To Kevin Warren:
Welcome to the Big Ten Conference. Congratulations on being named the historic league’s next commissioner, succeeding Jim Delaney. Welcome to the Conference of Pioneers.
Hey, if Bill Walton can call the Pac-12 the Conference of Champions, well, Big Ten fans certainly own the right to label the Big Ten the Conference of Pioneers.
Yes, UCLA’s all-time basketball great and cheeky TV analyst irritates football- and basketball-centric fans with his claim, but the facts back up Big Bill when encompassing other men’s and women’s teams and Olympic sports.
And there is no denying the Big Ten has an empirical right to call itself the Conference of Pioneers. Trailblazers date to African-American athletes that were sons of former slaves competing as their school’s first black athlete in the late 1800s. That’s nearly a full century before Alabama and its coach Bear Bryant “joined the Union” in the written words of the late, great Los Angeles Times columnist Jim Murray.
There is no more fitting league for your breakthrough.
By now, we’ve learned about your own pioneering history — most significantly as the NFL’s first African-American Chief Operating Officer with the Minnesota Vikings.
With your proximity to the University of Minnesota the past 14 years, you no doubt learned College Football Hall of Fame coach Murray Warmath provided breakthrough opportunities for black athletes. In 1960, Sandy Stephens led the Golden Gophers as the first black quarterback to win a national title.
You might have heard his teams referred to as the Underground Railroad. Fair enough, since Warmath had connections to segregated North Carolina that helped him recruit future Hall-of-Famers Bobby Bell (Pro and College), Carl Eller (Pro and College) and Charlie Sanders (Pro), but they were pretty much the extent of his reach into the South.
The true Underground Railroad teams were those of Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty throughout the 1960s. You’ve met Vikings legend Gene Washington, and he can tell you more about his experience as a passenger out of Texas. No coach, not even Warmath, had Daugherty’s vast connections with black high school coaches through the segregated South. Those coaches laid the initial tracks to the Underground Railroad, contacting Daugherty to send them their players.
Bubba Smith’s father Willie Ray Smith was a Texas high school coaching legend. In addition to his son and other Houston-area players, he recommended Daugherty recruit Washington from nearby La Porte. William Roberts of Anderson, S.C., asked Daugherty to take his star, George Webster.
Smith, Washington and Webster from the 1965-66 national championship teams are in the College Football Hall of Fame along with Clinton Jones of Cleveland, Ohio. They were the first four African-Americans from the same senior class named to the College Hall.
When Michigan State and Notre Dame played their epic 1966 Game of the Century, the Spartans had 20 black players, 11 black starters, a black quarterback (Jimmy Raye) and two black captains (Webster and Jones). Notre Dame had one black player (Alan Page).
Although 20 doesn’t sound like much compared to today — a millennial has nearly nil awareness of how recent was segregation — Notre Dame’s “one” was much closer to the norm of the era than Michigan State’s 20. In those days, even schools with a long history of integration limited their rosters to six or so black players.
Minnesota had only five on its 1960 national title team and USC seven on its 1967 national championship roster. But by USC’s next national title in 1972, the Trojans lined up 23 black athletes.
As Gene can tell you, Duffy showed the way to the nation.
Duffy’s first passenger was Clifton Roaf out of Pine Bluff, Ark., in 1959. That makes this season the 60th anniversary of the Underground Railroad wrapped within the 150th anniversary of college football. You might recognize the surname: Pro Football and College Football Hall of Famer Willie Roaf is his son.
Two more significant passengers were Sherman Lewis of Louisville, Ky., and Jimmy Raye of Fayetteville, N.C.
Lewis was the Underground Railroad’s first All-American as a halfback, finishing third in the 1963 Heisman Trophy voting. Raye was the South’s first black quarterback to win a national title. He was a sophomore backup in 1965 and the starter in 1966.
They also broke ground when Daugherty hired them among the first black assistant coaches in major college football. They blazed similar trails in the NFL, including as offensive coordinators, although they never had a fair chance to be a head coach. There is a round-trip ticket beyond playing days on Duffy’s Underground Railroad.
Tyrone Willingham, a passenger in Daugherty’s final 1972 recruiting class, considered Raye and Lewis mentors on his path to becoming a pioneering black head coach at Stanford, Notre Dame and Washington. If you ask Willingham, he’ll tell you he’s embarrassed he has been a head coach and not Raye and Lewis.
Daugherty was ahead the times hiring coaches, too. I don’t have to tell you, of course, that a black man can’t have a chance at becoming a head coach unless he is in the pipeline, but many people fail to understand this a half-century after Civil Rights legislation was passed.
Daugherty’s 44 passengers from 1959 to 1972 were from all the southern states but for Alabama, Tennessee and Maryland. Note that none were from Alabama.
Please, PLEASE, don’t believe the myths that Alabama coach Bear Bryant was a benevolent segregationist that sent players from the South to Daugherty.
That myth has been regurgitated enough times to turn the stomach of the truth (see facts Nos. 21-31, Four-four Underground Railroad legacy facts). It was so disappointing to see as recently as on June 3 that “The Athletic” regurgitated the myth that Bryant scheduled USC in 1970 to lose the game in a reverse psychology ploy to convince his bigoted fans to allow him to recruit black athletes. The myth conveniently overlooks USC was one of eight integrated teams Alabama faced that season, including Oklahoma.
