Three Black Teenagers Changed the Face of College Football and Got Written Out of History
PHOTO: Wake Forest’s Bob Grant (left photo) with the ACC Network’s E.J. Manuel and Kelsey Riggs. Houston’s Warren McVea in the school’s Hall of Fame with photo of College Football Hall of Fame coach Bill Yeoman, a former Michigan State assistant under Duffy Daugherty.
A seven-part series debunking 1970 USC-Alabama myths crafted 20 years after game was played.
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“We have to tell the stories of the living history or they fade away. To restore them, the stories have to be told and retold. We can look back on the mistakes made and the opportunities lost.”
— Abraham Lincoln, 16th U.S. President
By TOM SHANAHAN
This year marked the 60th anniversary of the 1964 Civil Rights Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson. His forceful personality cajoled bigoted lawmakers into passing a transcendent bill that was recently honored at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas.
But another pivotal 60th anniversary in the Jim Crow South – albeit without LBJ’s persona – likely won’t be remembered in any form. In 1964, Bob Grant, Butch Henry and Warren McVea were a trio of Black teenagers independently stepping forward to desegregate college football programs in the South.
Grant and Henry were from separate North Carolina high schools when they enrolled at Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, N.C. The Atlantic Coast Conference member was the first school from a major southern conference to recruit Black football players out of high school. McVea and Houston broke similar ground in Texas.
To describe their millstones as “a heavy burden” is putting it lightly. The Ku Klux Klan bombed Black homes and churches in those days. Grant and Henry took the field with fans throwing racial epithets and bags of urine at them. McVea was told by stadium security guards they were unable to protect him “if the shooting started.”
But the trio endured and turned jeers to cheers. Doors opened for Black athletes the remainder of the decade. By the end of the decade, an integrated team playing in the South was normalized — a fait accompli. On September 12, 1970, Stanford opened the season with a win against No. 4 Arkansas at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock and USC beat Alabama at Legion Field in Birmingham. The same day Georgia Tech’s Eddie McAshan was the Deep South’s first Black starting quarterback, leading the Yellow Jackets to a win over integrated South Carolina at Grant Field in Atlanta.
Yet for all Grant, Henry and McVea set in motion their legacies were whitewashed.
Myths exaggerating the racial impact of the 1970 USC-Alabama game co-opted history belonging to the true 1960s pioneers. College football lore instead accepted folklore centered on one coach, Alabama’s Bear Bryant, and one player unwittingly caught up in the myth, USC’s Sam Cunningham. The myth’s unfounded claim was one game, which wasn’t televised, flipped a century of Jim Crow bigotry.
However, with the aid of poorly researched sports writing, the myth spread as if it was the lone exception to America’s demonstrated history requiring years of struggle to enlighten narrow-minded attitudes.
I gained the insight from reading former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines’ book, “Silent Calvary: How Union Soldiers from Alabama Helped Sherman Burn Atlanta — and Then Got Written Out of History.” Raines researched if southern historians had failed to learn about the Alabamians who opposed secession or if they took steps to erase them.
I spoke recently with John Papadakis and Alan Graf, USC football players dating to the 1970 USC-Alabama game. They were principal characters establishing and spreading the 1970 myth into national folklore two decades after the game was played. But before I could discern if Papadakis and Graf were aware of the many milestones or ignored facts to sell their movie script, they turned defensive.
Papadakis said, “I was there. You weren’t.”
Graf added, “So, you’re not a USC fan.”
NOTE:
You may be asking, why write a story debunking folklore as old as the 1970 USC-Alabama myth? The simple answers: 1) It’s a false narrative. 2) It’s at the expense of the true pioneers. 3) Younger Americans, Black and White alike, don’t understand what pioneering Black players faced in the Jim Crow South.
That should be enough, but the myth lives on. The media remains hooked on spinning Bear Bryant yarns. The myth, based on poorly researched sports writing, ignores the coaches without Bryant’s job security who stuck their necks out.
The untold stories that are lost to history need to be told and retold. They are found in my new book, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of the College Football Integration in the 1960s.”
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Papadakis, a bon vivant restaurateur with the gift of gab, can pivot from a question.
Finally, he said, “You have an agenda.”
And he hung up.
I didn’t get a chance to reply, “Guilty.”
My agenda is to shine a light on the true pioneers of the 1960s.
The premise of the 1970 USC-Alabama myth was Bryant orchestrated events to shock his bigoted fanbase into allowing him to recruit Black athletes. He scheduled USC as a game to lose so that when the Black players overran his smallish team, bigots would experience an overnight change of heart. Cunningham, a Black fullback, provided the folklore’s denouement, leading a 42-21 victory before 72,175 fans at Legion Field in Birmingham.
