"Breaking the Plane": Integration and Black Protest in Michigan State University Football during the 1960s

"Breaking the Plane": Integration and Black Protest inMichigan State University Football during the 1960s by John Matthew Smith Before top-ranked Notre Dame played second-ranked Michigan State University (MSU) in November 1966, the media built up the contest as "the game of the century." It was the first time in college football history that the top two teams would meet so late in the season. Millions of college-football fans anticipated what they hoped would be "the greatest battle since Hector fought Achilles."1 Equally remarkable was the racial makeup of each team: Michigan State would start twelve black players while Notre Dame had only one. By 1966, MSU fielded so many black players that the team was often compared to those of Historically Black Colleges and Universities like Grambling, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical, and Morgan State.2 For Michigan State star player Charles "Bubba" Smith, a black Texas native who had never played in an integrated stadium until he went to college, this would be the pinnacle of his college career. If Smith symbolized Michigan State football, Jim Lynch, a white Irish-Cathohc Ohioan and All-American linebacker, epitomized the kind of player for whom Notre Dame fans In addition to the staff of the Michigan Historical Review and the anonymous referees, I would like to thank Nora Faires, Mitch Kachun, John Larson, and Randy Roberts for their support, their careful reading of earlier drafts of this article, and their suggestions for revision. 1 "Fans, Bets, and Alcohol Abound as Nation Sets for Big Football Game," Wall Street Journal, November 18, 1966. See also Mike Celizic, The Biggest Game ofThem All: Notre Dame, Michigan State, and theFall of '66 (New York Simon & Schuster, 1992). Celizic, a journalist and Notre Dame alumnus, provides a fine account of the buildup to 'The Poll Bowl" and the game itself. However, while his work does discuss the fact that MSU had a large number of black players, there is little analysis of the significance of the game in the context of the civil rights movement. 2Alan Page was the only black player on Notre Dame's varsity squad. Souvenir Program, Michigan State versus Notre Dame, November 19, 1966; Lawrence Casey, "Sports Ledger," Michigan Chronicle, October 30,1965; "And He's You Know What," Baltimore Afro American, October 18,1966. Michigan Historical Review 33:2 (Fall 2007): 101-129 ?2007 by Central Michigan University. ISSN 0890-1686 All Rights Reserved. 102 Michigan Historical Review were used to cheering. At a pep rally two days before the game, on Notre Dame's pristine campus in South Bend, Indiana, forty-five hundred students and fans flooded the old field house as the marching band played the school's fight song. With chants of "cheer, cheer for Old Notre Dame" ringing from the rafters, the overwhelmingly white male crowd hanged Bubba Smith in effigy next to a sign that read "LYNCH 'EM."3 Coaches and athletes were often hanged in effigy by the fans and students of opposing schools, but "hanging" Smith next to a sign that said lynch 'em suggested some mixture of insensitivity and outright racial bias at Notre Dame. Two years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and nearly twenty years after Jackie Robinson broke major league baseball's color barrier, the "dummy in the green uniform with a number 95" represented not only Bubba Smith but a rejection of racial equality.4 Well into the twentieth century lynching had expressed and enforced white supremacy in the South, and the powerful memory of mob rule was reinforced for African Americans in the 1960s when their churches were bombed, or they were clubbed and hosed by pohce or stoned by white crowds. Notre Dame's rally was emblematic of a dominant white sports culture that resisted integration. The racial makeup of each school's football team illustrates the uneven progress of the civil rights movement. On one end of the spectrum, Notre Dame represented how hard blacks had to struggle to move beyond token athletic integration at predominantly white institutions. At the other end, Michigan State's squad was an example of what a fully integrated team might look hke. While many northern...