Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football

Prologue

1 Floyd Keith, head of an organization called Black Coaches and Administrators (BCA), considers the lack of African American coaches in college football “an outright disgrace.” For twenty years, the BCA has advocated for minorities within the NCAA coaching ranks, reminding fans of some startling figures. As of 2009, only 3.4 percent (that is, 4 of 119) of the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I) schools employ black coaches. BCA has even called on minority candidates to consider pursuing litigation under federal civil rights legislation should the number of black coaches remain so low.1 Led by the BCA, along with sportswriters like William Rhoden at the New York Times, the debate over black coaches speaks to a remarkable transformation in collegiate athletics. Not only is 3.4 percent lower than the overall proportion of blacks in America (13.5 percent), it is also more than ten times less than the proportion of current college players who are black. In 1990, 37 percent of football players at major NCAA Division I schools were African American, despite constituting only 4 percent of enrolled students.2 A 2006 NCAA survey found that 19,667 black students competed for 616 football teams (32.7 percent); this figure does not include the hundreds of players who participated at historically black colleges and universities. In 2008, the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport reported that the percentage of African American players on all Division I football teams stood at 45.9 percent.3 Fan reaction to minority hiring in the NCAA often invokes a simple question : why are there so few black coaches when so many black students play football? For the many who listen to sports radio, read sports journalism, and follow their favorite teams, debates such as these make college sport a lens for examining complex issues like race, affirmative action, civil rights, and discrimination. Indeed, for some (often younger) fans, college athletics may be the only medium through which they have thought extensively about Prologue these important concepts, talked them over with peers, and formed their own opinions. However, the most important point is usually absent from these discussions: although black athletes seem ubiquitous on today’s campuses, they endured more than one hundred years of struggle before they could fully participate in college sport. In terms of black football players at predominately white schools, there were entire decades when participation was zero, and decades more when the 32.7 percent was less than 3 percent. During the twentieth century, the shifting racial demographics of college football teams reflected broader changes, not only on college campuses but also throughout American society. Unlike the simplified stories of racial progress embraced by many Americans—such as Jackie Robinson’s transformation of Major League Baseball (and the country) in 1947—the acceptance and ascendance of black athletes at the nation’s universities was a long, painful process. Depending on a given school or athletic conference, predominantly white football teams integrated with black students as early as the 1880s and as late as the 1970s. Yet college football also offered some of the most dramatic, visual examples of transformation sparked by the modern civil rights movement. The game emerged in the late nineteenth century at the country’s most elite institutions; for example, the first intercollegiate contest in 1869 featured Rutgers University and Princeton University. By the turn of the century, an influential group of race scientists, psychologists, and even presidents (notably Theodore Roosevelt) applauded football as a way to prepare Anglo-Saxon youth for their confrontation with the world’s inferior races. For the next fifty years, social theorists noted that all-white college teams were evidence of the differences between whiteness and blackness. But today, a new generation of scholars is drawn to college sport for the opposite reason: the supposed glut of black participants. African American athletes are now more likely to represent their school on radio, television, and in newsprint than any other members of the student body. By the 1970s and 1980s, popular debates centered on the growing number of black athletes, gross recruiting violations at black high schools, and sinking academic standards for black players. Thus, although the transition from 0 to 32.7 percent required more than a century, it was also sudden and overwhelming. Consider the career of Lou Holtz, legendary coach at Notre Dame University who began his career as a 1960 graduate assistant at the University of Iowa. At that time...