At the University but Not of the University: The Benching of Willis Ward and the Rise of Northern Racial Liberalism

No Northern state university prohibits the enrollment of Negroes, although a few practice minor forms of discrimination once they are enrolled. This is often a matter of individual prejudice rather than of official policy.¹

The racial prejudice encountered by the University of Michigan’s black lettermen during the first half of the twentieth century was entwined into the nation’s fabric: restaurants and hotels refused service to African Americans, landlords denied housing to black renters, and employers rebuffed black job seekers when it came to postgraduation professional opportunities. “They [black Americans] were IN America but not OF it,” remarked one writer recalling the racial exclusion that marked the era. Similarly, Dan Kean, a former tennis player at Michigan, reached the same conclusion about his and other African Americans’ sense of social isolation in Ann Arbor that had been drawn about the racial restrictions placed on black life in America. “If you want to know what it is was like then I’d have to say black students were AT the University but not OF it.”² Kean’s observation exposed the racial marginalization that black students confronted at the University of Michigan. Although African Americans began enrolling at the University of Michigan in the early 1850s, reflecting the early move toward integration in some areas of the North, discriminatory racial practices prevailed. White northern leaders supported race-neutral laws as they were compelled by both black and white activists to better manage the region’s race relations. They embraced northern racial liberalism; that is, they espoused the idea that all Americans, regardless of race, were politically equal. Yet they resisted the belief that the state should exert its influence, arguing that the state cannot and indeed should not enforce racial equality by interfering with existing economic and social relations. The result was predictable: African Americans were integrated in parts of the North, but the shift toward race-neutral laws as well as legal and legislative remedies did little to diminish the stark racial inequalities they were forced to endure. Segregation and stratification withstood racial liberalism and the pro-integration ethos that accompanied it.³ At Michigan, lodging restrictions, institutionalized racial quotas, and racist ridicule from professors in the classroom, among other forms of racial prejudice, stood as salient reminders to the school’s small black population of the gulf between their integration into a northern white institution and their attainment of full equality.⁴ Inclusion had its limits.

Whereas Kean summed the experiences of all black students at the University of Michigan, nowhere was the battle for full inclusion more fraught than in sport. Unwritten quotas, or “gentlemen’s agreements” as they were commonly known, shaped the racial etiquette in athletics at Michigan and many other northern universities.⁵ Qualified black athletes were segregated from participation, especially in football and basketball. In other sports like swimming, gymnastics, and wrestling, they were unable to start joining those teams until the late 1950s and early 1960s when a newer wave of Michigan coaches began to discard the unwritten quota system for African Americans. In baseball, though Michigan’s door was swung wide open by Moses “Fleetwood” Walker in 1882, only seven black men lettered in the sport, while no black athlete was permitted to play golf.⁶ In tennis, Kean became the second of only two African Americans to earn a letter in the sport in the university’s history when he did so in 1934, following behind Henry Graham, who first achieved the honor in 1928. These racial constraints on black participation aside, the chasm between integration and inclusion that marked life for black athletes at the university likely imbued Kean’s perception that African Americans had not been granted full acceptance. Nowhere was this gap between integration and inclusion more visible to Kean than during his senior season in 1934 when the university experienced its most embarrassing racial incident—the benching of Willis Ward, an African American football star and three-time all-American in track and field.

On October 20, 1934...