Today is Juneteenth, a national holiday rooted in the day news reached the Confederate state of Texas that the South had lost the Civil War and slavery was over.
A few days ago, I dreamed of Texas A & M and someone say a really important promise had been broken, and I woke up wondering that that was about?
I recalled that Juneteenth was approaching.
I recalled that Paul “Bear” Bryant coached at Texas A & M before he was hired by Alabama to resurrect its football program from the dead.
Some of Coach Bryant's teams' wins were so last minute spectacular that someone did drawing of him walking on water, and in some circles he became known as “The Bear Jesus”.
What Coach Bryant is not remembered nearly as well for in Alabama, and hardly at all in the rest of America…
After years of wanting to recruit black high school players, but the political climate in Alabama was so Alabama Governor George Wallace “segregation now, segregation forever”, Coach Bryant finally got an opening in 1970, as described in this 2020 FORBES Magazine article, to which I added a little bid of additional clarification and incitement to action in bold:
Bear Bryant’s Genius Decision 50 Years Ago Shaped College Football Today
Don Yaeger
Senior Contributor
Sep 7, 2020,10:07am EDT
Updated Sep 7, 2020, 10:31am EDT
TUSCALOOSA, AL - CIRCA 1972: Sam "Bam" Cunningham, #39 full back of the University of Southern
If you’re a college football enthusiast, like I am, then this is the most beautiful time of the year (fingers firmly crossed!). It’s when the clash of helmets and shoulder pads gives you a jolt better than doubling up on morning coffee. It’s when rooting for your favorite school becomes an opportunity to witness, in unison, a significant moment that will be remembered forever. This decade is easily linked to the University of Alabama and head coach Nick Saban. The Tide has won four National Championships in the past 10 seasons—five in the past 11.
And I don’t believe it would have happened if the Tide hadn’t first made a groundbreaking decision a half-century ago. It was 50 years ago this week that two legendary college football programs played a game in Birmingham that many argue completely altered the course of college football.
The year was 1970 and while the radio played hit songs like “Let It Be,” by The Beatles, the college football world would soon see the state of Alabama sing a new tune. Coach John McKay and the University of Southern California were invited by iconic Alabama coach Paul “Bear” Bryant to see which team was better. Despite the fact that Jackie Robinson had broken the color barrier in baseball 23 years earlier, there wasn’t a single Black player on the varsity roster at Alabama in 1970. Then that one game took place, and the reaction turned the Tide for good.
I had the opportunity to write a book about the USC vs. Alabama matchup —researching and tracking down notable figures to truly celebrate the significance of that big night. Both teams entered that season loaded with young talent, but Southern Cal had long before made the decision to embrace integration and allow Black players to contribute to the on-field success of the team. Bryant wanted to do the same, but politics and pressure had prevented such a move. The genius of Bear Bryant was in deciding to play USC—which at the time had 18 Black players on the team, including the team’s starting quarterback, a rarity in the sport. That meant the Alabama faithful would be given a first-hand view of how integration could look on the football field.
To say the Tide was overmatched would be an understatement. USC beat Bama 42-21 and all 6 touchdowns by the Trojans were scored by Black players. The breakout star of the game was a backup fullback named Sam “Bam” Cunningham who made his college football debut by rushing 12 times for 135 yards and 2 touchdowns. USC’s victory—paired with Cunningham’s dominant performance, was the feather in the cap that Coach Bryant needed to convince the fan base and higher-ups that the University should actively recruit and play Black players on the football team.
Sports is often a vehicle for change, and this game revved the engines and added fresh tires for the advancement of college football at Alabama. By 1979, the team had gone from zero Black players to 18 Black players on the roster. They’d also won three national championships, posting a win-loss record of 107-13 in that 10-year window.In 1971, junior college transfer defensive lineman Johnny Mitchell became Alabama’s first Black player to see playing time. That same year, another Black player, running back Wilbur Jackson would join him on the field. In fact, Jackson was in the stands watching the game as a freshman. Then by 1973, Mitchell would be invited back by Bryant to become Alabama’s first Black assistant coach. Mitchell is currently an assistant coach to Mike Tomlin and the Pittsburgh Steelers.
The backstory of the game makes this even more compelling. Bryant had put it on the schedule only a few months prior after a quick meeting with McKay in the Los Angeles airport. He recognized the opportunity to make a statement about the need to integrate his team. He knew his decision would not be a popular one for many in Alabama, but enlightening them to what could be achieved in a fully integrated world could only come from someone with his clout and stature. Bryant’s genius was in recognizing the significance of the moment and taking advantage of it.
