Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football (review)

"The honor of my race, family & self is at stake," wrote Jack Trice the night before his 1923 debut as the first African American football player at Iowa State University. The next day, Trice endured serious injuries—perhaps from racially charged, overaggressive white tacklers—and he soon died. The incident revealed both the burdens and obstacles faced by early black athletes at predominately white institutions. In Integrating the Gridiron, Lane Demas recognizes these hurdles while also painting a richer, more nuanced portrait of how race shaped college football.

If popular history creates heroes out of single, professional black athletes overcoming their sport's racial barriers, Demas seeks to move "beyond Jackie Robinson." In four case studies that cover a broad geographic range and span from the late 1930s to the early 1970s, he illustrates a diversity of responses to touchstone moments in the integration of college football, complicating any easy triumph-over-adversity narrative.

Ironically, in moving "beyond Jackie Robinson," Demas begins with Robinson's football team at UCLA, which had four other black players, as well, including the stars Kenny Washington and Woody Strode. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, UCLA rejected the "gentleman's agreement" that dictated the benching of black athletes in competitions against all-white teams. Black Los Angelinos and the African American press adopted UCLA as their own team, reading political significance into these racially integrated, high-performing squads.

Demas then turns to Johnny Bright, a star black halfback for Drake University in Iowa, who in 1951 suffered a broken jaw after a deliberate, premeditated attack on the first play of a game against all-white Oklahoma A&M. It not only elicited universal condemnation in Iowa, but also earned criticism in Oklahoma—though in terms of "poor sportsmanship," not racism, suggesting one way that race got muted in the supposedly apolitical sports arena.

When Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin banned Georgia Tech from playing the University of Pittsburgh (which had one black player, a backup fullback) in the 1956 Sugar Bowl, it represented "massive resistance" in the South after the Brown decision. But it provoked outrage among not only racial liberals, but also white college students in Atlanta and beyond. While southern football fans pleaded that the Sugar Bowl had nothing to do with politics, it nevertheless exposed cracks in the segregationists' guard.

Yet in 1969, when fourteen black players at the University of Wyoming elected to wear black armbands against Brigham Young University to protest the racist practices of the Church of Latter Day Saints, Coach Lloyd Eaton kicked them off the team. Culturally threatened by Black Power, whites in Wyoming endorsed Eaton's decision, even though it essentially sacrificed the team's chances for success.

Well-researched and accessible, Integrating the Gridiron urges an understanding of multiple perspectives at the intersection of race and sport. Yet it resembles an excellent dissertation more than a mature book. Some sections on historiography and historical context seem unnecessary. A few more case studies, perhaps stretching the scope to encompass the entire twentieth century, could have fulfilled the promise suggested by these insightful analyses.