Blood, Sweat, and Tears

Jake Gaither, Florida A&M, and the History of Black College Football

Derrick E. White

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781469652450
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

Black college football began during the nadir of African American life after the Civil War. The first game occurred in 1892, a little less than four years before the Supreme Court ruled segregation legal in Plessy v. Ferguson. In spite of Jim Crow segregation, Black colleges produced some of the best football programs in the country. They mentored young men who became teachers, preachers, lawyers, and doctors--not to mention many other professions--and transformed Black communities. But when higher education was integrated, the programs faced existential challenges as predominately white institutions steadily set about recruiting their student athletes and hiring their coaches. Blood, Sweat, and Tears explores the legacy of Black college football, with Florida A&M's Jake Gaither as its central character, one of the most successful coaches in its history. A paradoxical figure, Gaither led one of the most respected Black college football programs, yet many questioned his loyalties during the height of the civil rights movement. Among the first broad-based histories of Black college athletics, Derrick E. White's sweeping story complicates the heroic narrative of integration and grapples with the complexities and contradictions of one of the most important sources of Black pride in the twentieth century.

1

THE COLOR LINE OF SCRIMMAGE AND SPORTING CONGREGATIONS

The 1926 season was the finest for the Knoxville College (KC) Bulldogs in their first two decades of play. Founded in 1875 by the United Presbyterian Church, KC, an HBCU, didn’t play its first games until the opening years of the twentieth century, as students took the lead in recruiting classmates, planning practices, and arranging games. In the beginning, most of the Bulldogs’ early opponents were local. They played against Morristown College, a Methodist-sponsored HBCU in East Tennessee, local Black high schools, and occasionally Fisk (Nashville), Livingstone (Salisbury, N.C.), and Swift Junior College (Rogersville, Tenn.).¹ Though America’s participation in World War I forced KC, like many colleges, to discontinue intercollegiate athletics, after the armistice, KC restarted its football team and joined the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (SIAC) in 1924. Conference affiliation normalized KC’s schedule with those of other Black institutions of higher learning, setting the stage for the Bulldogs’ great season.

All-conference fullback Raymond Fowles led the 1926 team, but teammates remembered that the true leader was Alonzo “Jake” Gaither, a six-year starter at left end.² KC quarterback Claude Cowan recalled that Gaither had “always been an emotional guy. He always shook up guys. Although I was captain of the team, we all looked to Jake for guidance. We looked to him for his judgment more than his playing ability.”³ Teammates described Gaither, a two-way player, as “a tough, forceful competitor.”⁴ He had arrived at KC in 1919 as a sixteen-year-old high school freshman. By his junior year of high school he was playing varsity, and as a high school senior he was a starter.⁵

Any chance KC had at a SIAC title depended on beating the Tuskegee Golden Tigers, coached by Cleveland “Cleve” Abbott, a racial pioneer and star athlete at South Dakota State. Abbott had originally been offered the coaching job by Tuskegee’s founder, Booker T. Washington, before his death in 1915. Abbott eventually accepted the position in 1923, leading the team to undefeated seasons in 1924 and 1925 and claiming back-to-back national titles.⁶ In 1926, All-American halfback Ben Stevenson led Tuskegee’s explosive offense, making them the team to beat.⁷

The Bulldogs, unlike many of the HBCU football programs in the 1920s, still had a white coach.⁸ Under Carl Moore, “a Pittsburgh man,” the team adopted the slogan “Trounce Tuskegee” and believed that they had developed the plan they would need to stop the big, strong, and fast Stevenson.⁹ Although the Pittsburgh Courier praised KC, remarking that the team had “upset pre-game predictions by their marvelous playing and successful ground gaining ability,” KC’s solid play was still not enough to defeat Tuskegee that year.¹⁰ Even so, the 24 to 3 loss to the best team in Black college football was still a moral victory and set the tone for a season in which the Bulldogs rebounded to win 5 games in a row. Over Christmas break, the team left the cold of East Tennessee for a scrimmage against FAMU in Pensacola. Though the score of the game has been lost, it was momentous in other ways. Alongside his teammates, Jake Gaither swayed in the Jim Crow railcar on the way to Florida. Little did he realize that he was riding into his future.¹¹

From 1892 through the 1930s, the opening generations of HBCU football witnessed the creation of a Black sporting congregation that linked campuses, in the form of coaches, administrators, and players, with Black communities through the Black press and the creation of fans. The athletic interactions between campus and community fueled the game’s growth and development behind the color line. Black college football merged racial uplift with popular interest to become a significant part of Black culture. All the while, HBCU football reinforced an ethos of self-determination. The threads of the Black sporting congregation were not unique to African American colleges, but like other parts of Black culture influenced by the mainstream, such as jazz or the church, Black sporting congregations developed because of and in spite of segregation. Significantly, Black sporting congregations reflected themes of equality and autonomy shaped by slavery, emancipation, and Reconstruction.

These sporting congregations emerged at a time when racism was spreading to infect every crevice of Black life. Historian Rayford Logan has described the decades between the end of Reconstruction and World War I as the nadir of Black life, as segregation expanded across the South, legalized by the Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896.¹² During the nadir, political leaders deemed reconciliation between the North and the South more important than African Americans’ citizenship rights. Aided by the benign neglect of northern and western states, southern states eroded Black political rights in an orgy of violence and malicious intent.

