College football integration’s long journey remains a largely untold story that is misunderstood when cited with bits and pieces in college football lore.
One profound story lost to history can be traced from late 1930s Syracuse teammates Wilmeth Sidat-Singh, Duffy Daugherty and Marty Glickman through Daugherty’s 1960s transformative Michigan State teams.
Sidat-Singh, a Black quarterback, was benched for a 1937 game at Maryland. The “Gentleman’s Agreement” required northern schools to bench their Black players when they played in the South.
Glickman, a halfback, also was a world-class sprinter scheduled to run on the U.S. team in the 400-meter relay at the 1936 Nazi Berlin Olympics. But he was pulled by U.S. officials for his Jewish faith to comply with antisemite German dictator Adolf Hitler.
The discrimination Daugherty observed shaped his view of the world, and he applied it upon becoming a head coach at Michigan State.
Daugherty defied the college football unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to half-dozen or so. His 1960s teams were college football first fully integrated rosters with double-digit Black players numbering into the 20s. He also recruited the players from the segregated South looking for an opportunity.
The remarkable life of Sidat-Singh, a scholar, athlete and Tuskegee Airman, and the backstories with Daugherty and Glickman are told in the book, “INVISBLE NO MORE,” by Scott Pitoniak and Syracuse emeritus professor Rick Burton.
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In 1964, the Spartans were the first fully integrated rosters, including the first fully integrated team to play in South in a 1964 game against North Carolina at Kenan Stadium in segregated Chapel Hill.
In the 1966 Game of the Century, a record TV audience of 33 million saw Daugherty line up 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and Jimmy Raye recruited out of segregated Fayetteville, N.C., as the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title.
Notre Dame had one Black player, Alan Page. That’s not meant to single out Notre Dame. USC won its 1962 national title with only five Black players and it’s 1967 national championship with only seven.
The rest of the nation began following Daugherty’s example in the late 1960s.
Racial progress is always a long progress in America. Long before the 1970 USC-Alabama game as a tipping point the experiences of Sidat-Singh and Glickman laid a foundation to Daugherty’s teams.
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