Black Man for football did not begin until 1938.  That year UCLA had the most integrated football team in the country with a man playing on the team named Jackie Robinson.  Yep.  The same Jackie Robinson that would go on a few years later to break down the barrier of professional baseball.  The popularity of UCLA football with Black fans and athletes alike caused racial walls to break down all over the country.  Except the South.  There were still Black walk-ons and reserve players on teams in the South but none had actually been "recruited" to play at a univeristy.  In 1963 Tom Nugent, the head coach at Maryland University decided it was time.  Nugent sent his assistant, Lee Corso, to find an African-American athlete who would help to inegrate football in the south.  We now know Lee Corso as the obnoxious guy on College Gameday that puts the mascot heads on to show his prediction.  A few months after Martin Luther King Jr. offered his compelling speech, he found Daryll Hill to come play football at Maryland.  While the subsequent process wasn't easy with several schools threatening to forfeit against Maryland and several threats to Hill's life, it had at least begun.  There were a few holdouts, though, the most notable being Bear Bryant of Alabama.

In 1970 the USC Trojans came to town in one of the most anticipated games in Alabama history.  It was the first game of the season and Alabama harbored national championship hopes.  USC brought their runningback Sam Cunningham, an African-American from Alabama, who proceeded to tear apart the Crimson Tide defense.  After a 42-21 rout, wherein Cunningham ran for 135 yards on only 12 carries, Bear Bryant made his way to the visitor's locker room.  He shook hands with Cunningham and told him what an incredible game he had played and walked out.  The next year Bryant had two Black athletes on his team.  If football was religion then Bear Bryant was god, so when he said it was ok to integrate, the rest of the South complied.  This weekend as you watch football, think about how far we've come.  You'll see White and Black players slapping hands, coaches hugging players and fans sitting shoulder to shoulder.  Sure, race issues still exist but not to the magnitude of a past era.  Regarding race we actually live in a pretty good time.