There are many overlooked facts aside from America’s long history of failing to solve its racial issues overnight.
Bryant signed Wilbur Jackson as his first Black player months before USC arrived. As a result of Bryant dragging his feet, Alabama was the seventh of 10 Southeastern Conference programs to integrate. By then, 33 of 37 major southern programs included Black players.
History’s timeline also reveals Southern Methodist coach Hayden Fry signed Jerry LeVias in 1965 as the Southwest Conference’s first Black scholarship player.
Kentucky was first to break ranks in the Southeastern Conference when coach Charlie Bradshaw signed Nate Northington and Greg Page in 1966 and two more Black players in 1967, Wilbur Hackett and Houston Hogg. Tennessee and coach Doug Dickey followed with Lester McClain in 1967. Auburn, Alabama’s in-state rival under coach Ralph Jordan, was one year ahead of Bryant, signing James Owens in 1969.
In the 1969 season, Tennessee routed all-White Alabama 41-14 before 72,433 fans at Legion Field. Tennessee’s Jackie Walker, the SEC’s first Black All-American player, returned an interception for a touchdown and a 21-0 first-quarter lead. Walker’s performance contradicted the “shock premise” of the 1970 USC-Alabama folklore.
If there was a shock or tipping point at Legion Field, it was a year before USC arrived. Tennessee’s victory in the “The Third Saturday of October” rivalry escaped the attention of no one in the Alabama fanbase. Another eye-opener was Colorado beat Alabama 47-33 in the 1969 Liberty Bowl. By the 1970 season opener, Alabama allowing 40-plus points to teams with Black stars was the norm.
With progress taking place in the South outside the bubble of USC’s mythmakers, it’s important to understand Sam Cunningham was not the villain. He was unwittingly caught up in the myths, and a cottage industry of book authors and documentary producers cashed in on him while selling Bear Bryant hagiography.
PART II
“History writes people out of the story. It’s our job to write them back in.”
— David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize-winner and biographer.
SAM CUNNINGHAM’S HONESTY REFUTES MYTHS
Reggie Berry, Bob Grant and Sam Cunningham were friends and former NFL players living in Southern California. They worked together in the early 2010s on Berry’s charity, “Goals for Life.” The program targeting struggling students celebrates its 35th anniversary on September 15.
Berry, 74, played at Long Beach State and for the San Diego Chargers. His leadership skills included serving on the NFL Retired Players Association Board of Directors. Berry, Grant and Cunningham were together one day when they discussed college football integration prior to the 1970 USC-Alabama game.
“I told Sam, ‘Bob and other guys integrated the South; Bob was at Wake Forest in 1964,’” Berry said. “Sam was a smart guy. What I told him he acknowledged. He looked at me and said, ‘You’re probably right.’”
The history lesson provided Cunningham a new perspective. In 2016, he expressed his discomfort with the myth in a Los Angeles Times interview – perhaps publicly for the first time.
“It’s already a historic story without adding sauce to it, you know what I mean?” Cunningham was quoted in the article. “Everybody wants to make it more than what it is. And what it was was very, very important anyway.”
It’s not hard to read between the lines to conclude Cunningham felt used. But Berry doesn’t need to read between the lines. He heard Cunningham say it.
“Sam didn’t like they gave him a place in history he didn’t deserve,” Berry said. “I talked to Sam about that. There’s not a doubt that he didn’t like they used him.”
PHOTO: Reggie Berry with students at a Whittier school working together in the “Goals for Life” program despite rival gang influences.
Cunningham, having lived the 1970 game, was aware of omitted facts, including three USC fullbacks scored against Alabama. Cunningham tallied USC’s first two TDs but after Alabama closed the deficit in the second quarter to 15-7, Charlie Evans’ crucial TD provided a 22-7 halftime lead.
Evans, the Trojans’ returning senior starting fullback, was one of USC’s 18 White starters in the Alabama game. Cunningham came off the bench and split carries with Evans on a night USC started only four Black players, quarterback Jimmy Jones, tailback Clarence Davis and defensive linemen Charlie Weaver and Tody Smith.
On the crucial scoring drive, Evans broke off the longest gain of the series, a 15-yard rush, and reached the end zone on a 7-yard run.
Bill Holland was the third fullback to score in the fourth quarter on a 6-yard touchdown pass. Holland, who worked in the corporate world and later in USC’s athletic office, was asked in 2020 in a 247Sports/USCfootball.com podcast about the 1970 game.
