Piece by piece, year by year, holes are punched in storyboards depicting Alabama coach Bear Bryant as a benevolent segregationist. The myths were created to hide his silent voice on race in the 1960s — the issue of his times for a southern leader to be on the right side of history — belie that sports has long outpaced society.
The oversimplification of the 1970 USC-Alabama game erroneously portrays it as a pivotal moment in college football’s integration. The false narrative has Bryant scheduling USC’s integrated program as the season opener “to lose” and thus shame Alabama’s bigoted fans into allowing him to recruit African-American athletes. The myths and fiction were meant to embellish USC’s role and to obfuscate Bryant dragging his feet.
The reality is, Oklahoma was the ninth integrated roster Alabama faced that season in a game played 49 years ago tonight in the 1970 Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl. Of the Southeastern Conference’s 10 members in 1970, five had integrated ahead of Alabama and Vanderbilt in 1971.
In the 1970 opener, USC’s Sam Cunnningham, a black fullback that ran 12 times for 135 yards and two touchdowns to beat Alabama 41-21 on Sept. 12, 1970, But he was no more a turning point for Alabama enlightenment than was Oklahoma’s Greg Pruitt, a black halfback that scored two touchdowns on runs of 58 and 25 yards among eight carries for 97 in a 24-24 tie on Dec. 31, 1970.
To state otherwise is to believe President Lyndon Johnson signing the 1965 Civil Rights Act was the turning point to Martin Luther King’s movement. The pivotal moment was a decade earlier when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, sparking the Montgomery bus boycott that King led.
In the bowl game, Oklahoma lined up four black starters and 12 black players overall. The 1970 Trojans, despite their long history of integration, had similar small numbers, with five black starters and 17 black athletes.
“Prentiss Scott was Oklahoma’s first black player in 1956, but after that there were only two or three black players on the team,” said Mike Brooks, an Oklahoma football historian. “Then there were four or five. It wasn’t until later in the ’70s that the team began to get to be 40 or 50 percent black.”
The fictional narrative begins with the NCAA permitting an 11th game and Alabama adding USC. A biting line from Los Angeles “Times” sports columnist Jim Murray, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was Alabama had finally joined the Union 105 years after the Civil War.
Significantly, seven integrated southern schools Alabama played represented confederacy states, meaning all of them were ahead of Bryant. They were, in order, Virginia Tech, which integrated in 1970; Florida, 1970; Tennessee, 1968; Houston, 1965; Mississippi State, 1970; Miami, 1968; and Auburn, 1970.
The fiction that USC-Alabama was a pivotal moment has its roots with the imaginations of former USC linebacker John Papadakis and author Keith Dunnavant. Papadakas wrote and tried to sell a movie script; Dunnavant is a Bryant apologist.
Understand that prior to the expansion of Bryant-Denny Stadium on campus in Tuscaloosa, Alabama typically played half or more of its home games at Birmingham’s Legion Field, “The Football Capital of the South.” In those days, Birmingham was called “Bombingham” for attacks on black homes and churches. Four little girls were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church Bombing on Sept. 15, 1963.
Bryant failed as a leader in turbulent times, David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winner that covered the Civil Rights movement early in his career, noted in his 2002 ESPN story on Bryant, “Just a coach, not a leader.”
USC-Alabama was played at Legion Field, and the post-game fiction included Bryant parading Cunningham, stripped to the his football pants, around the Alabama locker room supposedly as an example to his players of what a football player looked like. Aside from Papadakis ignorantly painting an image of an auctioneer taking bids on a slave, it never happened.
Alabama’s players had disputed the story once the myth spread many years later from the West Coast. Neal McCready of the Mobile (Ala.) “Press-Register” spoke with the Alabama players, including quarterback Scott Hunter, and wrote about it in a 2003 story before USC played at Auburn.
For years the myth grew with Cunningham playing along. Eventually, though, he hinted it didn’t happen quite like that. Finally, he admitted in a 2013 Showtime documentary, “Against the Tide,” it never happened at all. There is no more truth to the Sam Cunningham moment with Bear Bryant than there is to the moment in the he 1993 movie “Rudy” that portrays Notre Dame players turning in their jerseys on coach Dan Devine’s desk if the Rudy Ruettiger wasn’t permitted to dress for the season finale.
