Breaking the Line

The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights

Samuel G. Freedman

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781439189795
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

1967. Two rival football teams. Two legendary coaches. Two talented quarterbacks. Together they broke the color line, revolutionized college sports, and transformed the NFL. Freedman's dramatic account, highly praised as a contributing part of the movement and a riveting sports story, is now available in paperback. In September 1967, after three years of landmark civil rights laws and three months of devastating urban riots, the football season began at Louisiana's Grambling College and Florida A&M. The teams were led by two extraordinary coaches, Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither, and they featured the best quarterbacks ever at each school, James Harris and Ken Riley. Breaking the Line brings to life the historic saga of the battle for the 1967 black college championship, culminating in a riveting, excruciatingly close contest. Samuel G. Freedman traces the rise of these four leaders and their teammates as they storm through the season. Together they helped compel the segre­gated colleges of the South to integrate their teams and redefined who could play quarterback in the NFL, who could be a head coach, and who could run a franchise as general manager.In Breaking the Line, Freedman brilliantly tells this suspenseful story of character and talent as he takes us from locker room to state capitol, from embattled campus to packed stadium. He captures a pivotal time in American sport and society, filling a missing and crucial chapter in the movement for civil rights.

1

DRAW WATER WHERE YOU CAN

Jake Gaither and Eddie Robinson
in Their Time, 1937–1966

Late in the summer of 1937, Jake Gaither drove south toward Tallahassee, Florida. In all his life, some thirty-four years, he had rarely if ever ventured so deeply into the former Confederacy. He was heading toward the best coaching job he had ever received, and he was heading, too, into a city lately inflamed by a lynching.

Gaither had grown up in mining hamlets and county seats along the Appalachian ridge, knotty places that even below the Mason-Dixon Line had small black populations and little history of large-scale slaveholding. More so, as the son of a pastor and a teacher, young Jake formed part of the Negro elite. His parents could afford to send him at sixteen to a combined high school and college in Tennessee that had been founded by the abolitionist wing of the Presbyterian Church. There, at Knoxville College, he was taught and coached by white men enlightened for their time, and there he met the classmate, Sadie Robinson, whom he married four years after graduation.

Sadie sat next to him now in their car, leaving behind Virginia, where they had resigned their jobs teaching and coaching, respectively, so Jake could assume the position of assistant football coach at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical College. The first day’s drive brought the couple to Atlanta, and the next morning, they set off on Highway 19 for the final leg, to Tallahassee, the source of the job and the trepidation.

Along the highway, the land spread out flat and fertile, nothing like the hollows and crags of Jake’s youth. The region was known as “Plantation Trace.” Its fields supported the cotton and peaches and pecans that once depended on slaves and now on sharecroppers; its woods sheltered the quail that the masters of antebellum mansions hunted for sport. Through Albany and Moultrie, past the remnants of the prison camp for Union soldiers at Andersonville, down into Thomasville, where a spur off the main highway led straight to Tallahassee, the Gaithers drove and worried.

Just past the Florida border, the couple felt so thirsty they decided to risk pulling up at a country store. Jake walked apprehensively through a clutch of white men out front and toward the tall one sitting imperiously behind the counter. “Could I have two Coca-Colas?” he asked. Without moving, without getting up, the man pointed to a shelf and said, “There it is.”

Cokes shakily in hand, unharmed yet unnerved, Jake got back into the car. When he had first signed his contract with Florida A&M earlier in the summer, the decision had seemed simple enough. Even as an assistant, a position there meant a raise in both salary and prestige from his previous job, at St. Paul Junior College, a Negro school. He had been recruited to Florida A&M by its new head coach, Bill Bell, whom Jake had met while both were earning their master’s degrees at Ohio State. The segregation laws that forbade blacks from attending the South’s state universities also made money available to pay their tuition for advanced degrees on integrated campuses in the North. So there in Columbus, formerly a station on the Underground Railroad, now a refuge from Jim Crow, Gaither and Bell had taken classes together, had lived in the same black boardinghouse, and had talked enough football over the dinner table for the A&M coach to make his offer.

