Rooting for the Home Team: Sport, Community, and Identity

2. the Biggest "Classic" of Them All: The Howard University and Lincoln University Thanksgiving Day Footbal Games, 1919-1929

2. The Biggest “Classic” of Them All The Howard University and Lincoln University Thanksgiving Day Football Games, 1919–1929 DaViD k. WigginS African Americans established a number of successful and important separate sports programs during the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Banned from most predominantly white organized sport during this period because of racial discrimination, African Americans organized their own teams and leagues behind segregated walls at the amateur and professional levels, in small rural communities and large urban settings, and among both men and women of different social and economic backgrounds. Some of the most important of these separate sports programs were those established at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Since the latter stages of the nineteenth century, HBCUs have competed at a relatively high level in football, basketball, and a number of other sports.1 The annual Thanksgiving Day football games played between well-known HBCUs drew a great deal of attention and much enthusiasm from African Americans. The most popular and significant of these games were those pitting Howard University and Lincoln University from 1919 to 1929. Described in 1922 by Chicago Defender sportswriter Frank Young as “the most important game in the country as far as we (African Americans) are concerned,” the Howard and Lincoln Thanksgiving Day matchups during the 1920s, a decade commonly termed the “golden age of American sport,” garnered some attention in the white press, voluminous coverage in the black press and attracted great interest among upper-class African Americans in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other black communities across the country.2 The Biggest “Classic” of Them All 37 The Howard and Lincoln annual Thanksgiving Day football games, along with the accompanying social activities were, like the creation of black AllAmerican teams and naming of mythical national champions, a way for two of the most prestigious HBCUs to exhibit a much-needed sense of racial pride and self-determination while at once measuring themselves against the standards of predominantly white university sport and its attendant rituals. The “classic” was also important in that it enhanced the already elevated prestige of Howard and Lincoln, which, in turn, contributed to intangible strategic advantages for two institutions that were becoming more entrepreneurial and commercialized. The games and their accompanying social activities, moreover, played an important role in the identity of upper-class African Americans in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and other locales. For many African Americans, the “classic” was both a salve and a symbol of status, bringing them together while cordoning them off according to their respective social station. And things were in flux. Social changes, resulting from the northern migration of southern blacks during the early decades of the twentieth century, cast racial identity in a new light. With alternative modes of social advancement becoming possible in black communities, and toleration of whites toward upper-class African Americans being diminished because of the geographical expansion and more economically mobile pattern of the black population following the great migration, the “classic” was more than just a test to determine athletic superiority. It was “a social competition between the black populace of Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia” and a highly visible way to help keep African Americans of like kind together.3 The first football game between Howard and Lincoln took place in 1894 on Howard’s campus in Washington, D.C. Characteristic of the sport in the late nineteenth century, the game was a vicious and bloody affair. Lincoln’s right tackle James Harper suffered a broken jaw after colliding with Howard ’s star halfback “Baby” Jones. This incident, along with several other unfortunate confrontations during Lincoln’s 5–4 victory and following the game, including a Lincoln player having a pistol drawn on him by a white man on a Washington, D.C., street, were so serious that the schools did not play each other again until 1904. The games played between 1904 and 1918 attracted relatively little fanfare.4 In 1919 the Howard and Lincoln Thanksgiving Day football game, which was played in Philadelphia and ended in a 0–0 tie, was advertised and promoted as the “classic” and “greatest event of the season.”5 It would prove to be an apt descriptor as the game, which attracted a reported ten thousand mostly black fans, the usual composition of the crowds for these contests, 38 DaViD k. WigginS was transformed into a...