“Some people have taken liberties with what they remember,” Holland said
Papadakis was granted a license to spin revisionist history in both the 2013 Showtime documentary and a 2020 ESPN feature.
On Showtime in 2013, he said, “I don’t recall them making a meaningful first down in the first half.”
On ESPN in 2020, he claimed, “They couldn’t make a meaningful first down in the first half. They couldn’t move the ball. Therefore, we ran over them.”
Both networks failed to fact-check claims of a start-to-finish rout. Here’s what happened, according to the official game book play-by-play sheet. Quarterback Scott Hunter directed a second-quarter scoring drive that closed the deficit to a one-score game, 15-7. Three first downs were picked up on completions of 11, 7, and 19 yards. The 7-yarder caught by Steve Doran was on a third-and-6. Guess who made the tackle? John Papadakis.
For the night, Alabama passed for 232 yards – a 1970 statistic that roughly translates to 300 in today’s game — and David Bailey caught seven passes for 101 yards.
The misleading continued with depicting USC as a model integration program. Until the late 1960s, the Trojans followed college football’s unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to a half-dozen or so. USC coach John McKay’s 1962 national title team numbered only five Black players and his 1967 national championship roster only seven despite a campus located in populous and diverse Los Angeles.
In McKay’s 1974 book, “McKay: A Coach’s Story,” he acknowledged the Los Angeles Black community questioned him about his lack of Black players. McKay’s defense was USC was no different than other programs. It was a disingenuous statement since USC had faced Michigan State with its double-digit Black players in 1963 in Los Angeles and twice in East Lansing, in 1964 and 1967.
Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty ignored the quota limitations with the first fully integrated rosters throughout the 1960s. In 1962, the Associated Press reported Michigan State’s 17 Black players was the most in major college football history. The report didn’t make clear Daugherty’s teams broke their own records.
USC and other coaches — by limiting their roster’s Black athletes — only recruited elite prospects. With Heisman Trophy winners Mike Garrett and O.J. Simpson scoring the touchdowns, viewers gained a distorted picture of USC’s rosters.
Daugherty differed from his peers by taking chances on undersized Black athletes. Michigan State’s Jimmy Raye, the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title, was undersized while recruited out of segregated Fayetteville, N.C., in 1964.
USC partisans push back citing C.R. Roberts (1955-56) and Willie Wood (1957-59), but they only played with two or three Black teammates. Roberts gained 251 yards at Texas in 1956, but his performance didn’t change anything.
USC fans also don’t understand the Trojans omitted Bryce Taylor, who was USC’s first Black All-American in 1925, from its media guide until the Los Angeles Sentinel, a Black newspaper, exposed USC in the late 1950s. Showtime conveniently left that fact out of its film.
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VIDEOS FEATURING TRUE 1960S PIONEERS
The End Game: Race and Sports – Tom Shanahan Report
DEBUNKING MORE BEAR BRYANT MYTHS:
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PART III:
The first rule for historians: Always stick to the truth. Tell or write only what you can prove.”
— Stephen Ambrose,award-winning historian.
STRAIGHTENING OUT HISTORY
The principle of debunking a myth starts with a core truth.
Grant’s “firsts” at Wake Forest didn’t stop with his 1964 enrollment. He was the first Black player named a major southern conference’s post-season team as a 1966 All-ACC defensive lineman.
In 1968, Grant was the first Black player the NFL drafted from a major southern conference when the Baltimore Colts took him in the second round as the 51st player overall. McVea followed as the second club member as a fourth rounder the Kansas City Chiefs took as 109th pick.
Both players also have a slice of Super Bowl history. Grant played in III as the first Black player from a major southern school. McVea was the first Black player from a major southern school to win a Super Bowl in IV. Grant joined followed McVea on the winners list in Super Bowl V.
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Click here: In 2020, Wake Forest honored Grant with its Trailblazer Award. A year later, national broadcaster Andy Katz presented the NCAA’s Inspiration Award to Grant.
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Grant and Henry played conference games in ACC stadiums throughout the South, which at the time included South Carolina before the school left for the SEC. They also left footprints in the SEC at Auburn’s stadium in 1966 as well as the Liberty Bowl in Memphis and Florida State as non-conference games before the Seminoles joined the ACC.
But Houston, with McVea joining the varsity in 1965 before the NCAA permitted freshmen eligibility in 1972, routinely played at SEC and other southern stadiums long before USC arrived at Legion Field.