In the weeks between accepting the job and moving to Tallahassee, however, Jake Gaither had read some disturbing news about his prospective home. The story appeared in all the leading black papers—the Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Baltimore Afro-American—as well as the major big-city dailies in the Northeast. Early on the morning of July 20, four white men wearing masks had forced a night guard to unlock cells at the Leon County jail. The men yanked out two black teenagers, Richard Ponder and Ernest Hawkins, who had been arrested the previous day for breaking into a downtown store and slashing a police officer. Holding Ponder and Hawkins at gunpoint, the vigilantes drove about three miles outside the city and ordered the boys to run for their lives. As they did, the white men fired off more than twenty rounds. “This is your last warning, negros,” read one of the handwritten signs the killers left beside the corpses, “remember you might be next.”

Gaither, for one, got the warning loud and clear. He called Coach Bell and the college president, J.R.E. Lee, to ask if he and his wife would be safe in Tallahassee. The higher-ups offered enough reassurance to keep Gaither from withdrawing, but not enough to keep a Coca-Cola stop from renewing his distress. If anything, the weeks since the double killings only offered more evidence of Tallahassee’s hostility. Florida’s governor, Fred P. Cone, persisted in describing the crime as an ordinary murder rather than a lynching. The Daily Democrat, Tallahassee’s newspaper of record, referred to it merely as “an unfortunate incident.” The editorial went on to approvingly observe, “As lynchings go, last night’s was about as free from the usual unsavory angles as any we have heard about. The method adopted was quiet, orderly.”

At the end of two days and 850 miles, the Gaithers reached Tallahassee. For the city’s whites, life was proceeding without particular upset. The annual livestock market set its tents and pens and auction blocks on the outskirts of town. Farmers drove their wagons downtown for Saturday shopping. The Ritz theater offered escapist antidotes to the Depression with Shirley Temple in Wee Willie Winkie, followed by Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Saratoga.

Here in the Panhandle, a part of Florida more akin to the Deep South than the Atlantic Coast, the social order rested on laws and customs that confined Tallahassee’s blacks, 40 percent of the city’s thirteen thousand residents, immovably on the bottom. Segregation governed restaurants, theaters, schools, parks; certain churches still had their slave pews intact. The political and commercial aristocracy, known locally as the “golddusters,” reigned over the strata of small businessmen, civil servants, redneck laborers, and, finally, Negroes. Living in Smokey Hollow and Frenchtown, most of them avoided going downtown whenever possible. “Blacks in Tallahassee,” one historian later put it, “never ceased to fear violence and with justification.”

Descending from the State Capitol and crossing the railroad tracks, the Gaithers climbed the last hill in town. At its crest, they took in their first view of Florida A&M. Jake saw a set of five or six wooden army barracks, unpainted and badly weathered, which constituted the male dorms. “This Building Will Be Replaced,” read a sign, “When Funds Are Available For A New One.” Until recently, the road into the campus hadn’t even been paved. Most of the classroom and administrative buildings were wood frame. Patches of sugarcane grew wild. Only as Jake continued did he spot the Carnegie Library with its stone portico, the redbrick Colonial Revival administration building, the quadrangle and band shell.

The people of A&M liked to claim that their hill was the highest in Tallahassee. The assertion was just one of many ways they had of defying the minimal expectations and miserly funds Florida’s all-white government begrudgingly provided. In exactly a half century, Florida A&M had scraped its way from being the Normal College for Colored Students, tasked with producing tradesmen, farmers, and teachers, to a nationally accredited, four-year academic institution. Gaither’s new boss, President Lee, had been born into slavery, trained by Booker T. Washington at Tuskegee, and imbued with the civil rights ethos by the National Urban League. He insisted on a college that taught liberal arts alongside the practical skills of animal husbandry and carpentry, that offered Shakespeare productions in addition to a working dairy, that created courses in Negro history and literature.

The achievement required a contortionist’s talent. For all his erudition and savvy, Lee had to extract money from the autocrats of the State Capitol, and doing so required him periodically to play the “Yes, massa” role. He annually hosted legislators for a day of entertainment on campus, with students demonstrating their skill at brickmaking and performing the Confederate anthem of “Dixie.” Politicians told “darkie” jokes from A&M’s lectern. When Lee once asked the legislature for a raise in salary to $4,000, Governor Cone declared during a cabinet meeting, “There’s not a nigger in the state of Florida worth four thousand dollars a year.”

