Sidelined: How American Sports Challenged the Black Freedom Struggle

Chapter 3. The Black Athletic Revolt on Campus

61 3 The Black Athletic Revolt on Campus We figure it’s only right. We represent our race and our school in football, basketball, and track but still we didn’t have a pom-pom girl. —Don Shanklin, University of Kansas, football [Black athletes] were dropped into an environment that was almost impossible for them to succeed in . . . two entirely different universes all of a sudden converging. —Bob Wolfe, University of California, Berkeley, basketball Far from the political activism surrounding Harry Edwards, the sprinters of Speed City, and the Harvard rowers was the University of Kansas athletics department. The institution’s teams were known as the Jayhawks— as a reference to the violence and turmoil of the Civil War era—and were members of the Big Eight Conference. In 1968 they would improve on their relatively mediocre performances of the previous two years and tie for the position of Big Eight football champions. On a Saturday in May of that year the players gathered to participate in the varsity intrasquad scrimmage at Memorial Stadium. Play was divided into three periods of twenty minutes. The offense was awarded points for making first downs or touchdowns while the defense scored when they stopped first downs, forced fumbles, or intercepted passes. Although the defense won the first two periods, the Jayhawk offense dominated the third period to record an overall victory of 52–49. Coach Pepper Rodgers declared he was pleased with the scrimmage. He commented, “The offense beat themselves by making mistakes— fumbles and interceptions. If you eliminate mistakes you have a chance to 62 SIDELINED win.” The coach singled out a few individuals for special mention after a successful spring practice that left the team in a better position than in the previous year.1 Despite Rodgers’s no-nonsense analysis, this scrimmage was not an entirely unremarkable event and the campus in Lawrence, Kansas, had not escaped the racial tensions that were prevalent in many other areas of the nation. Two days previous to the scrimmage that marked the end of spring practice, T. J. Gaughan, a white member of the team, entered the locker room. He began talking with other members of the team as he changed for practice. His attention was then slowly drawn to a source of amusement elsewhere in the room. One of the team was stripped and in the process of putting on his uniform when Coach Rodgers walked in. Gaughan and others began to smirk at the scene that was developing. The player inadvertently providing the levity was black. As he looked around the locker room he quickly saw that he was the only black player there. Rodgers told the young man that he had better put his clothes back on and go up to the Student Union to join the rest of the black players who were boycotting practice. Gaughan remembered, “Poor Vernon forgot about it or had taken a nap and missed it!”2 African American Jayhawk football players were protesting the perceived discriminatory policies of the university. They were attempting to use sport as a lever to extract concessions, just as Edwards and Noel had done at San Jose the previous year. This sort of activism took place on many campuses across the United States in 1968. In fact, Harry Edwards asserted that in the 1967–1968 academic year there were demonstrations in the athletic departments of some thirty-seven major college campuses .3 Significant protests followed at several institutions throughout 1969. The majority of these incidents have received only brief historical attention, with just one article devoted to comparative analysis.4 A full understanding of the course of the black athletic revolt requires that these protests be given closer scrutiny. They reveal a further dimension to the relationship between the black athletic revolt and the black freedom movement. Teams were disrupted, racial tensions heightened, and the civil rights struggle became intertwined with concerns over racial identity and team discipline. White and black athletes found it difficult to maintain a team ethos when faced with issues of racial politics. Furthermore , some black athletes, facing pressure to reconcile their role as student athletes with an increasing black militancy, confused issues of racial prejudice with team discipline. This further hardened the stance The Black Athletic Revolt on Campus 63 of sports administrators against any intrusion by the civil rights struggle into the sports world. The case studies that follow have been...