The false narratives surrounding Bryant have cost Daugherty his legacy as the true leader of college football integration. A courageous leader, Daugherty was anything but a passive bystander.
You can learn more reading my book with Jimmy Raye:
RAYE of LIGHT
Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans and the integration of college football.
Note that the Foreword was written by Tony Dungy, a pioneer as the first black coach to win a Super Bowl and a Pro Football Hall of Famer. Before Dungy’s NFL days, he was a Minnesota quarterback in the mid-1970s.
I’ve read your Vikings office is decorated with photos of Martin Luther King Jr., Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood and the 1966 Texas Western basketball.
Hopefully, your Big Ten office will feature Big Ten pioneers, including Daugherty, Warmath and their players.
As you learn more about the Big Ten trophies named to for two legends – for example, the Ford-Kinnick Leadership Award is named for Michigan football player and U.S. President Gerald Ford and Iowa Heisman Trophy winner Nile Kinnick – maybe you’ll consider a Daugherty-Warmath Award for pioneering Big Ten figures.
Or maybe a Captain of the Captains award in the name of George Webster and Clinton Jones. Michigan State’s roster voted them 1966 team captains by a player vote, believed to be the first pair of black team captains with a white captain sharing the roles. That’s how far ahead of the times were Daugherty’s teams.
There is a Dungy-Thompson Humanitarian Award that encompasses Tony Dungy and Indiana’s Anthony Thompson. Not to take anything away from Thompson, but maybe there should be a Dungy-Raye Pioneering Award for their roles as black quarterbacks and black coaches.
* * *
Michigan State and Minnesota aren’t alone in the Big Ten. Here are more pioneers among so many others at each school:
— Illinois: Mannie Jackson was the first black captain of an Illinois basketball team. The players voted him captain, but when the Illini coach wanted a re-vote, teammate Jerry Colangelo, later a powerful NBA owner and USA Basketball executive, said one vote was enough. In the business world, Jackson earned distinction as one of the nation’s 30 most powerful black executives.
— Indiana: Preston Eagleson was the football team’s first black player from 1893 to 1893.
— Iowa: Kinney Holbrook was Iowa’s first black athlete in football and track. In 1896, he led the Hawkeyes to their first conference football title in 1896.
— Michigan: DeHart Hubbard set a world record in the long jump as a senior in 1925, but a year earlier he was the first African-American to win a gold medal in an individual Olympic event at the 1924 Games in Paris. The movie Chariots of Fire was based on the 1924 Olympic track and field games, although Hubbard doesn’t appear in the storyline. Hmm.
— Northwestern: George Jewett was the first African-American football player at both Michigan and Northwestern. He transferred from Michigan to finish his medical studies at Northwestern, playing for the Wildcats in 1893.
— Ohio State: Frederick Patterson was the son of an escaped slave and the Buckeyes’ first black athlete as a football player from 1891 to 1893.
— Purdue: African-American Lamar Lundy was the first Purdue athlete to earn team MVP honors in football and basketball in the same school year. Lundy played 13 NFL seasons.
— Wisconsin: Although the school no longer sponsors baseball, the sport was the first with black athletes when Julian Ware and Adelbert Matthews played for the Badgers. Ware was the first captain of a Big Ten team in 1902 and 1903.
* * *
Schools that recently joined the Big Ten through expansion have fit the league with their own own significant pioneers:
— Maryland: Darryl Hill was the first black football player in the Atlantic Coast Conference, in 1963. Maryland assistant coach Lee Corso, a future Indiana head coach, recruited him.
— Nebraska: George Flippin was the Cornhuskers’ first black football player from 1891 to 1894. In 1892, Nebraska refused Missouri’s request to leave Flippin at home for their game; Missouri forfeited rather than face Flippin.
— Penn State: Cumberland Posey was Penn State’s first black athlete in basketball from 1909 to 1911 and is in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. He also played baseball in the Negro Leagues for the Homestead Greys.
— Rutgers: Paul Robeson was an All-American football player from 1915-19. He gained greater fame was as a bass baritone and actor, but his legacy was later unfairly damaged over his Civil Rights stances later in life.
Mr. Warren, welcome to the Big Ten. You have a chance to do more to highlight some true trailblazers in “The Conference of Pioneers.” You have a chance to encourage more pioneers in the coaching and administrative office pipelines.
Sincerely,
Tom Shanahan
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I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
Tom Shanahan, Author: Raye of Light http://tinyurl.com/knsqtqu
— Book on Michigan State’s leading role in the integration of college football. It explains Duffy Daugherty’s untold pioneering role and debunks myths that steered recognition away from him to Bear Bryant.
— Raye of Light featured at 2019 National Sports Media Association Book Festival
http://shanahan.report/a/the-case-for-duffy-and-medal-of-freedom
http://www.shanahan.report/a/forty-four-underground-railroad-legacy-facts
Don’t believe the myths at Duffy Daugherty’s expense about Bear Bryant’s motivation to play the 1970 USC-Alabama game or myths about the Charlie Thornhill-for-Joe Namath trade. Bear Bryant knew nothing about black talent in the South while he dragged his feet on segregation.
http://shanahan.report/a/myths-that-grew-out-of-1970-alabama-game-with-usc
http://shanahan.report/a/mystery-solved-in-thornhill-and-namath-myth
David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winner and biographer; “History writes people out of the story. It’s our job to write them back in.
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