WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY, Part I: Durham hotel housing Michigan State in 1964 defied Jim Crow
PHOTO: New research identified the Durham Holiday Inn West as the hotel that defied Jim Crow by housing Michigan State’s football team for its 1964 game at segregated North Carolina. The moment is worthy of a historical marker, but the hotel built in 1963 no longer exists. The above photo is a typical 1960s Holiday Inn sign.
***
Buy me a coffee to support my research to tell untold college football integration untold stories.
Thomas Shanahan | @Thomas-Shanahan-23
***
AUTHOR’S NOTE: When a major university faces prolonged leadership and cultural crises, it’s a good time to look back for authentically positive, historically grounded narratives to anchor their institutional reset.
The story below represents the 1960s leadership of President John Hannah, athletic director Biggie Munn and football coach Duffy Daugherty. They were in alignment.
I began researching this story long before President Kevin Guskiewicz left on May 27 for Clemson and was wrapping it up just as athletic director J Batt departed on June 15 for Kentucky.
It was written with a focus on lost history due to irresponsible 1960s sports journalism avoiding race. But with MSU’s recent administration turmoil, I wanted this note to point out it also reflects the moral and cultural high-water marks of Michigan State University.
The legacy of Daugherty’s trailblazing teams included college football’s first fully integrated rosters in the 1960s while capturing the nation’s attention on TV with a share of 1965 and 1966 national titles. Hannah’s student body and Daugherty’s White players accepted the influx of Black students and recruits. That wasn’t happening everywhere.
On Michigan State’s 1966 team that faced Notre Dame in the Game of the Century, the Spartans’ leadership was represented by two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title, Jimmy Raye, who was recruited aboard Daugherty’s Underground Railroad out of segregated Fayetteville, N.C. Read on and you’ll learn there’s much more about Michigan State as a singular story.
In our documentary project, GAME (CHANGERS) OF THE CENTURY, one of the Executive Producers is Dr. Phil Hart. The title of his Ph.d dissertation he earned at Michigan State was, “Problems in Organizational Renewal.”
Watch: Game Changers Sizzle 2025 | Videos & Movies on Vimeo
***
By TOM SHANAHAN
Michigan State’s 1964 football team broke ground as the first fully integrated roster to play a game in the segregated South, but the embryo of racial progress isn’t found in history books. This was a man-bites-dog story that the 1960s sports media irresponsibly ignored.
That sounds sinister, but the sports media custom back then was to avoid race and stick to game results – at least until Black athletes protested at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.
To restore the milestone moment, we must rely on oral histories. It’s the only way we learn nothing racial happened to mar the Michigan State-North Carolina game on September 26 at Kenan Stadium in Jim Crow Chapel Hill.
If “nothing happened” sounds like a Seinfeld episode, think again. Beyond North Carolina’s 21-15 victory and the historic 42-yard touchdown run by Michigan State’s Clinton Jones as the first Black man to score at Kenan, it was newsworthy the Spartans’ Black players were spared enduring cheap shots on the field and hearing racial epithets spewed from the stands.
There wasn’t a Bull Connor among the Tar Heels.
Clint Jones and his 1964 touchdown at North Carolina that history ignored – Tom Shanahan Report
Michigan State’s Clinton Jones and North Carolina’s Ken Willard on Episode 29 of The End Game discuss the Spartans playing in segregated Chapel Hill, September 26, 1964.
If you’re a couple of generations removed from Jim Crow America, understand enduring abuse was the norm for Black pioneers playing in a Jim Crow stadium. The earliest trailblazers were Maryland’s Darryl Hill (1963), Wake Forest’s Bob Grant and Butch Henry (1964), Houston’s Warren McVea (1964) and Southern Methodist’s Jerry LeVias (1965) among others. Kentucky (1966) and Tennessee (1967) were the leaders in the Southeastern Conference.
LeVias, the Southwest Conference’s first Black football scholarship player, said he bounced up quickly from a tackle to avoid piling on. In 1966, Texas fans at Memorial Stadium waved nooses at him. When the FBI deemed credible a death threat before SMU’s game at TCU, LeVias’ teammates avoided standing next to him on the sidelines.
Again, we only know these stories through oral histories. The history books are blank.
But there’s more to appreciate about Michigan State’s milestone 1964 weekend. The Spartans’ Black players didn’t face the indignity of Jim Crow hotels and restaurants rejecting them.
Michigan State College Football Hall of Famer Clinton Jones, 81, and his teammates said their weekend was so uneventful, they couldn’t recall the name of the hotel that boldly defied Jim Crow. In their memories, it was like a routine road game to a Big Ten team’s Midwestern town.