PHOTO: Houston coach Bill Yeoman, a Michigan State Duffy Daugherty Disciple who desegregated the program, with Elmo Wright. The wide receiver was Houston’s first Black College Football Hall of Fame player.
The Cougars visited Tennessee (1965), Kentucky (1966), Mississippi State (1967), Mississippi (1967), Georgia (1968) and Florida (1969). Houston also played Mississippi (1966) at the Liberty Bowl in Memphis. Other southern stadiums with Houston’s footprint included Texas A&M (1965), Miami (1965), Florida State (1965, 1966), Texas (1968), Memphis State (1968), and NC State (1969).
Houston and Alabama played a home-and-home series in 1970 and 1971. By 1970, Alabama regular- season schedule featured nine integrated opponents out of 11 and a 10th integrated opponent when Bryant’s team faced Oklahoma in the Astro Bluebonnet Bowl. In other words, Alabama and Bryant were bringing up the rear – not leading – by scheduling USC at Legion Field in 1970.
“It’s one thing to integrate a team in the South in the 1970s,” said Elmo Wright, Houston’s first Black College Football Hall of Famer, who arrived as a freshman in 1967. “But how about during the Civil Rights era? A lot of stuff was happening. Martin Luther King was assassinated. For Bill Yeoman to come down to Houston and integrate in 1964, that’s impressive. I remember when I was playing, he was hung in effigy. It wasn’t for losing. He was a winning coach.”
There’s plenty more.
At Southern Methodist, LeVias, a College Football Hall of Famer, broke ground throughout the SWC. He also led the Mustangs to victory at an SEC stadium in 1968. LeVias scored a touchdown and on a two-point conversion to lead a 37-28 victory at Auburn.
Other integrated teams that played in the South included Michigan State’s 1964 trip to North Carolina as the first fully integrated team to play in the South. The Spartans played at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill, but the milestone the game represented was ignored by a 1960s sports media that avoided race.
Clint Jones and his 1964 touchdown at North Carolina that history ignored – Tom Shanahan Report
The integrated teams playing in the South long before 1970 included UCLA facing Tennessee at the Memphis Liberty Bowl (1965), Michigan at North Carolina (1965), and Army against Tennessee at the Liberty Bowl (1966). Texas hosted two integrated opponents in 1966, Indiana and USC.
The 1970 myth also doesn’t explain USC and Alabama had agreed in 1968 to play a home-and-home series, 1977 and 78 (series were typically scheduled five to 10 years in advance). The NCAA permitting an 11th game in 1970 simply moved up the clock. When the game was scheduled in 1968, Sam Skinner of the San Francisco Sun, a Black newspaper, reported Bryant had assured USC athletic director Jess Hill there would be no racial problems. Skinner interviewed Hill during the Pac-8 Skywriters tour while asking a question White reporters were oblivious to reporting in the mainstream media.
In fact, by 1970 two integrated Pac-8 teams opened the season on September 12 at a revered southern stadium. The marquee game, though, was Stanford-Arkansas — not USC-Alabama. ABC-TV broadcast Stanford-Arkansas as its national game of the week, while USC-Alabama was limited to local radio networks.
Tenth-ranked Stanford, with an all-minority backfield, upset No. 4 Arkansas behind to the performance of Hillary Shockley—wait for it—a Black fullback with three touchdowns and 149 total yards. Sound familiar? Why were Stanford and Shockley lost in the shadows of USC and Cunningham?
“We talked about that when we had our Rose Bowl 50th anniversary reunion,” Shockley said. “We were on national TV the same weekend as the USC-Alabama game. We certainly had a better platform for promoting the change that was taking place in college football. We had an all-minority backfield. People talk about USC and Bryant getting religion, but our game and season were a stronger testimony.”
Notice Shockley didn’t cite the 20th or 25th reunion. As mentioned earlier, the 1970 USC-Alabama myth was crafted and spread two decades after the game was played. The attention around the myth—and the sports media’s failure to point out the errors—grew with Showtime’s 2013 documentary, “Against the Tide.” Showtime failed to mention the Stanford-Arkansas game while making a misleading statement promoting the USC-Alabama as a bold scheduling move on Bryant’s part.
At the film’s 1:33 mark, narrator and USC alumnus Tom Selleck noted, “Shortly after the 1969 season, the NCAA added another game to the 1970 college football schedule. Most of the big-time programs saw that game as an easy win or easy money. But Alabama’s coach, Bear Bryant, may have seen something different—an opportunity.”