In response to their political marginalization, Black Americans leaned on an ethos of independence and self-determination. “Underpinning the specific aspirations,” according to historian Eric Foner, “lay a broader theme: a desire for independence from white control, for autonomy both as individuals and as members of a community being transformed by emancipation.”¹³ Newly freed men and women built institutions—churches, orphanages, and most notably, schools. When white supremacy constrained Black political rights, Black communities relied on their churches, schools, and fraternal organizations to organize their communities to fight for their freedom rights.¹⁴

The rising tide of white supremacy pushed Blacks out of many integrated institutional spaces. In response, they formed their own cultural, professional, and political institutions. These groups functioned as the seedbed that allowed Black communities to survive the harshest edges of American racism and to launch a counteroffensive to secure citizenship rights. In the assessment of historian Earl Lewis: segregation became congregation.¹⁵ Sport and Black colleges, separately and together, reflected these themes of segregation and autonomy in the formation of a sporting congregation. As African American communities sought to survive the nadir, Black colleges built a sporting congregation with players, coaches, Black communities, media outlets, and athletic conferences as its foundation.

HISTORICALLY BLACK COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES

The wellspring for late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Black cultural and professional organizations was HBCUs. The men and women who created, staffed, and graduated from HBCUs provided a steady supply of leadership and membership and reflected the aspirations of Black communities that had marshaled monetary, social, and political resources to build a network of secondary schools, colleges, and universities. Behind these efforts was a desire “to control and sustain schools for themselves and their children.”¹⁶ To reach this goal, Black communities accepted assistance from white-controlled individuals and institutions, including Christian missionaries, the federal government, and private philanthropists. These bodies did not alter the educational aspirations of Black communities, though they did try to control the details. In spite of the desires of outside forces, Black communities shaped and reshaped these agencies’ plans to their own will.

There were three founding waves of HBCUs. The first schools were founded before the Civil War. As some northern whites agonized over the validity and morality of slavery, several religious denominations, such as the Quakers and the Methodists, founded schools to educate free Blacks. The Quakers founded Cheney State University (1837) and Lincoln University (1854) in Pennsylvania, while the Methodists founded Wilberforce University (1856) in Ohio.¹⁷ These northern HBCUs were built upon the abolitionist movement. Next, a significant number of private colleges were founded after the Civil War by northern Christian missionaries, often with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Attempting to help Blacks transition from slavery to freedom, most church-sponsored schools for African Americans began as parochial, teaching biblical lessons alongside the fundamentals. Soon, church leaders realized that the educational needs of the newly freed exceeded the time constraints of parochial schools. The demand for Black agricultural labor limited the school year in the South to four or five months between the harvest and planting seasons. The missionaries also maintained negative views of African American character and morality and came to believe that boarding schools provided the best means of eradicating illiteracy and countering the supposed moral depravity of their students. Church-supported Black colleges emerged from these boarding schools.¹⁸ Finally, there were the colleges started or enhanced due to the Morrill Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln in 1862 to establish land-grant colleges nationwide. Although Black colleges in Mississippi, Virginia, South Carolina, and Kentucky used the first Morrill Act, the vast majority of HBCUs were products of its successor, the 1890 Morrill Act.

The paradox of Black education during the nadir can be seen in the 1890 Morrill Act’s contradictory aspirations to voice support for integration while accepting southern segregationist customs where necessary. Its language stated “that no money shall be paid out under this act to any State or Territory for the support and maintenance of a college where a distinction of race or color is made in the admission of students, but the establishment and maintenance of such colleges separately for white and colored students will be held to be in compliance with the provisions of this act if the funds received in such State or Territory be equitably divided as herein set forth.”¹⁹ Six years before the Plessy v. Ferguson decision, then, the authors of the Morrill Act accepted segregation as a form of race management.

One key distinction between the missionary-initiated Black colleges and those begun under the auspices of the Morrill Act would be public versus private status. Of the HBCUs founded between 1890 and 1900, three-fourths were public, a complete reversal of the pre-1890 pattern. The public versus private split would shape the trajectory of football at HBCUs, as private schools dominated the opening generations, while public Black colleges would become a force in the mid-twentieth century. Regardless of the specific circumstances of their founding, virtually all HBCUs emerged from the third and final founding wave with a similar mission: to provide higher education for African Americans with the goal of race leadership. HBCU graduates set out to fulfill what W. E. B. Du Bois later described as the “social regeneration of the Negro” and to “help in the solution of problems of race contact and co-operation.”²⁰

The trajectories of KC and FAMU, founded in the second and third waves, respectively, reveal how the missions and functions of HBCUs transformed between emancipation and the nadir. KC’s origins follow the parochial school-to-college trajectory. In 1863, the Reverend Joseph G. McKee arrived in Nashville to begin his missionary work, meeting with African American elders and seeking their support for a parochial school. With African American blessings, financial support, and commitment, McKee opened a school in a Baptist church basement. By 1874, however, the school was being squeezed out for students by other denominations, most notably Fisk University, which was sponsored by the American Missionary Association and the United Church of Christ, and Roger Williams, sponsored by the American Baptist Association. The Presbyterian missionaries decided to move their school to Knoxville in 1875, seeking a less competitive environment to fulfill their Christian educational aims. Once the school relocated to east Tennessee, it transitioned to a boarding school in 1877 and later became a college. At the beginning of the twentieth century, KC filled several educational roles: a secondary-level boarding school, a normal school that trained teachers, a liberal arts college, and a fledgling medical school.²¹ KC would later receive money from the Morrill Act, after it agreed to offer “practical” agricultural education. KC’s physical plant rapi...