Michael Oriard: Footbal and how today's game was shaped by the racial strife of 1969.
College football's centennial year, 1969, also happened to be my senior season at Notre Dame. I played against three teams that year—Georgia Tech, Tulane, and then Texas in the Cotton Bowl—that had not yet integrated their varsity football teams. This was actually a mark of progress. By 1969, the integration of the Southeastern Conference and the old Southwest Conference was finally well underway. It started in the SWC in 1966 at Baylor and SMU and in the SEC with Kentucky in 1967; it ended with Texas and Arkansas in 1970, then with Georgia, LSU, and Ole Miss in 1972.
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That was college football's quiet racial revolution. The noisy one took place on northern campuses. At Oregon State in February 1969, a black linebacker named Fred Milton was suspended from the team after an assistant coach spotted him on campus with a moustache and goatee, in violation of the team's ban on facial hair. Black students on campus responded with a boycott of classes, many of them left the university, and both the football team and the institution struggled for years afterward against a reputation for racial intolerance. Two months later, 16 black players at the University of Iowa boycotted a spring practice and were suspended; seven were reinstated in August. That summer, John Underwood wrote a three-part series for Sports Illustrated titled "The Desperate Coach," describing the incidents at Oregon State and Iowa, along with dozens of lesser ones in athletic programs throughout the country, as a full-scale assault on coaches' authority. "In the privacy of their offices," Underwood wrote, "over breakfast in strange towns, wherever two or three coaches get together, they talk about The Problem."
Then came the season itself. At the University of Wyoming, coach Lloyd Eaton suspended a group—what became known as the "Black 14"—that pushed to wear armbands at a home game against BYU to protest the Mormon Church's racial doctrines. Next, at the University of Washington, Jim Owens suspended four black players for a lack of commitment to him and his program. Finally, at Indiana University, coach John Pont, with considerably more reluctance, suspended 16 black players (eventually reinstating four) after they boycotted a practice.
In each situation, what were matters of team discipline to the coaches were concerns of fairness or human rights to the players. Fred Milton insisted that his beard and moustache were expressions of black culture. The "Black 14" at Wyoming insisted on their constitutional right to political protest. The complaints of the black players at the other schools involved playing time, treatment by coaches, the absence of black assistants, and the practice of "stacking"—playing black players at only certain positions...
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That was college football's quiet racial revolution. The noisy one took place on northern campuses. At Oregon State in February 1969, a black linebacker named Fred Milton was suspended from the team after an assistant coach spotted him on campus with a moustache and goatee, in violation of the team's ban on facial hair. Black students on campus responded with a boycott of classes, many of them left the university, and both the football team and the institution struggled for years afterward against a reputation for racial intolerance. Two months later, 16 black players at the University of Iowa boycotted a spring practice and were suspended; seven were reinstated in August. That summer, John Underwood wrote a three-part series for Sports Illustrated titled "The Desperate Coach," describing the incidents at Oregon State and Iowa, along with dozens of lesser ones in athletic programs throughout the country, as a full-scale assault on coaches' authority. "In the privacy of their offices," Underwood wrote, "over breakfast in strange towns, wherever two or three coaches get together, they talk about The Problem."
Then came the season itself. At the University of Wyoming, coach Lloyd Eaton suspended a group—what became known as the "Black 14"—that pushed to wear armbands at a home game against BYU to protest the Mormon Church's racial doctrines. Next, at the University of Washington, Jim Owens suspended four black players for a lack of commitment to him and his program. Finally, at Indiana University, coach John Pont, with considerably more reluctance, suspended 16 black players (eventually reinstating four) after they boycotted a practice.
In each situation, what were matters of team discipline to the coaches were concerns of fairness or human rights to the players. Fred Milton insisted that his beard and moustache were expressions of black culture. The "Black 14" at Wyoming insisted on their constitutional right to political protest. The complaints of the black players at the other schools involved playing time, treatment by coaches, the absence of black assistants, and the practice of "stacking"—playing black players at only certain positions...