Breaking the Line: The Season inBlack College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed theCourse of Civil Rights by Samuel
G. Freedman (Simon & Schuster, 2013, 336 Pages, $28.00) in a
gripping tale of a season consumed with both the strife of the
surging civil rights movement during the mid-sixties and the rivalry for
supremacy in black college football between two of the greatest, and
least recognized, coaches in football history. In telling the
stories of Eddie Robinson, head coach of Grambling College in Lincoln
Parish , LA and Jake Gaither, who coached at Florida A&M
University in Tallahassee, Florida, Freedman tells the story of the
changes in American society that led to the breaking of the barriers
keeping black Americans from finding their places in American sport,
and in the larger realm of American life. While, we are now 150
years beyond the emancipation proclamation, the story of race
relations and black advancement is still being told, but this crucial
year in the history of black progress, explored within the context of two
coaches whose approaches to playing the game of football and the game
of life in a rapidly changing racial environment were coming under
criticism, helps readers understand the magnitude of the change and
the difficulty of achieving it in the strongest and most persuasive
narrative I've read.
Eddie Robinson
Eddie
Robinson, born in Lousiana in 1919, and educated largely in the
segregated schools of the time, except for earning a Master's desgree
at Iowa State University, coached at Grambling University for 57
years, ending his career with the second most wins of any football
coach in history and as a member of the College Football Hall of
Fame. But Robinson's fame and recognition came late in his career. He
first took his position at Grambling in 1941, when black colleges
received little support from their state legislatures and the
struggle to send children to higher education and possible
advancement was achieved in an environment of exceptional resistance
and outright danger. Similarly, Jake Gaither, born in 1903 in
Dayton, TN, was educated at Knoxville College and earned a Master's
degree at Ohio State. He became head coach at Florida A&M
University in 1938, where he won 204 games and six Black College
National Championships during a career in which he had to overcome
illness and a life threatening brain tumor as well as the exigencies
of the deeply segregated state of Florida to amass an amazingly
successful career as a football coach. He, too, is a member of the
College Football Hall of Fame. The careers of these two amazingly
successful coaches culminated in the Orange Blossom Classic, held in
Miami, Florida on December 2, 1967 in an exciting, and suspenseful
game, which Freedman recounts in nearly play-by-play detail. Each of
these coaches was responsible for sending dozens of black players in
the AFL and NFL. Robinson's player Tank Younger was the first full
time black player in the NFL and James Harris became the first black
man to start at quarterback in the NFL. This book is the story of
these two men, their intense and interlocked rivalry.
Jake Gaither
It is
also, however, the story of the emergence of black athletes in a
world where segregation in the deep south was still widely practiced
and embedded in the legal and social structure of the times. It was a
time when traveling athletic teams couldn't find a place to eat along
the road, there were no rest rooms they were allowed to use, and
sleeping accommodations were often the floors of black churches or
college classrooms. The students who enrolled in these programs were
often allowed by their parents to leave home to attend because they
expected their children to receive an education which would fit them
for advancement in a society bent on keeping them “in their place.”
The struggle that college presidents and football coaches had to
educate their students and develop a reputation for their athletic
programs are detailed, often both heart breaking and inspiring.
Although both Robinson and Gaither were no longer alive when Freedman
began his book, it is filled with the reminiscences of the players,
many of whom went on to success in professional sports, the ministry,
education, and business. The backgrounds and careers of the two
quarterbacks in the Orange Blossom Classic, James Harris, relatively unknown except to football historians who view him as football's Jackie Robinson, and Ken
Riley the able FAMU quarterback, help develop the book's focus on advancement, leadership, and
education as each was prepared and developed by his respective coach.
Both
coaches were deeply respected in the coaching community as teachers
and leadership among their coaching peers as clinicians worthy of
breaking racial barriers to learn from and teach with. Paul “Bear”
Bryant of the University of Alabama and Woody Hayes of Ohio State
University both taught in and attended Gaither's and Robinson's
coaching clinics. However, both coaches, whose careers began around
1940, were strict disciplinarians whose games depending on endless
repetition, speed, and discipline. They believed in the ground attack
and brutal, tough defense. Yet each was wise enough to see the coming
changes in the games and develop innovations leading to game winning
passing attacks as the rules changed and the game developed.
Parallel
to the story of developing football players as athletes and as men,
runs the story of doing so in an environment fraught with challenge
and often danger. The days of the lynchings and shootings to enforce
white supremacy in the south were far from over. The legal structure
of segregation was still firmly in place, despite Brown v.
Board in 1954 and the voting rights act in 1965. Florida Schools were still firmly segregated well
into the sixties, as were those in Louisiana. The first football game
in which a black school played a white school in Florida was not held
until 1968. The presidents of both these institutions and their
football coaches were largely responsible for building institutions
which gradually received some support, largely as a way for states to
argue that integrating the great state universities was unnecessary.
By 1967, with the winds of change blowing hard, and activism in the
faces of men like Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and the Student
Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were inspiring students to
challenge their school administrations, the coaches and
administrators were beginning to be criticized for their
accommodationist approaches to building their schools and athletic
programs. The rise of activism led to student demonstrations on
campus, and, at Grambling, to a student boycott and to charges that
President Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones was an Uncle Tom. By
his deft and thorough placing of these events into an historical
context, Freedman emphasizes the schools' accomplishments rather than their
failures, taking much, but certainly not all, of the blame off the
shoulders of these leaders of the forties and fifties by extolling
both their courage and guile.
Samuel Freedman
Samuel
G. Freedman is a
columnist for The New York Times
and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of
Journalism. He is the author of six acclaimed books, four of which
have been New York Times
Notable Books of the Year. Freedman also has written frequently for
USA TODAY, New
York magazine, Rolling
Stone, The Jerusalem
Post, Tablet, The Forward, and
Salon.com. He lives in Manhattan with his fiance and his children.
Because he is not primarily a sports writer, this narrative
successfully negotiates the territory between sport and social
history, while offering exciting and detailed descriptions of
sporting events and coaching prowess.
Breaking the Line: The Season inBlack College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed theCourse of Civil Rights by Samuel
G. Freedman (Simon & Schuster, 2013, 336 Pages, $28.00) details
an important period in American social history by focusing on an
exciting football rivalry and a period which actually changed the
course of American racial progress. The book is carefully researched
and annotated. It is written in a descriptive language which uses
detail and evidence to support its assertions and conclusions. This
is an important and enlightening volume for football fans and social
historians, released just in time for the opening of the football
season. The book was provided to me by the publisher as an electronic
galley through Edelweiss: Above the Treeline. I read it on my Kindle.
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