PHOTO: Jimmy Raye rode Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad from Fayetteville, N.C., the ational titles at Michigan State and to the NFL. In 2023, the NFL 360/NFL Network documentary “The Indelible Legacy of Jimmy Raye” won a Sports Emmy Award.

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By TOM SHANAHAN

Jimmy Raye boarded Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad in the fall of 1964, departing his hometown of Fayetteville, N.C., in the Jim Crow South as a second-class citizen. Two and a half years later he was invited home a conquering hero, an honored North Carolinian.

The social transcendence of sports in America was once at work.

Jimmy Raye Day, December 19, 1966, recognized him for his ground-breaking career as a quarterback on Michigan State’s 1965 and 1966 teams that won shares of the national title. Don Clayton, a Fayetteville White businessman, knew the significance of overcoming racism and segregation. He organized Jimmy Raye Day and brought Pro Football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell to town as the keynote speaker.

Mitchell was a powerful symbol of progress. He was the Washington Redskins’ first Black player upon President John F. Kennedy’s administration forcing the franchise to integrate, in 1962. Washington, owned by avowed racist George Preston Marshall, was the last NFL team to integrate its roster.

Raye, though, was just getting started with his playing days. His legacy continued with a coaching career. Daugherty hired him in 1972, and he coached in the NFL from 1977 to 2013. In 1983, he was the NFL’s second coordinator when the Los Angeles Rams hired him as their offensive coordinator.

A traditional calendar marking his ground-breaking athletic and coaching careers spans six decades. But if we remember the segregated South was antebellum America, Raye’s rise spans a century.

Raye’s home state honors him once again when the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame enshrines him on May 2 in Greensboro. The Hall of Fame ceremony celebrates Raye and 10 others at the Sheraton Greensboro Hotel Joseph S. Koury Convention Center.

Rayes impact can’t be overstated, especially among younger Americans unmindful segregation is recent history. Raye and many others who overcame the injustice of the segregated South still walk among us. Ruffin McNeill was among the early Black players at East Carolina, and he was the Pirates’ first Black head coach, 2010-15.

“If you were a Black kid growing up in North Carolina in the 1960s and 1970s, you knew the legend of Jimmy Raye,” wrote Ruffin McNeill in the Foreword of THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.

“He was from a segregated area of Fayetteville, not far from my hometown and where my father and uncles grew up and participated in sports with Jimmy. Jimmy Raye boarded Daugherty’s Underground Railroad in 1964. He was one of only two Black quarterbacks in the nation in 1966 season. The Spartans played Notre Dame in the 1966 Game of the Century.”

But for all that Raye has accomplished, his story remains largely untold in college and pro football lore.

PHOTO: Pro Football Hall of Famer Dan Fouts was the emcee when Jimmy Raye was honored in the inaugural 2021 class of NFL Awards recipients. The award is sponsored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

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The significance of his quarterback career as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national has been lost in hazy history due to the 1960s sports media avoiding race and failing to note milestones. His coaching career isn’t fully appreciated by a media that limits influence on the game to head coaches and thus regards Tony Dungy and Dennis Green as the only successful Black coaches.

The NC Sports Hall of Fame enshrinement shines a bright light Raye’s true legacy.

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Episode 27 of THE END GAME features Michigan State Hall of Famers Jimmy Raye and Bob Apisa discussing the Spartans’ 1965 and 1966 teams entering the Michigan State Hall of Fame in 2024.

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His place in history as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title was first revealed by research for the 2014 book, “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans.” The National Football Foundation reviewed the information and made it official in a 2015 newsletter.

In the Foreword to RAYE OF LIGHT, Tony Dungy, the Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who was the first Black coach to win a Super Bowl, recalled growing up in Jackson, Michigan, as a fan of the 1965 and 1966 Spartans and Raye. In the backyard games with friends, Dungy was Jimmy Raye — not Johnny Unitas or Bart Starr.

“One of the stars on that team I was drawn to was Jimmy Raye. Jimmy was unique to me because he was not just a talented African American player, he was quarterback. I know that’s not newsworthy now in this day and age, but in 1965, his sophomore year, that was stunning.”