The identity of the team hotel was a mystery until new research revealed the Spartans stayed at the Durham Holiday Inn West on Hillsborough Road/Highway 70, a stretch connecting Durham with Chapel Hill. Michigan State’s Ben Phlegar of the Spartans’ communications office found newspaper stories buried in MSU’s archives. They were written by two Durham Morning Herald sportswriters, Elton Casey and Jack Horner.
Horner’s story noted Michigan State was one of three teams staying at a Durham hotel for games played September 26 in the Triangle. All-White Clemson bunked at Durham’s downtown Holiday Inn to play NC State in Raleigh and all-White Virginia stayed at the Durham Motor Lodge on U.S. 15 to face Duke in Durham.
Maybe it was normal in those days to report a visiting team’s travel plans, but the writers missed an uplifting story. North Carolina’s players and fans demonstrated southern racism wasn’t monolithic.
However, there is another mystery beyond why the Holiday Inn West defied Jim Crow in a city as segregated as any southern town. The 2019 movie “Best of Enemies” was about the Ku Klux Klan resisting Durham public schools desegregating — in 1971!
Who did Michigan State College Football Hall of Fame coach Duffy Daugherty trust to take his roster below the Mason Dixon Line?
In those days, schedules were typically arranged five to 10 years in advance, so the Tar Heels knew who they invited to dinner. Michigan State was known as an integration leader dating to the Spartans’ 1954 and 1956 Rose Bowl victories. Large television audiences saw African American stars Leroy Bolden and Ellis Duckett score in 1954 and Clarence Peaks and John Lewis in 1956.
There was no surprise in Chapel Hill unlike Wake Forest’s arrived in 1966 to play Auburn on the Plains. Wake Forest had desegregated only two years earlier.
When Wake Forest’s 1966 team couldn’t find accommodations, Auburn coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan, the Alabama school’s long-time coach, intervened. Wake Forest coach Bill Tate told me Jordan found a hotel and a caterer to bring in food.
Sports journalism missed the story of Bill Tate in life and death – Tom Shanahan Report
Unfortunately, though, the refreshing oral history doesn’t end with a happy note. Jordan was unable to prevent fan abuse.
Grant, who was the Atlantic Coast Conference’s first Black player to make an all-league team in 1966 and first Black player drafted by an NFL team (the Baltimore Colts) from a major southern conference in 1968 (you won’t find those facts in history books), told me Auburn’s fans threw bags of urine and waved Confederate flags at him and Henry. Grant added he wore his helmet when he got off the bus.
If the MSU-UNC deal was agreed to in the late 1950s, North Carolina’s coach then was Jim Tatum (1956-58) until his sudden death on the eve of the 1959 season. The Tar Heels promoted Tatum’s assistant, Jim Hickey, 1959-66.
We can gather Tatum’s mindset matched Daugherty based on an oral history from Bobby Bell, a Minnesota College Football Hall of Famer and Pro Football Hall of Famer from Shelby, N.C. Bell said Tatum saw him play in the North Carolina Negro All-Star Game and steered him to his friend, Minnesota coach Murray Warmath.
I asked Bell what Tatum, who coached an all-White UNC roster, was doing at a Black high school all-star game. He said he didn’t know, but he preceded to explain Warmath initially wasn’t interested in taking Bell. But Tatum persisted, telling Warmath if Bell didn’t pan out, he would pay Bell’s scholarship.
After Bell arrived in Minneapolis and it was obvious he could play, Bell said Warmath asked him if he had any friends back home. Bell said yes, referring to future Minnesota College Football Hall of Famer and Pro Football Hall of Famer Carl Eller of Winston-Salem.
Again, you won’t read in history books the backstories relating Tatum, Bell, Eller and Warmath.
The MSU-UNC contract was a three-game series with North Carolina playing at Spartan Stadium in 1962 and 1963 and the backend 1964 game at Kenan.
North Carolina’s Ken Willard, 82, a second-team All-American fullback recruited out of Virginia, told me he believes the Tar Heels’ southern-bred roster learned racial enlightenment from their two trips to Michigan State as well as a 1962 game at Ohio State.
Daugherty departed from other integrated programs by taking lead. Ge was the first coach to break from the college football custom of limiting Black players to a half-dozen or so. The prevailing opinion was too many Black players would lead to fights in the locker room and hurt recruiting. Notre Dame, for example, with a national recruiting base, didn’t want to risk losing prospects from the South.
In 1962, The Associated Press reported that Spartans’ 17 Black athletes were the most in major college football history. However, the story overlooked the Spartans broke their own records. Examples of programs following the unwritten quota limits until the late 1960s included national champions Minnesota, USC and Notre Dame.
