WRITTEN OUT OF HISTORY: Tracing 1930s Syracuse to 1960s Michigan State
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Thomas Shanahan | @Thomas-Shanahan-23
Order link:
Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, The Integration of College Football 3rd Ed – August Publications
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By TOM SHANAHAN
College football integration’s long journey remains a largely untold story that is misunderstood when cited with bits and pieces in college football lore.
One profound story lost to history can be traced from late 1930s Syracuse teammates Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, Duffy Daugherty and Marty Glickman through Daugherty’s 1960s transformative Michigan State teams.
Sidat-Singh, a Black quarterback, was benched for a 1937 game at Maryland. The “Gentleman’s Agreement” required northern schools to bench their Black players when they played in the South.
Glickman, a halfback, also was a world-class sprinter scheduled to run on the U.S. team in the 400-meter relay at the 1936 Nazi Berlin Olympics. But he was pulled by U.S. officials for his Jewish faith to comply with antisemite German dictator Adolf Hitler.
The discrimination Daugherty observed shaped his view of the world, and he applied it upon becoming a head coach at Michigan State.
Daugherty defied the college football unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to half-dozen or so. His 1960s teams were college football first fully integrated rosters with double-digit Black players numbering into the 20s. He also recruited the players from the segregated South looking for an opportunity.
The remarkable life of Sidat-Singh, a scholar, athlete and Tuskegee Airman, and the backstories with Daugherty and Glickman are told in the book, “INVISBLE NO MORE,” by Scott Pitoniak and Syracuse emeritus professor Rick Burton.
Click here for all 39 episodes:
The End Game: Race and Sports – Tom Shanahan Report
Click here for all 23 episodes of Milestone Minutes: Duffy Daugherty’s ground-breaking teams – Tom Shanahan Report
This video podcast provides more depth into Daugherty’s leadership.
In 1964, the Spartans were the first fully integrated rosters, including the first fully integrated team to play in South in a 1964 game against North Carolina at Kenan Stadium in segregated Chapel Hill.
In the 1966 Game of the Century, a record TV audience of 33 million saw Daugherty line up 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and Jimmy Raye recruited out of segregated Fayetteville, N.C., as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title.
Notre Dame had one Black player, Alan Page. That’s not meant to single out Notre Dame. USC won its 1962 national title with only five Black players and it’s 1967 national championship with only seven.
The rest of the nation began following Daugherty’s example in the late 1960s.
Racial progress is always a long progress in American. Long before the fairytale of the 1970 USC-Alabama game as a tipping point erroneously captured the college football lore narrative, the experiences of Sidat-Singh and Glickman laid a foundation to Daugherty’s teams.
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— 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.”
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PURCHASE LINKS, non-fiction books
— RAYE OF LIGHT,
Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, The Integration of College Football 3rd Ed – 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
