Watch any major college sporting event these days, and you’re almost guaranteed to see at least one African-American face competing, if not a majority. It’s so commonplace these days, no one even thinks about it anymore. But that wasn’t always the case.
Can you imagine Auburn beating Oregon in the BCS Title game in 2010 without Cam Newton under center? Or John Calipari winning a championship with no Anthony Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrest or any other player you can name from last season’s championship crew. Or what would Dean Smith’s legacy look like without players like Phil Ford, James Worthy and Michael Jordan?
For much of the 20th century, colleges from the Southwest to the Mid-Atlantic competed in an athletic world that was devoid of any diversity. That list includes perennial powerhouse programs Alabama and Florida of the Southeastern Conference and Atlantic Coast Conference schools from South Carolina to Maryland.
In those days, not only were Black athletes not allowed to compete for these institutions, they were prohibited from even competing against them. These so-called “gentlemen’s agreements” meant that even schools who did offer opportunities to African-Americans would keep them off the field of play against Southern teams that refused to compete against those student-athletes. According to Lane Dumas, author of “Integrating the Gridiron: Black Civil Rights and American College Football,” this was by no means a secret.
“White and Black sportswriters referenced it routinely (as did administrators),” Dumas said in 2010. “And any casual football fan could easily read about the role of race in negotiations between major college teams and the scheduling of games.”
These agreements were pretty much universally accepted for the first half of the 20th century. The writing on the wall came in the form of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, but those Southern institutions of higher education fought fervently over the next decade and a half to stem the approaching tide. But little by little, things began to change.
In 1963, just months after James Meredith needed 500 U.S. marshals to enter the University of Mississippi, Mississippi State found itself matched up against a Loyola team that started four Black players in an NCAA Tournament game. The previous year, the school had opted out of the tournament in an effort to avoid having this type of dilemma. That season, however, coach Babe McCarthy decided to give his team a chance at a national title.
