In This Big Game, There Were Two Black Coaches
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Posted By: Jehan Bunch on February 12, 2007 In This Big Game, There Were Always Two Black Coaches By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN Published: February 5, 2007 Decades before Super Bowl XLI, with its history-making confrontation between African-American coaches, similar encounters took place every year. The setting was the Orange Blossom Classic, the unofficial but de facto championship game for the all-black colleges of the segregated South. Associated Press Eddie Robinson on the Grambling sideline in 1971. From its inauguration in 1933 to the full integration of college football, the Orange Blossom Classic provided the showcase for such coaches as Eddie Robinson of Grambling, Jake Gaither of Florida A&M, John Merritt of Tennessee State and Earl Banks of Morgan State. Regularly drawing crowds of more than 40,000 to the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami, the game was a key element in the parallel universe of black college football, a sport with its own black coaches, stars, publicists, parades, bands, radio stations and journalists. In one of the paradoxes of race in America, segregation afforded opportunities in sports, as well as business, academia and the ministry, for a black middle class to develop and operate its own institutions. “Given the lack of opportunities for black coaches in the N.F.L. during that era, you could say the Orange Blossom Classic was their Super Bowl,” said Michael Hurd, a former sportswriter for USA Today who has written several books on the history of black college football. “The coaches who took their teams into the O.B.C. were extraordinary men who were well versed in X’s and O’s, who also knew how to mold great players and build championship teams, and you can extrapolate that to contemporary black coaches.” The Orange Blossom Classic began as the brainchild of J. R .E. Lee Jr., a business administrator at Florida A&M and son of the university’s president. Florida A&M, which is located in Tallahassee, always played host to the December game, and late in the football season it would invite another top black team as its opponent. (Now the classic is a regular-season game between Florida A&M and Florida International.) Never did the significance of the Orange Blossom Classic show more clearly than in the four meetings — 1955, 1964, 1967 and 1969 — between Florida A&M under Gaither and Grambling under Robinson. Robinson would go on to accumulate the most victories (408) of any college football coach, while Gaither would register one of the highest winning percentages (.844), with a record of 203-36-4. Both produced scores of N.F.L. players. The 1967 Orange Blossom Classic, for instance, had as its opposing quarterbacks James Harris of Grambling, who became the first black quarterback to regularly start in the N.F.L., and Ken Riley of Florida A&M, who became an All-Pro defensive back for the Cincinnati Bengals. The events on the field, though, only hinted at the broader roles played by Gaither and Robinson. The son of a minister, Gaither had aspired to a career in law until his father’s death made him the family breadwinner. Nonetheless, he earned a master’s degree at Ohio State. And he went on to do graduate study at Yale and assemble a coaching staff on which every member held an advanced degree — this at a time in the 1960s when, according to census data, only 3 percent of black adults even had a bachelor’s degree. Robinson also earned a master’s degree. Like Gaither, he had to go north to get it, at the University of Iowa, and had to return south to have any chance to be a head coach. White coaches at white colleges who refused for years to recruit black players — Bear Bryant at Alabama and Bobby Dodd at Georgia Tech, among others — treated Gaither and Robinson as professional peers, attending the same coaching clinics and conventions. Precisely because Gaither and Robinson enjoyed a tenuous status in the Southern white world, and because they rarely spoke publicly on behalf of civil rights, they faced a good deal of private criticism among more politicized blacks. Still, the caustic view of those coaches overlooked their self-appointed role as molders of men — a trait cited these days about the Super Bowl coaches, Tony Dungy of Indianapolis and Lovie Smith of Chicago. Gaither and Robinson insisted that their athletes go to class and earn degrees. Stoic in the style of their generation, both coaches spoke little of the indignities they endured. The first faculty housing Robinson and his wife, Doris, received from the state of Louisiana, for instance, was the leftover barracks from a nearby camp for German prisoners of war. In an oral history made in the 1970s, Gaither recalled his trepidation driving to Florida A&M in 1937 to take his initial job as an assistant coach because there had recently been a lynching in Tallahassee. His racial consciousness also emerged as he traveled through Florida speaking at graduations, building dedications and alumni events on the black side of segregated communities. “I love to think of my people fighting in the war of the Revolution — giving birth to the greatest democracy the world has ever known,” he said in 1952, at an awards ceremony for the black employees of a wood-pulp company. “I like to think of my people following Teddy Roosevelt in the Battle of San Juan Hill. I like to think of the part my people played in the war to save the Union. I like to think of how valiantly my people fought in the Argonne Forest of the first World War. I like to think of the courageous stand of my people in the Battle of the Bulge. I like to think of the glorious history the Negro has.” It was only appropriate that Florida A&M’s marching band performed with Prince at halftime last night. History has caught up to where men like Gaither and Robinson were a half-century ago: in charge in a championship moment. Samuel G. Freedman, who writes about education and religion for The Times, is writing a book about football and civil rights at black colleges. If you enjoyed this article, Join HBCU CONNECT today for similar content and opportunities via email! |
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Jehan Bunch
From Columbus, OH Central State University class of 2005 Member Since January 2006 |
Comments
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It was great to have witnessed two of the Great Coaches of all times. Coach Merritt and Coach Robinson were champions for equality and justice. Their teams were disciplined and focused at all times during the great TSU and Grambling games of the late '70's -
Thursday, February 15th 2007 at 1:57PM |
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