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5 On 3 December 1898, Harvard’s football team held a banquet to celebrate the end of a dramatic year.1 Having completed an unbeaten season, the squad enjoyed surprise victories over several Ivy League rivals, including the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University. The evening’s featured speaker, Theodore Roosevelt, proved to be a boisterous, energetic orator and a huge football fan. Roosevelt, a Harvard alum and newly elected governor of New York, received a warm ovation from an audience of influential administrators, students, and boosters. Yet the evening’s largest cheer came with the introduction of Assistant Coach William Henry Lewis. While a student at Amherst, the popular Lewis became one of the first African Americans to integrate the college game when he joined the freshman team in 1888. He was later joined by black teammate W.T.S. Jackson the following year. After graduating from Harvard Law School (where he also played successfully) Lewis was named assistant coach, also a first for a black man.2 Lewis’s popularity, eloquence, and skill as a jurist helped him join Roosevelt’s inner circle—a group of Harvard graduates and future “Rough Riders” in the Spanish-American War, ten of whom listed football as their “occupation” when they enlisted in 1898. According to historian Harold Ward, when Lewis was chosen to deliver Amherst’s graduation address in 1892 the event “was publicized as an indication of the black man’s ‘fitness.’ ”3 African Americans from throughout New England came to hear him speak; they included W.E.B. Du Bois, who had delivered his own commencement address at Harvard in 1890. While Lewis himself stayed home during the Spanish-American War and continued to coach, his relationship with Roosevelt persisted until 1907, when the president promoted him to assistant U.S. attorney in Boston. Under the subsequent administration of William Howard Taft, Lewis became assistant attorney general of the United States—at that point the highest federal office ever held by an African American.4 1 Beyond Jackie Robinson Racial Integration in American College Football and New Directions in Sport History William Lewis used the burgeoning game of college football to earn a reputation in the press as a “very strong,” “intelligent,” and “heady” player.5 Such an image fit perfectly in Roosevelt’s posse of headstrong leaders and administrators . Public discourse of non-whites rarely emphasized rationality or intellect, especially combined with such praise for a black male’s physical attributes. In a period of renewed racial animosity, contemporary black leaders had to find some means to forge positive public images if they had any hope of advancement . Within these constraints, Lewis used football to establish himself as an ideal man living the “strenuous life”—an amazing accomplishment considering the strict racial hierarchy that developed and informed Roosevelt’s philosophy. The president explicitly saw football as rugged preparation for Anglo-Saxon supremacy and American leadership in the new century.6 And yet William Lewis is not thought of as a black sporting hero in the same way as Jackie Robinson or Joe Louis. Unlike boxing and baseball, college football has rarely been the subject of serious study in terms of culture, race, and integration . Rather than examine the nebulous story of integration in collegiate football , scholarly attention and popular memory have both chosen instead to focus on clear and powerful individual stories of integration: the legendary biographies of professional black athletes. This remains the case even for the postwar era, when television exposure continued to popularize the game and made some student athletes household names alongside professional boxers and baseball players. Since 1985 scholars have explored the process by which black athletes were invoked in a number of debates—including the biological nature of African American physical prowess, dissension over the the black community’s perceived emphasis on achievement in sports and entertainment, and the debates surrounding the role of black athletes as community leaders or racial “spokesmen.”7 Yet the issues these studies focus on emerged from a growing African American presence in select professional (not amateur) turn-of-the-twentieth-century athletics , particularly individual sports such as boxing and Negro-league baseball. Many later observers found them particularly difficult to apply to intercollegiate team sports, especially football. Indeed, neither a single “color line” nor a single integrating figure in college football emerged; instead, a tediously slow and arduous process spanned eighty years and countless players. It is even difficult to identify the...

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