On Michigan State’s 1965 and 1966 teams that shared national titles, Raye was a 1965 sophomore backup who played frequently – including in the Rose bowl — and the 1966 junior starter. He broke ground when the stereotype was a Black quarterback wasn’t smart enough and his White teammates wouldn’t follow his leadership.

In the poll voting era, the Spartans were crowned 1965 national champions by two of the four bodies sanctioned by the NCAA — United Press International, National Football Foundation, and co-champions by the Football Writers Association of America with Alabama. The Spartans finished 10-1 after an upset loss to UCLA in Rose Bowl, 14-12.

But since 1965 was the first year Associated Press experimented with waiting until after bowl games to name the national champion, Alabama (9-1-1) was voted the AP title after its Orange Bowl victory despite its inferior regular season record with a loss and a tie and without venturing above the Mason Dixon Line.

In 1966, after the Spartans played Notre Dame in the Game of the Century, the NFF named Michigan State co-national champions with Notre Dame. The teams played to a 10-10 on the field and finished with 9-0-1 records, but the other three bodies named Notre Dame No. 1.

The 1966 Game of the Century served as a tipping point to college football integration before a record TV audience of 33 million. In an era when college football followed an unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to a half-dozen or so, Daugherty was the first coach to ignore quota limitation. Michigan State’s 1966 roster featured 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and Raye in his high-profile role as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title. Notre Dame’s roster included one Black player, Alan Page.

There was a firing of the conscious among fans and, more importantly, among coaches who realized they were ignoring an untaped talent pool.

But the negligence of the 1960s sports media reporting on race hindered Raye’s groundbreaking taking hold in college football lore. the Sports Illustrated cover story on the Game of the Century was written by legendary writer Dan Jenkins. He made no mention of the racial contrast. Raye was identified simply as a quarterback with “a thin mustache.”

In those days, few Blacks athletes could transition from their playing careers to coaching, but Daugherty was ahead of his peers with his staff, too. He hired All-American Sherman Lewis in 1969 and added Raye to his staff as a second Black coach in 1972 at a time most schools had only recently hired their first Black coach.

A different, though, was Daugherty hired them for their coaching potential. Other schools were hiring Black coaches to recruit Black players.

By 1977, Raye jumped to the NFL with the San Francisco 49ers. He was only of only 10 Black assistant coaches in a 30-team league. Raye was the OC for the first time in 1983, the same year Lewis jumped to the NFL with the 49ers. Lewis’ first job as an OC with the Green Bay Packers (1992-97), which included winning Super Bowl XXXI for the 1996 season.

The above facts, though, weren’t mentioned in real-time media reports.

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Episode 12 of THE END GAME features NFL 360/NFL Network producer/director Osahon Tongo. His documentary, The Indelible Legacy of Jimmy Raye, won a 2023 Sports Emmy Award.

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The media focused narrowly on who would become the first Black head coach. Raye’s name was frequently mentioned as a candidate in the late 1980s, but his prime years as a head coach candidate in the late 1980s through the 1990s played out at a time when Black coaches weren’t seriously considered for jobs as a head coach.

Raye’s contributions extend to off the field. He was a mentor to many young Black coaches, including Dungy and Tyrone Willingham. Dungy mentioned Raye in his 2016 Pro Football Hall of Fame induction speech. Willingham, whom Raye recruited to Michigan State out of Jacksonville, N.C., was the first Black coach to take a team to the Rose Bowl in 1999 at Stanford and the first Black coach in any sport at Notre Dame, in 2002.

in 2023, NFL 360/NFL Network produced a documentary, “The Indelible Legacy of Jimmy Raye,” that won a Sports Emmy Award. The film was produced and directed by Osahon Tongo. He explained as a former Georgia Tech player in his 30s he was inspired to learn what it was like for an African American athlete to emerge from segregation and the Civil Rights movement.

Another consequence of the mainstream college and pro football lores failing to properly tell Raye’s story has been the trickle down to Michigan State. The school fails to fully understand Raye’s stature and educate its players and fanbase. Once Daugherty retired after the 1972 season, the football budget was cut, and the university sought a separate identity.

Jimmy Raye joined a history class at Westerville High near Columbus, Ohio, to discuss his pioneering career at Michigan State.

