The old adage “History is written by the victors” validates any thoughts to add an epilogue to the James Owens story.
Owens, who died in 2016, was Auburn’s first black football player (1970-72). He arrived a year prior to Alabama’s first black player, Wilbur Jackson (1971-73), but try explaining that to those in the state and beyond that believe Jackson — through no fault of his own — was the first through the door.
Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s wattage broadens the Crimson Tide’s spotlight, especially with Jackson coupled as Robin to Bryant’s Batman in Alabama folklore. Once Alabama joined the Union, Bryant made the 1970s his decade with his fourth (1973), fifth (1978) and sixth (1979) national titles.
History is written by the victors.
Auburn Hall-of-Famer Terry Henley (1970-72) — who became Owens’ teammate, close friend and spoke at his funeral — said he has grudgingly learned to live with distorted facts shining on the Tigers’ Southeastern Conference neighbor.
“Bear Bryant carried a big stick and won a lot of games with a lot of great players,” Henley said. “You’ve got to hand it to him and respect what he did.
“But then again, you have another school across the state, and we had the first Heisman Trophy winner. We had the first African-American football player. We were way ahead of them in a lot of categories.”
Auburn’s first Heisman Trophy winner was Pat Sullivan in 1971 and second was Bo Jackson in 1985; Alabama’s first was Mark Ingram Jr. in 2009.
Add to that list Auburn basketball.
The Tigers’ Henry Harris arrived on campus in the fall of 1968 and made his varsity debut in the 1969-70 season (NCAA rules prohibited freshmen eligibility until 1972). Alabama’s Wendell Hudson made his debut a year later in Tuscaloosa.
Bryant’s apologists say a combination of segregationist Gov. George Wallace and Alabama’s bigoted fans prevented Bryant from recruiting African-Americans, but it had been in the news throughout the late 1960s that Alabama’s high schools were gradually integrating. By 1968, the Alabama High School Athletic Association had fully merged with the the state’s former black athletics association.
Schools that were still all-white, still all-black and already integrated were playing each other in regular season games and playoff brackets. Owens’ high school, Fairfield High near Birmingham, was one of the early schools to integrate. Auburn coach Jim Hilyer scouted a Fairfield game, returned to campus and suggested to legendary Auburn head coach Ralph “Shug” Jordan they offer Owens a scholarship.
“I came back and said there is a young man at Fairfield High School that fits our needs,” says Hilyer. “He’s a fine young man with a fine family – and he’s black. Coach Jordan called me into his office and said there will be some kick back.”
But, Hilyer added, Jordan followed up his cautionary note saying he would back him “100 percent.”
It was that easy for Auburn to beat Alabama and Bryant to recruiting the first black football player among the two in-state SEC rivals.
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“Quiet Courage,” was produced and written by Thom Gossom Jr., a black Auburn football player (1972-74) that went into acting and writing.
“If you watch the story on James and the 1972 team, it will bring a tear to your eye,” Henley said. “When Bruce Feldman was at ESPN a few years ago writing a story on Auburn, I pleaded with him and others at ESPN to do a 30-for-30 (documentary) on James.
“I don’t know why they won’t do it. It’s a great documentary.”
Auburn’s integration story also authentically separates from Alabama in another way: a reckoning among prominent figures. Former Auburn athletic director David Housel acknowledged in “Quiet Courage” his school should have done more to support Owens as the only black player.
“In retrospect it was not the way to break the color barrier,” Housel said. “There should not have been one person on that island alone.”
Of the Civil Rights movement to end segregation, Housel added, “There were terrible things that happened, but the thing that was most terrible was when good men stood silent. And I think that was true at Auburn and throughout the South … Change should have come quicker, but good men remained silent. …”
Henley said it wasn’t until later in life, upon deeper conversations with his old friend, that he recognized that he should have done more to support Owens’ difficult transition.
“It was a learning curve for me, the players and the coaches,” Henley said. “I was raised in an all-white community.”