PHOTO: Duffy Daugherty with his five two-time All-American players from the 1965 and 1966 seasons. L-R are Clinton Jones (Ohio), Bob Apisa (Hawaii), Bubba Smith (Texas), Gene Washington (Texas) and George Webster (South Carolina). Smith, Washington and Webster rode Daugherty’s Underground Railroad and along with Jones comprise the first four Black players from the same class enshrined in the College Football Hall of Fame. Apisa was college football’s first Samoan All-American and is in the Polynesian Football Hall of Fame.
Minnesota’s 1960 title team numbered five Black players. USC won the 1962 national title with five and the 1967 national championship with seven despite a campus located in populous and diverse Los Angeles. Notre Dame had one Black player in the 1966 Game of the Century when the Irish faced the Spartans’ 20 Black players.
But with irresponsible 1960s sports journalism leaving behind many blank pages, Michigan State’s ground-breaking decade was largely ignored. Later, it was co-opted by myths crafted two decades after the 1970 USC-Alabama game was played. The claim was Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant launched integration through the performance of USC fullback Sam Cunningham leading the Trojans to a 42-21 victory.
The narrative was Bryant scheduled USC as a game to lose. He wanted Cunningham, a Black fullback, to run over his all-White roster to shock his bigoted fanbase into allowing him to recruit Black players. There are no facts to support the myth — not to mention Bryant didn’t have a boss. But the misperception worked its way into national folklore with the aid of poorly researching sportswriting.
Posing 1970 USC-Alabama as a singular moment ignores Michigan State’s 1964 game at North Carolina as well as Maryland, Wake Forest, Houston, Southern Methodist, Kentucky, Tennessee and other integrated southern teams playing throughout Jim Crow’s boundaries prior to 1970.
The Underground Railroad quote book – Tom Shanahan Report
Example: Jerry LeVias, College Football Hall of Famer who ultimately picked SMU over MSU as the first Black scholarship football player in the Southwest Conference.
“Michigan State should be proud of what they did. Instead of sitting back and waiting for someone to tell their story, if I was a Michigan State recruiter in a living room with a kid’s family, I’d be saying, ‘Do you know the history of Michigan State?’”
The most glaring example refuting the 1970 myth was Tennessee’s 1969 integrated roster routing Alabama 41-14 at Legion Field in Birmingham. Tennessee’s Jackie Walker was the first Black man to score at Legion Field when he returned a first-quarter interception for a touchdown and a 21-0 lead. Such history wasn’t reported in game stories.
Tennessee’s rout a year before USC arrived at Legion Field contradicts the myth Bryant wanted to shock his fans. If there was a shock effect, it was in 1969. Another contradiction was Bryant had signed Wilbur Jackson to his 1970 recruiting class nine months before the USC game.
I’ve debunked the 1970 USC-Alabama myth many times, but the fairytale is so entrenched, college football lore accepts it. ESPN, for example, promoted the 50th anniversary of the 1970 USC-Alabama game. HBO and Showtime aired misleading documentaries hailing Bryant for some kind of “Nixonian-secret southern strategy.”
Abraham Lincoln, prior to his election as President, spoke to the Young Men’s Lyceum on January 27, 1838, in Springfield, Illinois, on the preserving oral histories. He referred to losing stories about the American Revolution heroes.
Honest Abe’s words remain a cautionary tale. They can be applied to explaining college football integration’s untold progress in the 1960s understood through oral histories.
-30-
Visit my homepage: TomShanahan.Report
— Watch a three-minute video to learn about our documentary at the fundraising stage, GAME CHANGERS OF THE CENTURY, and the Investment Deck.
I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
I’ll put my facts on the true pioneers of college football integration versus Bear Bryant fairytales against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.
Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation and Alabama that earned first place for Enterprise from the Football Writers Association of American.
— Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter with two books on college football integration, “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans,” and “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” They are the most accurate accounts of college football integration in the 1950s and 1960s. They also debunk myths about the 1970 USC-Alabama game. The false narrative co-opted the stories of the true pioneers who stood up to Jim Crow and the KKK.
— Two children’s books also explain Michigan State College Football Hall of Fame coach Duffy Daugherty’s impact on integration through the Underground Railroad and the Hawaiian Pipeline: “DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” and “HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP.”
***
PURCHASE LINKS, non-fiction books
— RAYE OF LIGHT, August Publications or on Amazon.
— THE RIGHT THING TO DO, August Publications or on Amazon.
PURCHASE LINKS, children’s books
— DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD: Order from Barnes and Noble here and Amazon here.
— HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP. Order here:
How Duffy Put Hawaii On America’s Football Map by Tom Shanahan, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
Amazon.com: How Duffy Put Hawaii On America’s Football Map eBook : Shanahan, Tom: Kindle Store