That script was oblivious, if not duplicitous, to Stanford scheduling a national title contending opponent on the road. Stanford’s Arkansas victory launched a storybook season. A month later, Stanford beat USC 24-14 on the way to winning the Pac-8 title and upsetting No. 2 Ohio State in the Rose Bowl.
USC? The Trojans, routed by UCLA 45-20, didn’t earn a bowl bid.
PART IV
“What happens in history is often a slippery business. And as ever, depends on who is doing the telling, when they are telling the tale and why.”
— Doris Kearns Goodwin,award-winning presidential historian.
THE FABRICATION AND MEDIA COMPLICITY
Legendary performances with folklore longevity need more than statistics. They require humor to propel a word-of-mouth crossover into the media.
Cunningham provided the statistics, and mythmakers made him the punchline pawn. The humor claims Bryant brought Cunningham into the Alabama locker room to show his team, “what a football player looks like.”
The tale spread unchallenged in the media until Cunningham’s interview with an Alabama sportswriter prior to USC’s 2003 opener at Auburn. Neal McCready of the Mobile Press-Register wrote a retrospective on the 1970 USC-Alabama game.
“I made a lot of phone calls, but I finally talked to him,” said McCready, who is now publisher of Rebel Grove, the Rivals.com site for Mississippi. “It was a fascinating conversation. He couldn’t have been nicer, but he wasn’t comfortable talking about it. When I asked him about the post-game, he was almost sheepish. He finally admitted it was a myth. He definitively told me it did not happen.”
PHOTO: In 2021, Wake Forest honored Bob Grant and Butch Henry with its inaugural Trailblazer Award. A year later, the NCIAA presented Grant with its Inspiration Award.
But the media’s comfort with the Bryant myth – then and now — and vicarious pleasure spinning a Bryant yarn was reflected in its response to McCready’s intrepid reporting. His story, worthy of awards, was virtually ignored.
At the time, sportswriter Don Yeager, Papadakis and Cunningham collaborated on a book project promoting the myth, “Turning of the Tide.” Cunningham’s honesty might normally have disrupted the project, but Bryant remains a Teflon figure. The book, published in 2006, reads as if Yeager accepted his advance before submitting his manuscript. He twists himself into a pretzel while mentioning contradictions to the myth without spoiling the book’s misleading theme.
In 2008 HBO aired a documentary on the 1970 USC-Alabama game, “Breaking the Huddle,” Cunningham danced around the locker-room question.
In a 2013 Showtime film, “Against the Tide,” Cunningham reverted to his 2003 print journalism honesty.
“I didn’t go into their locker room, I didn’t shake any of their guys’ hands, I didn’t get put up on a pedestal or nothing. But kind of that got surfaced and kept rolling for 30-some years.”
Note he didn’t say 40-some years, which in 2013 dated to 1970. The myth started sometime in the late 1980s with USC boosters slapping spreading the myth until a 1990s leap into the media through columnist Loel Schrader of the Long Beach Press-Telegram.
In a 2020 ESPN TV feature produced to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1970 USC-Alabama game, Cunningham again admitted it never happened.
But the producers of the documentaries were selling a different narrative and stuck to promoting the myths over Cunningham’s honesty.
A political quote provides a good metaphor for the media’s history of favoring one story over another. In 1968, Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Presidential candidate in the Democratic primaries, drew a wave of media coverage when he successfully challenged LBJ and Vietnam War in the early New Hampshire primary. But the press switched its attention to Robert F. Kenndy Jr. once he entered the campaign.
“The press is like a bunch of Blackbirds on an electric wire,” McCarthy said. “When one moves, they all move.”
The Blackbirds jumped onto the 1970 USC-Alabama myth and remained perched on that wire. But perhaps the harshest ramification is viewed through the lens of comparing the Cunningham and Grant obituaries.
When Cunningham died on September 7, 2021, media outlets big and small dutifully reported the news. The New York Times headline read: “Sam Cunningham dies at 71; Fostered Integration on the Football Field.”
When Grant died on May 19, 2024 these were the headlines found in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times (LA was Grant’s adopted hometown), ESPN, Sports Illustrated, The Athletic, The Atlantic, Forbes and other national outlets:
Nothing.
PART V
“It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding.”
— UPTON SINCLAIR, author and muckraker.
THE ALABAMA LOCKER ROOM WHOPPER
In the end, I believe Papadakis and Graf were ignorant of the 1960s milestones.
They seemed taken aback by the milestones I was able to mention. They might be borderline irrational about their school’s history, but they weren’t duplicitous.