So Jake and Sadie Gaither felt scared for good reason. During the next ten days, until football practice began, it took all their courage just to buy furniture from white stores for their empty apartment. With the first whistle on the gridiron, though, Jake’s fears fell away, displaced by challenges. The A&M football team had gone 2-4-1 the previous season and was only one game above .500 for the decade. Many of the players weighed in the 150s, even 140s. They practiced in a cow pasture, and played home games on a bumpy plane of scrub grass carved into a hillside, without shade, bathrooms, or permanent seats for whoever the spectators might be.

By his own description, Gaither had been an ordinary college player who “never missed a game but never knocked their socks off.” He still cut a handsome figure with his pencil mustache, center-parted hair, firm chin, and tapered physique, but at 5-11 and 170 hardly a physically intimidating one. Coaching had been an unintended career choice. He had grown up watching lawyers argue cases in the county courthouse and as a student he had set their profession as his goal. Modeling himself on his articulate, impassioned hero Clarence Darrow, Gaither had been almost unbeatable as a college debater. It took his father’s death, while Jake was in college, to redirect him into the more reliable direction of education.

In the first coaching job of his life, at a high school in North Carolina, Gaither’s team went scoreless in losing every game. The indignity focused his sense of vocation, and it instilled an appetite for knowledge that sustained him through every obstacle. While in his first coaching job, Gaither heard that the defensive coach for Amos Alonzo Stagg’s celebrated teams at the University of Chicago would be speaking to a clinic at Duke University. Gaither wrote to Duke’s head coach, Wallace Wade, to ask permission: “I know that the laws of the state won’t permit Negroes to go to Duke University or to attend the clinic . . . I would like to come to be the janitor . . . and sweep the floors just so I could hear the lectures.” Wade never even wrote back. Inwardly furious, Gaither traveled to clinics in Chicago and Minnesota, where his color was tolerated.

He learned techniques and strategies, and he discovered that football had a place for the eloquence and intelligence and competitive streak he had once hoped to use in the courthouse. But for a Negro who aspired to college coaching, the North offered no more prospects than the South. In fact, it offered fewer, because the preponderance of black colleges were in the South. So south Gaither went, south as far as Tallahassee, south as far as Florida A&M’s hilltop, a sanctuary of black dignity and self-determination amid a landscape of hatred and degradation. There, on land that had once been a governor’s plantation, Gaither set to prove his own worth and his people’s. As John Hope, the president of Morehouse College, had put it early in the century, “The same instincts that make a man love dangerous sports make him dare to do noble deeds.”

In Jake Gaither’s first season, Florida A&M went 6-1-1, winning its conference. That record was an augury of things to come.

One day in June 1941, a thirdhand message reached a young man named Eddie Robinson at the feed mill where he worked in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. A tiny black college two hundred miles upstate, the Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute, was looking to hire a football coach. The offer had made its way from Robinson’s wife, Doris, who was attending a training course there for teachers, to her mother in Baton Rouge, one of the few black people in town with a home telephone, and finally on foot to the mill. Even if Negro Normal Institute was just a flyspeck of a place, commonly known as Grambling for the hamlet in the piney woods where it was set, this opportunity to coach football reached Eddie Robinson as a godsend.

For nearly his entire life, he had aspired to no other occupation. Robinson was the sole child of a third-generation sharecropper and a maid who earned a dollar a day. He had spent his first six years in the farming town of Jackson, sleeping on the floor of a shotgun shack without heat, water, or electricity, connected by a plank walkway to an outhouse. When his parents’ marriage broke up, he moved to Baton Rouge, where his father had found a job at the Standard Oil refinery. Soon after, as the elder Robinson moved through a series of homes and women, Eddie started his own working life. He shined shoes, hawked papers, hauled ice, cut hair, bused tables, bagged shrimp, sold strawberries, delivered sandwiches. He learned to box and walked the streets with the gloves tied to dangle over his shoulders, practicing his punches, advertising another form of self-reliance.

