The Democrats of the Old South were a vile lot. They were unapologetic segregationists who resisted the civil rights movement of the ’60s both in the classroom and on the college football fields of the Atlantic Coast, Southwest and Southeastern conferences.
That turbulent period is ably told in “Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football,” a one-hour documentary on HBO that aired on Tuesday night and will be repeated the next several weeks.
George Wallace, the Democratic governor of Alabama, is shown at his inaugural address of 1963 uttering his infamous words: “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever.”
And it was Wallace who in June 1963 stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to symbolically block two black students from enrolling in the school.
It would be seven years before Paul Bryant’s Crimson Tide became an integrated program. This process was facilitated in part by the Southern California-Alabama meeting in 1970, when the Trojans, with an all-black backfield and black quarterback, overwhelmed the all-white Crimson Tide 42-21 in the hostile environment of Birmingham.
Bryant, who wanted to integrate his program but was held hostage by state politicians and school alumni, walked up to USC coach John McKay after the beating and said, “John, I can’t thank you enough for what you did for me today.”
Birmingham was one of the flash points of the civil rights struggle, symbolized by the heavy-handed tactics of Democratic Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor.
The documentary also chronicles the story of Darryl Hill, who became the first black football player to play in the ACC after being lured to the University of Maryland by Lee Corso, the Terps freshman coach then and better known today as the ESPN talking head who dons the mascot costume of whatever team he is picking to win a game.
Hill was initially reluctant to accept Corso’s offer.
“I want to play some football,” Hill told Corso. “I don’t know about being Jackie Robinson.”
That was the conundrum before the black athletes of the ’60s.
As Thomas Gossum, the first black athlete to graduate from Auburn, put it in the documentary, “I left the comfort of segregation for the discomfort of integration.”
But leave these pioneers did and ultimately to the benefit of these previously segregated institutions across the South.
What the documentary does not explore - or was left on the cutting-room floor in the editing process - was how integration cut into the proud athletic traditions of historically black institutions.
The hard-earned advances of black athletes came with emotional costs, too, as Jerry LeVias makes clear in the documentary.
LeVias, the first black athlete to receive a scholarship in the Southwest Conference, made his debut with Southern Methodist University in 1966.
As the target of racial taunts, and worse, LeVias recalls being so emotionally wounded by the attacks that he nearly walked off the field during one game.
Hayden Fry, the SMU coach at the time, remembers telling a teary-eyed LeVias, “Are you going to let a guy like that help defeat us?”
A few plays later, prior to returning to the field to receive a punt, LeVias told Fry: “Coach, I’m going to run this punt back all the way.”
And run it back he did to lead SMU to a 21-14 victory.
Not that LeVias felt elation.
“That was the worst touchdown because it broke me,” LeVias said. “I did it out of hate, not for the love of the game. And that hate kind of carried me on a little bit and changed my whole personality. That was the first time I’ve ever really hated white people. I think it crippled me. I’m still healing, yeah, still healing 40 years later.”
It was a raw, shameful period in American history, the effects of which still reverberate today, although not on our playing fields, which perhaps have become the nation’s purest form of a meritocracy.
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