However, that doesn’t lessen the injustice to the men who paid a price. They played through death threats. Cunningham ran behind massive holes – Cunningham’s own description — opened by five White offensive linemen.
In the movie script Papadakis tried to sell, the fictional locker-room scene attributed laughable dialogue to Bryant while speaking to his team. The tone-death scene also depicts a slave trade imagery with Cunningham stripped to the waist, standing on a bench and a group of White men studying his body.
“Gentlemen, this ol’ boy, I mean, this man and his Trojan brothers just ran your slow-motion asses right out of your own house. Raise your heads and open your eyes; this is what a football player looks like.”
Does anybody believe Bryant spoke that way? And if Bryant said, “this is what a football player looks like,” why didn’t he have African Americans playing for Alabama?
PHOTO: USC alumnus John Papadakis owned a popular restaurant in San Pedro.
Alabama quarterback Scott Hunter said Bryant would never embarrass his team bringing an opponent into the locker room and speaking that way. But the perceived humor propelled the myth with word-of-mouth guffaws.
The quote was cited on Page 142 of “Turning the Tide.” Although the writing raised a red flag about the quote’s validity, the book sticks to the myth to sell copies.
When I asked Papadakis about Cunningham’s denial, he said, “Sam was a humble guy.”
Graf knows Cunningham never visited the locker room. I heard from a source that Papadakis and Graf nearly came to blows over including the locker room scene in the movie script. I asked Graf if that was true.
“We had a disagreement on which way to go,” Graf said.
The disagreement ultimately shelved the movie’s development.
But there are more ironies challenging the myth. When Alabama’s high schools desegregated in the late 1960s, it meant Bryant’s younger players had competed with and against Black athletes. They knew what a Black player looked like. They didn’t need a lecture from Bryant.
Did Papadakis know about high school desegregation in the late 1960s?
The Alabama Afro-American Student Association sued Bryant on July 2, 1969, for failing to recruit Black athletes on a campus desegregated since 1963. The lawsuit was dropped when Jackson committed to Alabama.
Although it’s true USC was fully integrated by 1970 with 18 Black players on the varsity, the myth fails to note the dramatic recruiting philosophy shift that resulted in 15 arriving in 1969 or 1970.
Of the 15, nine were junior college transfers. Four arrived in 1969: Clarence Davis, Charlie Weaver, Marv Montgomery and Bill Holland. Five more were in 1970: Lou Harris, Ron Preston, Willie Hall, Kent Carter and Alonzo Thomas.
Two were transfers from four-year schools: Tody Smith (Michigan State) and Mike Berry (Air Force).
Only four were high school freshmen in 1969, Cunningham: Rod McNeill, Charle Young and John Grant. The 1970 freshmen weren’t eligible for the varsity until the NCAA changed the rule in 1972.
That leaves only three Black recruits on the 1970 roster who arrived prior to 1969: Seniors Sam Dickerson and Tyrone Hudson and Jones as a junior.
Did the documentary producers and writers know these facts? At the very least, the producers’ research was slipshod. Did the media research these claims or simply rubberstamp the myth?
The sports journalism errors are similar to those found in the 2004 Sports Illustrated article. The story perpetuates another Bryant myth that the segregationist coach delivered Black players to Michigan State. The fairytale was printed in the magazine — when it was still owned by Time Inc. — without a single attribution.
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Read Part II about the sloppy Sports Illustrated article: Bear Bryant never sent Duffy Daugherty a player. So, why do so many smart people believe the myth? – Tom Shanahan Report
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As I’ve written on my website, none of Daugherty’s Michigan State Underground Railroad passengers told a backstory involving Bryant. Daugherty found them through his network of southern Black high school coaches throughout the South who recognized Michigan State as a North star.
A few writers have questioned the veracity of the 1970 USC-Alabama game’s myths between the 1990s and now. But not even a 2002 ESPN story by David Halberstam, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and reporter, broke the myth.
Halberstam wrote, “But the Bear was very late to the dance, especially because people are always talking about football coaches as leaders. In this case, he did not lead very well.”
But it’s human nature for people to accept the story they’re familiar with over facts.
PART VI
“The USC-Alabama story is a long line of White myths that serve to deny Black people their agency in terms of changing America. Focusing on figures like Branch Rickey and Bear Bryant creates narratives in which it is ultimately White people who make cautious, thoughtful, calculating decisions to create and integrate their own teams. They become agents of change, not Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks or thousands of who struggled in the streets.”