By contrast, HBO’s 2008 “Breaking the Huddle” and Showtime’s 2013 “Against the Tide” both celebrate Bryant while focusing on the 1970 USC-Alabama game, a tale that has grown with myths into folklore. The films skip over Bryant’s track record of dragging his feet on the social issue of his times.
An unintended consequence of such a misleading narrative has been courageous stories of early pioneers at others schools have been overshadowed. The oversimplified storly line has embellished the 1970 game’s significance. By the time USC visited Legion Field in Birmingham, earlier trailblazers had paid the price to open a path for Bryant to schedule a game played without racial incidents.
Although “Quiet Courage” received strong reviews, the HBO and Showtime documentaries gained larger audiences. They left a misleading image of Bryant waving his wand to end segregation on a single night in 1970.
History is written by the victors.
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Auburn made amends in 2012 to Owens for his sacrifices to change the South. The Tigers honored him as the initial recipient of the “James Owens Courage” Award that has been presented annually to a current or former Auburn player.
During a halftime ceremony at the Sept. 15, 2012 game against Louisiana-Monroe, the public address announcer told the Jordan-Hare Stadium crowd of 87,000 that “The James Owens Courage Award will ensure we never forget his legacy at Auburn University.”
Another teammate, offensive lineman Mac Lorendo (1970-72), asked Owens if he felt the current Tigers on the field had an awareness of the courage it took to blaze a trail.
“No, no they don’t,” was Owens’ reply, Lorendo said.
Telling Owens’ story remains important for a younger generation that doesn’t understand segregation was recent history – not ancient. Owens heart gave out four years ago, but there are still many pioneers among us. And an older generation that believes Bryant magically waved his wand.
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The first SEC school to integrate was Kentucky with Nate Northington and Greg Page arriving as freshmen in 1966. They were followed a year later by the second pair of black recruits, Wilbur Hackett and Houston Hogg.
In 2016, Kentucky unveiled a statue of the four pioneers.
Tennessee was the second SEC school with Lester McClain as its first black player. McClain (1968-70) gained another place in history as the first black SEC player to score a touchdown with his six TDs as a sophomore in 1968.
Next, Auburn was joined by Florida and Mississippi State in 1970, but it’s misleading to say Bryant had to wait. Recruitment of black athletes was gaining momentum in the South, and Bryant knew it.
In the 1966 season, Tennessee targeted two high school senior running backs to make history as the Volunteers’ initial black players, Albert Davis of Alcoa, Tenn., and Tommy Love of Sylmar, N.C. When Love committed to Michigan State, the Volunteers added Lester McClain of Antioch, Tenn., as a target.
Although Davis went to Tennessee State, leaving McClain as the Volunteers’ lone pioneer, Davis had been on Tennessee’s radar long enough to encounter Bryant at Neyland Stadium. Davis had a Tennessee recruit field pass for the 1966 Alabama-Tennessee “Third Saturday of October” rivalry that the Crimson Tide won 11-10.
McClain said Davis told him, “After the game Bear put his arm on his back and said, ‘I wish I could recruit you.’ ”
It was Bryant’s version of telling every girl he saw that she was prettiest gal he’d ever seen. Davis wasn’t the first or last black athlete to hear that non-committal excuse.
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Another school overlooked by Alabama myths was Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s 1960s Underground Railroad players. The Associated Press reported in 1962 the Spartans had “the largest delegation of Negro players in the history of major college football.”
Daugherty’s 1964 Spartans were the first fully integrated team to play in the South at the height of the Civil Rights movement. They played North Carolina on Sept. 21, 1964 at Kenan Stadium in Chapel Hill at the back end of a home-and-home contract.
The trip, ignored on college football integration timelines, belies claims from Bryant apologists that Alabama couldn’t find an integrated team to play in Birmingham. Author Keith Dunnavant, a Bryant apologist, dubiously made that claim about Boston College in the HBO documentary.
The narrative has USC coach John McKay, his old friend, agreeing to the game, but a hole in the story was Daugherty also was Bryant’s close friend.