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Tony Banks, Michigan State’s quarterback from 1994 to 1995, said he didn’t learn Raye’s history until they were together with the Washington Redskins in 2001 near the end of Banks’ 10-year NFL career. Raye was the offensive coordinator under Marty Schottenheimer and Banks took over as the starter, replacing opening-day starter Jeff George.

“I didn’t know about Jimmy Raye when I was at Michigan State,” Banks said. “It wasn’t talked about. When you I learn about him, I saw he had an amazing career as a quarterback and as a coach. But I didn’t get know him and all this until Washington.

“Jimmy Raye was a welcome offensive coordinator for me. I had never played for a Black coach until then. But it’s not just because he was Black, and we had experienced as quarterbacks people saying we didn’t understand the game and we weren’t smart enough. He was a great coach. I learned a lot about the game from him.”

But no matter the breadth of Raye’s identity, he has always been a North Star in the sports world among African American fans.

Jack Pitts doesn’t have the national name of Dungy or Willingham to comment on Raye, but his recruiting story similarly underscores Raye’s stature.  Pitts was a decorated quarterback at Trinity High, the Black school in Decatur, Georgia, with offers throughout the Big Ten. He was enshrined in the Georgia High School Sports Hall of Fame, in 2024 (the late induction yet another example of society coming to grips slowly with the 1960s history that was ignored in the media).

Pitts emerged as a pioneer among southern Black recruits as one of the first with the option to play for a southern school or go north. Previously, integrated programs — which included USC having only five Black players on its 1962 national title team and seven on its 1967 national championship team — followed an unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to a half dozen or so.

Episode 34 of THE END GAME features Wake Forest coach Bill Tate (1964-68) and Jack Pitts, one of the first Black athletes in the South with a scholarship offer from a major southern school as well as northern programs.

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Garland Boyette, a nine-year NFL veteran out of Grambling, grew up Orange, Texas, near Houston. He said a Black kid in the South knew there were only a half-dozen scholarships available for a Black player, and they hoped one would be used on a player from the South.

By 1964, Wake Forest, an Atlantic Coast Conference school in Winston-Salem, N.C., and Houston, were the first southern schools to recruit Black players out of high school. Wake Forest coach Bill Tate signed Black players in his 1964 and 1965 classes and pursued Pitts in his 1966 class.

Tate arranged for Pitts to meet Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. He also asked San Francisco Giants catcher Tom Haller, who played football and baseball at Illinois, Tate’s alma mater, to enlist Giants baseball legend Willie Mays to make a phone call to Pitts.

Pitts was in awe of meeting King and speaking to Mays, but he also says he was transfixed watching Raye play in the Rose Bowl as a Black quarterback for Michigan State. In those days, the Rose Bowl and Army-Navy Game were the two biggest games of the year.

On Pitts’ recruiting trip to Michigan State, he met Raye and All-American teammates Bubba Smith, George Webster and Clinton Jones among other Spartans. He joined them for a pickup basketball game at the Intramural West Building.

“When we finished playing, Jimmy told me, ‘We need you with us; we need you here,’” Pitts recalled. ‘That’s all I needed to hear to seal the deal. You go where you’re wanted, and when you’re playing with All-Americans and hear that from Jimmy, that did it.”

Reminded Raye’s voice spoke louder than those of MLK and Willie Mays, Pitts chuckles. But such was the stature of Jimmy Raye – unappreciated by today’s college and pro football lore or not – as he joins the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame.

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Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter and frequent contributor to Spartanmag.com in addition to posting on his website. His new book on Michigan State leading college football integration is, “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” His first book was “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans.”

I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055

Below are links to click on to purchase my books focused.

My books tell the true story of college football integration in the 1960s and address the myths and fiction that allowed a false narrative surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game to usurp the credit from the true pioneers. As I said when I spoke at the National Sports Media Association book festival, no two books provide an accurate portrayal more than RAYE OF LIGHT and THE RIGHT THING TO DO.

I’ll put my facts up against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.

Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation awarded first place by the Football Writers Association of America. I tell untold stories on Michigan State’s leading role and the true pioneers of college football integration. Click here to read the summary as a first-place story.

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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