— LANE DEMAS, author, historian and PH.d professor at Central Michigan University
THE 1978 BIRMINGHAM GAME
So, the 1978 season provided a prime opportunity to hype the Trojans as returning social justice heroes when No. 7-ranked USC traveled to face No. 1 Alabama on September 23 at Legion Field. But fans didn’t expect such a story in 1978 since the myth wasn’t crafted until the late 1980s and spread in the early 1990s. That explains why the media wasn’t looking for such a story in 1978.
The LA Times’ Mal Florence, a dean of Southern California sportswriters, mentioned the 1970 game only in his Saturday morning advance story’s last paragraph: “Alabama holds a 4-1 edge over USC in a series that began in 1938. USC’s only win came in 1970. Where? Birmingham.” Florence made no mention of Cunningham or a transformative racial moment.
PHOTO: Keith Jackson, the voice of college football, and Mal Florence, a dean of Southern California sportswriters, made no mention of the 1970 USC-Alabama game and Sam Cunningham’s performance as a transformative moment while reporting on USC’s return to Alabama in 1978.
The 1978 USC-Alabama game was ABC-TV’s national game of the week with Keith Jackson, the voice of college football, behind the microphone. In Jackson’s pregame show lasting 7 minutes 20 seconds, he never mentioned 1970 as a historic moment.
His pre-game commentary focused on USC coach John Robinson wisely bringing air conditioning units to Birmingham to battle 85-degree heat. Robinson, Jackson said, had noticed during the Nebraska-Alabama game two weeks earlier that Alabama placed air conditioning units on its sideline —but not for Nebraska. The Cornhuskers, waving towels to cool themselves, wilted in the southern heat in a 20-3 loss at Legion Field.
Upon the kickoff and with three minutes elapsed on the game clock, a graphic flashed on the screen noting Alabama led the series 4-1. Jackson stated Cunningham led USC’s lone victory in 1970, but he didn’t link the performance to racial progress. Later, USC led 24-7 midway through the fourth quarter. “The last time these teams played here, in 1970,” Jackson remarked, “the Trojans won 42-21.” No transformative racial history was cited.
After USC closed out the 24-14 victory, the post-game centered on Trojans running back Charles White, who rushed for 199 yards and a 40-yard touchdown. The next day on “The Bear Bryant Show,” Bryant praised White. “I don’t recall anyone, unless it was (Johnny) Rodgers at Nebraska, playing against anyone better than he was,” he stated. Cunningham wasn’t mentioned.
In Sports Illustrated, writer John Underwood referenced White’s performance worthy of joining legendary USC running backs Mike Garrett, O.J. Simpson, Anthony Davis and Ricky Bell. No mention was made of Cunningham or 1970. This was the same John Underwood who authored Bryant’s 1974 autobiography, “BEAR.” The book made no mention of the 1970 USC-Alabama game.
But with time, the media readily latched on to the myth celebrating Bryant. Similarly, the media most frequently points to North Carolina iconic basketball coach Dean Smith and Charlie Scott’s sophomore season, 1967-68, as a singular moment. But Maryland’s Billy Jones was the ACC’s first Black player as a sophomore, 1965-66. More Black players at Duke and Wake Forest joined the ACC along with UNC’s Scott. In the SEC, Vanderbilt’s Perry Wallace was the first Black player, signing as a freshman in 1967.
There is a parallel between the USC-Alabama myth and the successful rewriting of Civil War history through the “Lost Cause” narrative in the early 1900s. Southern historians transformed the cause from slavery to about states’ rights. Union General Ulysses S. Grant was cast as a butcher and a drunk while Confederate General Robert E. Lee was romanticized.
“And so, the Confederates lost the Civil War, but they certainly won the war of the myth,” said author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates in a History Channel documentary. “And Grant was on the wrong side of that myth.”
The true pioneers of college football integration remain on the wrong side of the 1970 USC-Alabama myth.
PART VII:
“We tend to resort to conventional, superficial understandings. We tie things up in nice bows.”
— Ken Burns, award-winning historian and filmmaker on accepted myths and research to find overriding facts.
DUFFY DAUGHERTY’S 70th AND 60th ANNIVERSARIES
Duffy Daugherty’s Michigan State football teams are a singular story. That is the primary historical context that belongs to the Spartans. No school impacted college football integration more profoundly — and that’s above and below the Mason-Dixon Line.
If you don’t want to believe me, listen to Barry Switzer, who teamed with Oklahoma head coach Chuck Fairbanks (1967-72), a Duffy Daugherty Disciple, to fully integrate Oklahoma’s program. Switzer was Fairbanks’ offensive coordinator and upon succeeding him as head coach led the Sooners to national titles in 1974, 1975 and 1985.
