SMQ: Rethinking how we talk about racial integration in college football

The common tale about integration in college football centers on southern schools in the Jim Crow era. What other impacts did integration have on the sport?

When we tend to think about racial integration in college football, our focus tends to drift to the Southwest Conference and the Southeastern Conference. Situated as they were in states where Jim Crow laws were firmly anchored within the local society, schools in these conferences were forced to confront the changing nature of both the game and the nation at large.

In this common telling of the linear struggle for inclusion, names like Baylor’s John Hill Westbrook and SMU’s Jerry LeVias are a deservedly huge part of the historical record. For the SEC, Nate Northington of Kentucky lore looms large over the story of integration in the conference. When it comes to the ACC, Maryland’s Darryl Hill has the distinction of being the first black player in that league.

These are all names that should be celebrated. Their contributions to the sport helped pave the way for a more equitable system for all, not to mention a better product for fans of college football. The game as we know it today would look radically different without teams focusing on recruiting the best talent irrespective of race.

At the same time, though, focusing predominantly on these stories can cause us to miss some of the deeper tendrils of the story. Integration was not a process solely confined to the south, by any means, nor was it a story where everyone came out the other side as a winner.

These are the stories that have my mind spinning as an accompaniment to my morning coffee this weekend. In this week’s Sunday Morning Quarterback, let’s look beyond the traditional narratives about integration in college football to focus on several overlooked aspects of the story.

Integration beyond SEC: An uneven march to CFB equality

It is an all-too-common trend not just in college football but in American history to conflate the struggle for equal opportunity and the civil rights movement as exclusively southern in scope. But that too easily flattens a process that in reality came in fits and starts. We can look at the SEC as the last bastion of reticence, but that can also ignore early adopters of integration in the south.

When we focus too closely on the south, further, it allows hesitant programs outside the south too easily off the hook. Some programs were far quicker to adopt integration than others, so let’s talk about that story more completely.

Prior to 1931, only 14 college football programs were integrated. Six of those 14 are West Coast schools that now make up half of the membership of the Pac-12. That includes Oregon, which until 1925 had exclusionary laws on the books that barred blacks not just from owning property in Oregon but that barred their entry into the state altogether.

The year after the repeal, Bobby Williams and Charles Robinson became the first two black players to suit up for the Webfoots. But the right to represent the university on the gridiron did not extend to the right to reside with the rest of the campus population in the dorms. Instead, the administration at first segregated the two men from the rest of the student body living on campus before capitulating in the face of protests from their teammates and other students.

The ability to represent a school, then, did not mean that the school in turn always represented black students to their best interest. And integration at one state school did not signify a broader change at a state level. While Oregon integrated in 1926, for instance, it took another quarter-century before their rivals up the road in Corvallis invited their first black player onto the Beavers squad.

The slow pace of college football integration beyond the Deep South

Other than Iowa State, which had integrated in the 1920s, the rest of the Big 8 took several more decades before coming around on integration. Or look at Michigan State, a school often touted as an example of how a progressive attitude toward race allowed a football team to become a national powerhouse. The reality, though, is that Michigan State was also a relative latecomer to integration among northern schools, only integrating after World War II under Biggie Munn.

While integration came much earlier to many schools in the west than it did in other parts of the country, that too was not a universal trend. Consider the case of BYU, which was one of the last three schools along with LSU and Ole Miss to field a black player. The Mormon-affiliated institution mirrored the church’s attitude toward race for much of its history.

The exclusionary policies of the LDS church flew against the more inclusionary attitudes of rivals such as the University of Wyoming, which integrated nearly a half-century before BYU started allowing black players on their football team. The Cougars were still an all-white roster when 14 black players were kicked off the Cowboys squad by Lloyd Eaton for requesting the right to protest with black armbands in their game against the Mormon institution.

When we look outside of a conference structure that was still not a universal in the mid-20th century college football landscape, we also see tales of integration prior to Hill’s first game for Maryland in 1963. Schools like Louisville, Marshall, UTEP, and North Texas integrated in during the 1950s at a time when their vanguard status made scheduling competition against regional opponents that much harder.

As we see, integration came less like a wave from west to east and from north to south than as an array of dots popping up intermittently across the entire map. Each school’s path toward equal opportunities for non-white players was unique, dependent on everything from conference affiliation to geography to the sociopolitical and sociocultural leanings of the populace at large within a given state. Further deconstruction of these mythological renderings of the integration story are critical for deepening our understanding of the processes at work in the timeline.

HBCUs: The forgotten outcasts that lost in the game of integration

Because it took decades in many parts of the country before college football programs at flagship universities embraced integration, the remedy was the evolution of college football at historical black colleges and universities. A parallel set of conferences and championships emerged, as HBCUs provided competitive opportunities on the gridiron just as they offered educational opportunities that were barred at white-dominated institutions of higher learning.

In last week’s column, we talked briefly about the history of the national championship for HBCU programs. While the Celebration Bowl remains an opportunity for HBCU champions from the MEAC and SWAC to play for a mythic national title on a big stage, it is a palliative that wallpapers over the state of HBCU football in the modern era.

Integration was a long overdue process that finally came to completion at the I-A level in the early 1970s. At the same time, integration diverted generations of black talent away from the schools which previously provided their only opportunity to play college football. HBCUs continue to operate to this day, but they do so in a competitive environment where they are increasingly shunted to the margins of the sport.

Nominally ensconced at the FCS level of Division I, its programs are largely shuttered from the 24-team playoff. This is partially due to weak schedules and partially due to the desire to remain at a remove from the rest of the subdivision, in similar fashion to Ivy League ambivalence about postseason competition.

But while Ivy League teams are prohibited by league bylaws from playing in the FCS tournament, MEAC and SWAC schools usually lack the competitive quality to be selected for the bracket. HBCUs are still technically allowed into the tournament, though the MEAC and SWAC champs are contractually obligated to skip the playoffs for the Celebration Bowl.

Integration, then, did not necessarily lead to the integration of HBCUs into the broader Division I landscape. Lip service was paid to integration, which played out on an individual basis but was never addressed systemically on an institutional level.

What should we take away from a deeper reading into integration?

Because of its popularity across time, college football provides a wonderful lens for looking more deeply into the impacts of racial integration across the United States between the 1920s and 1970s. The uneven way in which the sport integrated geographically is indicative of the persistent legacies not just Jim Crow-era legal structures but also racist legislation that existed far beyond the traditional confines within the Mason-Dixon Line.

It also illustrates that the benefits of integration did not accrue to all institutions equally. HBCUs, which for years had been bastions of opportunity for players segregated out of opportunities at state universities, were now thrust into a competition for talent they could not win and shunted off to the margins of Division I as a result of integration.

As we continue to examine the legacies of race in college football periodically over the summer in this column, it is important to remember these critical facts.