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Two more holes on in excuses for Bryant: 1) George Wallace was out of Alabama office by 1967, but Bryant still didn’t add a recruit in his 1967, 1968 or 1969 recruiting classes. 2) The alumni didn’t prevent Alabama basketball coach C.W. Newton from recruiting Wendell Hudson to arrive on campus as a freshman for the 1968-69 school year. He also wasn’t prevented by the Alabama athletic director, a powerful figure named Bear Bryant.
In 1969, Bryant used his old excuse on Southern Methodist’s Jerry LeVias at a college all-star game. LeVias was the Southwest Conference’s first black scholarship player and a two-time All-American receiver/return man. He was named to the South roster that Bryant coached in the All-America Bowl on Jan. 4, 1969 in Tampa, Fla.
With the South trailing 21-0 into the third quarter, Bryant opened up the offense. The South threw passes to LeVias and gave the ball to Mercury Morris, a black running back from West Texas State.
Their big plays rallied the South, although the comeback fell short, 21-15.
“When the game was over, Bear came over to me,” LeVias recalled. “He said, ‘When they let me, I’m going to get me some of you all.’ ”
The “when” word choice suggests in January 1969 signing a black athlete wasn’t on Bryant’s mind for the class of 1970, either. And by July 1969, Bryant still seemed without intent to recruit a black athlete.
Until, that is, Alabama’s Afro-American student association sued him. Civil Rights attorney U.W. Clemon said during depositions Bryant had told him he couldn’t find black athletes qualified academically and athletically to play for the Crimson Tide. Clemon doesn’t say if he asked Bryant about Owens or any number of black athletes breaking down doors in the South or playing elsewhere in the nation.
What changed?
The lawsuit went away when Jackson, a senior in the fall of 1969, committed to Bryant’s 1970 recruiting class — one year after James Owens had joined Auburn’s 1969 recruiting class.
At Auburn, Hilyer all it took to recruit a black athlete was to ask his school’s head coach. At Alabama, all the Alabama Afro-American student association had to do was sue Bryant.
By then it was too late for Bryant to beat Auburn and James Owen through the door, although revisionist history will tell you otherwise. But as revisionist history was added, those that believed Bryant ended segregation’s pain with one football game, the struggles of James Owens and others were pushed aside.
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No singular figure or moment represents the integration of college football, but Jerry LeVias stands out for encompassing so much history in a tumultuous fight for equal opportunity – at least on the playing field. His story also is unique for crossing paths with influential pioneers of his generation, including intersecting with Michigan State Underground Railroad engineers Duffy Daugherty and Willie Ray Smith Sr. However, the true 1960s pioneers have been dispossessed of their places in history due to myths surrounding the 1970 USC-Alabama game.
Podcast link:
https://www.shanahan.report/a/my-podcast-appearance-on-get-off-my-pylon
Part I (5-6-20): How MLK helped Jerry LeVias and Hayden Friday change the Southwest Conference
PART II (5-12-20): Jerry LeVias and his brave place among trailblazers at Kentucky, Tennessee and Houston.
Part III (5-21-20): “Integrating” southern end zones — paraphrasing the great Shirley Povich — with Tennessee’s Lester McClain and Jackie Walker, SMU’s Jerry LeVias and Michigan State’s Underground Railroad.
Part IV: (5-31-20) Auburn’s James Owens and his overshadowed history as the first black football at an SEC school in the state of Alabama.
PART V (TBA): USC and Alabama are scheduled to open the season Sept. 5 at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Tex. — if the 2020 season takes place. Many in the media will regurgitate folklore for the 50th anniversary of the 1970 USC-Alabama game, although the myths have been debunked that Alabama coach Bear Bryant scheduled USC as a landmark opponent to shame his bigoted fans into allowing him to recruit black athletes. The reality is SEC had been integrated since 1967 and USC was the first of nine teams with black athletes Alabama faced in 1970. LeVias played for Bryant in a 1969 college all-star game in Tampa. When Bryant spoke with him afterward, Bryant uttered words he had long used and his apologists have embraced to this day to try and explain away dragging his feet on integration
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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.
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
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.”
https://www.augustpublications.com/
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