Robinson’s neighborhood embodied the same trait. Wedged between two hubs of white power, the Louisiana State University campus and the downtown district around the capitol building, the black section known as South Baton Rouge in certain ways thrived under segregation. The district contained the full spectrum of Negro life—from gambling spots and backyard chicken coops to churches and shops by the dozens, restaurants and nightclubs, a newspaper called the Sepia Socialite, a baseball field known as Ethiopian Park. Migrants from the countryside such as Robinson’s father lived there, doing unskilled labor or household service, but so did pharmacists, doctors, insurance agents, tradesmen, professors. No matter that they were modest shotguns and bungalows, 80 percent of the neighborhood’s homes were owned.

Jim Crow had ruled Baton Rouge since the overthrow of Reconstruction, and the doctrine not only segregated institutions but also permeated the most incidental encounters. Black women in Baton Rouge were not allowed to try on a dress or hat in a downtown store. Any Negro was required to step off the sidewalk to make room for any passing white. When the city installed sewers, the pipes ended just before South Baton Rouge. Meanwhile, a brothel in the black section that catered to white customers was allowed to operate with impunity.

As a boy, Eddie had his own instructive encounters with white supremacy. Once, he was picked up by the police for supposedly stealing a customer’s watch while making ice deliveries. As the cops drove him to the station, Eddie recalled the stories he’d heard of jailhouse beatings and false confessions. Fortunately for him, the missing watch turned up before he was booked. Another time, Eddie sneaked into Tiger Stadium for an LSU football game, not realizing that Negroes were forbidden. Kicked out and sent home, Eddie then took a beating from his father’s belt for having crossed, however innocently, a treacherous racial boundary. He later found an acceptable way back into the stadium by joining the all-black maintenance crew that worked on game days.

Segregation felt permanent to Eddie Robinson, immutable, unchangeable. “We had come up with segregation all our lives,” he would later recall, “and nobody had ever told us it was wrong. We accepted it and you just grew up with the thing.” What the Negro could try to control and preserve was his sense of self-worth. Sports became Eddie’s chosen means of expressing that sovereignty.

He listened to all of Joe Louis’s fights on the radio his mother had bought for that specific purpose. During the broadcast of the Brown Bomber’s rematch against Max Schmeling, the German champion embraced by the Nazi regime, Eddie heard something astonishing: a Negro being referred to as an American. Much closer to home, Eddie saw a model of pride and purpose in the form of Julius Kraft—chemistry teacher, shopkeeper, amateur-theater director, and, most important, football coach at all-black McKinley High School. Every Monday and Wednesday during the autumns of Eddie’s childhood, Kraft would bring his team in full uniform through the black stores and gathering spots to sell tickets for the weekend game. Those players, Eddie noticed, called their coach “sir.”

Still in elementary school, Eddie practiced football in his street clothes and organized games on vacant lots. He sketched out plays in his school notebooks till his exasperated teachers snatched them away. By the time Eddie was a junior at McKinley, he was starting at quarterback, and he proceeded to lead the team to two straight unbeaten seasons and be elected class president for good measure. He went on to play quarterback at Leland College, a black Baptist school just outside Baton Rouge, and to be groomed for a future of coaching by his coach there, a northern-trained theologian named Ruben Turner. When Turner took along Eddie on recruiting trips around the state, and even more so when he brought him to a coaching clinic in Chicago, he was showing as much of the outside world as Eddie Robinson had ever seen.

In a state where fewer than 10 percent of Negro teenagers attended high school, McKinley High and Leland College served strivers who embraced their role as the vanguard. “We were infected with the idea of getting ahead,” recalled Gardner C. Taylor, a product of both institutions who later became a prominent minister and civil rights activist. “We thought of education as sacred.”

Along the way, Eddie courted a classmate named Doris Mott, and even young love contained an element of self-improvement. Doris was the daughter of the Negro middle class—her father a brakeman on the Illinois Central, her mother and aunts all teachers—who even attended boarding school for a time. With the money from his odd jobs, Eddie treated her to movies, and later the jazz bands that played the Temple Roof Gardens, atop the five-story building that was the tallest in South Baton Rouge. He always said that he knew he’d won her when she danced with him to “Stardust.”

Yet by the s...