“Duffy did more for integration than any other coach in college football,” said Switzer on Page 1 of THE RIGHT THING TO DO. “He had players from all over the South. There were excellent Black players in Texas who bypassed Oklahoma to play for Duffy. He had all those players from the Houston area. Duffy was also the first to recruit Samoan players.”
Daugherty’s Hawaiian Pipeline included Bob Apisa, the first Samoan All-American player, 1965 and 1966.
In 2024, Daugherty’s influence is marked by two significant anniversaries.
This the 70th of Daugherty’s first staff as Michigan State’s new head coach, in 1954. His assistants, upon becoming head coaches, followed his blueprint of ignoring quota limitations. The 1954 assistants included Dan Devine (Arizona State, Missouri, and Notre Dame), Bob Devaney (Wyoming, Nebraska), Bill Yeoman (Houston), and Sonny Grandelius (Colorado). Three more Daugherty Disciples from that era were Frank Kush (who succeeded Devine at ASU), Chuck Fairbanks (Oklahoma), and Earle Edwards (NC State). They spread Daugherty’s fingerprints coast to coast.
This season also is the 60th anniversary of Michigan State as the first fully integrated team to play in the South with a game on September 26, 1964, against North Carolina in Chapel Hill. But that’s not all. MSU halfback Clinton Jones, making his varsity debut in a College Football Hall of Fame career, scored on a 42-yard touchdown run to “integrate” Kenan Stadium’s end zone.
In two more years, Michigan State and Notre Dame will mark the 60th anniversary of their Game of the Century, a seminal game despite the 10-10 tie played on November 19, 1966. The nation saw the contrast in the Michigan State and Notre Dame rosters.
Michigan State was the future with 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains – George Webster and Clinton Jones — and Raye as a ground-breaking quarterback from the South. The past was Notre Dame with one Black player, Alan Page.
Jerry Barca, an author and filmmaker, addressed the significance of the 1966 “Game of the Century” in a 2019 ESPN feature:
“There’s not a singular thing you can point to that says, ‘Hey, college football is integrated.’ But what Duffy Daugherty did with the 1966 team is a tremendous part of the evolution of race in college football. What makes a real ‘Game of the Century’ stand out is when it has greater meaning or context—maybe even beyond football. Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty…he had 20 African American players, and he had Jimmy Raye as an African American quarterback.”
As I researched Michigan State’s history in the past dozen years, I realized milestones were overlooked. It didn’t take Woodward and Bernstein. I relayed my Raye research that Raye was the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title to the National Football Foundation, which confirmed my conclusion in a newsletter. I also relayed MSU’s 1964 game in Chapel Hill and Jones’ TD information to North Carolina, and communications director Steve Kirschner acknowledged it.
College football lore also fails to understand the Daugherty/Michigan State leadership dates to the Spartans winning the 1954 and 1956 Rose Bowl games with Black stars, including All-American Ellis Duckett and Leroy Bolden. Southern Black high school coaches began contacting Daugherty about their players. This was the genesis of Daugherty’s Underground Railroad, which totaled 44 passengers from 1959 through Daugherty’s final season in 1972.
“Obviously, Duffy Daugherty was a very successful coach, but I have more respect for him as a human being,” said Dr. Dennis Thomas, a College Football Hall of Famer from his playing days at Alcorn State in Mississippi, who later became a head coach at South Carolina State and an athletic director at Hampton University and commissioner of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference. “He didn’t see color. He saw performance. He saw character. He was doing it before it was fashionable.”
So, why isn’t Michigan State’s role under Daugherty leading college football integration more widely understood and appreciated in college football lore? The answer takes us back full circle to how Bob Grant, Butch Henry, Warren McVea, Jerry LeVias, Wilbur Hackett, Lester McClain, Jackie Walker, James Owens and others got written out of history.
The 1960s sports media avoided race, leaving Black milestones unrecorded. The vacuum was filled with misinformation, and the 1970 USC-Alabama myths overtook the national narrative the past 30-some years.
The true 1960s pioneers remain lost in the shadows of history.
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Follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
Click here to purchase The Right Thing To Do
THE RIGHT THING TO DO
The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s
Foreword by Ruffin McNeill
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Click here to purchase Raye of Light.
RAYE OF LIGHT
Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the 1ntegration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans
Foreword by Tony Dungy
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Click here to purchase my children’s book, Bubba’s Dad, Duffy and College Football’s Underground Railroad
The book for now is only a Kindle version on Amazon. Print and audio platforms available soon.