The rest of the backstory is, after Southern Cal ran all over Alabama in Tuscaloosa in 1970, Coach Bryant whined to Coach McKay that his little, slow white boys couldn’t compete against racially integrated teams like Southern Cal, and Coach McKay told Coach Bryant about a black football player named John Mitchell, who was playing at an Arizona junior college and was being recruited by Southern Cal and other colleges, and that’s how Coach Bryant found future two-time All SEC defensive end “Big John” Mitchell, whose Alabama team beat Southern Cal in 1991, in Los Angeles. At the end of the 1991 season, Alabama got manhandled by a very tough racially integrated Nebraska 35-6, in the Orange Bowl, and Coach Bryant recruited black players even harder. Wilbur Jackson went on to be a consensus All-American running back.
In celebrating the 50-year anniversary of the game that turned the Tide, I decided to dedicate a podcast episode to asking three players who were there the night of USC’s win what they thought of the game’s significance. The Corporate Competitor podcast will air on Friday and then my colleagues at ESPN intend to celebrate the story as well during their College GameDay broadcast on Saturday.
Why do sports matter? Why is it not just a game? That’s why! Because sports figures like Bear Bryant knew they could make a difference. It’s why today’s athletes are able to exercise their voice to address social issues and concerns. You could argue that Coach Bryant just wanted to win more football games, but no matter his reasoning, his decision reshaped history.
Indeed, after Coach Bryant recruited John Mitchell and Wilbur Jackson, Alabama’s white high schools, junior high schools and elementary schools, and white private schools, started recruiting black football players and other black athletes, and the same happened in the other Southeastern Conference states, including Texas.
So as we enter into unprecedented times in college football with a season of limited fans in the stadiums and entire conferences opting out until 2021, I’m reminded that college football has been through unprecedented times in the past, and emerged better because of it.
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Mr. Yeager, I think you need to do a follow up. Feel free to quote me.
In 2020, Covid-19 shut down America. The black man George Floyd was murdered by black and white policeman, which ignited the Black Lives Matter movement in America. Alabama head football coach Nick Saban was approached by his black athletes about him leading a Black Lives Matter march on the Tuscaloosa campus, which Coach Saban did. The march was mixed race. It ended where “segregation now, segregation forever” Governor George Wallace had stood blocking black Alabama student enrollees from attending class, and President John F. Kennedy's federalized Alabama National Guard escorted the black student enrollees past Governor Wallace to their classes.
I’ve been an Alabama Crimson Tide fan since Coach Bryant promoted Golden Flake Potato Chips and Coca Cola, “Great pair, says the Bear” on his Sunday after the Saturday game TV show in Birmingham- my father owned Golden Flake.
In my opinion, Coach Saban’s 2020 team, which went 10-0 in against 10 SEC opponents and then beat 7-0 in the Big Ten Ohio State for the national championship, was the best Crimson Tide team ever.
During that season, I drove down to an automobile junk yard in Shelby County below Birmingham to buy a used full-size rim for my van, so that I would not have to rely on a donut if I had another flat tire. In the office of the junk yard was a good bit of Alabama Crimson Tide paraphernalia, which nudged me to say to the white owner of the auto junk yard, “What about this year’s Crimson Tide?" He frowned, said, “Some things happened that some people didn’t like.” I said no more, paid him, and left with the spare rim and headed to the local Hispanic tire shop I had passed by on the way to the junk yard and had then mount a tire on the spare rim I had just bought from a white supremacist, aka, MAGA.
Now, Mr. Yaeger at FORBES Magazine, which once featured my father on its front page for being worth $100,000,000 thanks to Golden Flake Potato Chips, I do truly hope you and your bosses at FORBES noticed President Donald Trump was very slow in 2016 to say, well maybe he didn’t want the support of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon and Imperial Wizard David Duke, and after he was elected and in the White House, President Trump said there were good people in this Confederate Monument removal protest in Charlottesville, Virginia,
And, I hope you and your bosses at FORBES noticed the oceans of white people at Trump MAGA rallies, such as this one.
And, I hope you and your bosses at FORBES noticed the ocean of white people at this attempt to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.
And, I hope you and your bosses at FORBES are astute enough to know that when Trump kept saying before and after the 2020 election, that it was stolen, he meant, and MAGAS understood he meant, stolen by blacks.
And, I hope you and your bosses at Forbes see the close parallel between Donald Trump and his MAGAs and Adolph Hitler and his Nazis; and I hope you and your bosses at FORBES know Ivan Trump told VANITY FAIR, that when she was married to Donald Trump, he kept the book below of Hitler’s speeches in a cabinet on his side of their bed and sometimes he pulled it out and read it at night.
And, I hope you and your bosses at FORBES will point all of that out to FORBES readers.
You and bosses at FORBEs can use what I wrote here, including the photos, to paint that picture worth all the money in America.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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