Another problem with the Papadakis/Dunnavant narrative is Bryant never spoke of it between 1970 and his death in 1983, including in his 1974 book “Bear” with John Underwood. Also, one of Bryant’s closest assistant coaches, Clem Gryska, repeatedly denied the game was scheduled as one to lose with a message. He passed away in 2012.
Wilbur Jackson, who was Alabama’s first black recruit, had already signed a scholarship offer at Alabama before the 1970 USC-Alabama game. He was a freshman in in the fall of 1970, but he watched the USC game from the stands; NCAA rules prohibited freshmen eligibility until 1972. Bryant recruited Jackson after Alabama high schools began to desegregate in the late 1960s. Jackson was a junior in the fall of 1968 at all-black D.A. Smith High. The school closed prior to the 1969-70 school year, and Jackson’s senior year unfolded at desegregated Carroll High in Ozark, Ala.
That face begs this question: What if desegregation had been delayed another year or two? It is fair to speculate Bryant would not have recruited Jackson had he still been playing at Smith, Ozark’s all-black school.
As for Oklahoma’s 1970 roster, the “two or three” or “four or five” black players Brooks cited were typical numbers throughout the nation prior to the 1970s, even at schools with a long history of integration.
Michigan State was the game-changer in the 1960s.
On the Spartans’ 1965 and 1966 national championship teams under Duffy Daugherty, a College Football Hall of Fame coach, there were 11 black starters and 20 black players on the roster. They knocked down barriers that had limited black players to certain positions and uspoken quotas. Michigan State’s Jimmy Raye of Fayetteville, N.C., was the South’s first black starting quarterback to win a national title in 1966. Rover George Webster and halfback Clinton Jones were the first pair of black captains voted by their teammates without sharing the role with a white teammate. .
In 1960, Minnesota won the national title with five black players. In 1966, Notre Dame lined up one black player (Alan Page) against Michigan State in the Game of the Century that ended in a 10-10 tie. In 1967, USC won the national title with seven black players, but following Michigan State’s lead, USC’s number increased to 23 by the time of its next national title in 1972.
As for the theory Bryant scheduled USC as a game to lose, Cunningham was a sophomore who earned his starting role shortly before the opener. When the game was scheduled, there was no way to know Cunningham, ineligible as a freshman in 1969, could influence the outcome and Alabama’s bigoted fans.
In Alabama’s 6-5-1 season, the Tide went 5-3-1 against integrated rosters. The Crimson Tide lost to USC, Tennessee and Auburn before the tie with Oklahoma. Alabama beat Virginia Tech, Florida, Houston, Mississippi State and Miami. Of the three SEC rosters that were still all-white in 1970, the Crimson Tide beat Vanderbilt but lost to Ole Miss and LSU. Alabama was ranked No. 19 as late as Nov. 7 until a loss to No. 11 LSU.
Alabama and Vanderbilt were the sixth and seventh SEC schools to integrate in 1971. Ole Miss, LSU and Georgia were the last holdouts until 1972.
A difference between Cunningham and Pruitt in their 1970 games against Alabama was Pruitt didn’t have a teammate write a fictional script. Another was Oklahoma coach Chuck Fairbanks, a former Michigan State player (1952-54) influenced by the Spartans’ integrated history under head coaches Biggie Munn (1947-53) and Daugherty (1954-72), didn’t require an apologist.
Another question: Who was going to fire Bryant? He was a god-like figure in Alabama.
Don’t believe 50th anniversary stories about the 1970 USC-Alabama game that might be dreamed up in the upcoming season.
* * *
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.
http://shanahan.report/a/the-case-for-duffy-and-medal-of-freedom
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://www.shanahan.report/a/forty-four-underground-railroad-legacy-facts
Make sure you follow the All Sports Discussion Twitter account at @AllSportsDACC and please like our Facebook Page
Leave a Reply