Visit my homepage: TomShanahan.Report
— Click here for book review and purchase link: THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s and here for a purchase link to RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans.
— Watch a three-minute video to learn about our documentary at the fundraising stage, GAME CHANGERS OF THE CENTURY, and the Investment Deck.
— Documentary synopsis: Duffy documentary snynopsis.pdf – Google Drive
— I will debate anybody, anytime, anywhere Duffy Daugherty led college football integration
— My FWAA first-place story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and segregation
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By TOM SHANAHAN
Sports media obituaries reporting the death of Jeff Siemon on Saturday at age 75 noted he earned four Pro Bowl trips while playing 11 seasons with the Minnesota Vikings.
Some also identified him as a Stanford College Football Hall of Famer. The All-American linebacker led teams that won Pac-8 Conference titles in 1970 and 1971 and back-to-back Rose Bowls. The Pasadena New Year’s Day victories were upsets of No. 2 Ohio State and No. 4 Michigan.
But none of the posts explained a Siemon backstory helping the arc of a moral universe bend toward justice (to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.). That chapter of his legacy is lost to history.
Siemon’s leadership helped Stanford’s increased number of Black recruits fit into a predominantly White campus and White roster. We lean on Stanford’s Hillary Shockley, an African American fullback who arrived with Siemon in the 1968 recruiting class, to fill in the blanks.
“Jeff was a stellar guy,” Shockley said. “To be inconclusive, everybody needs to buy into it. You needed leaders like him to make it work. The common denominator on a team is protecting your buddy. It doesn’t matter if your teammate is Black or White.”
Shockley believes the locker room presence of Siemon helped mute voices who might have objected to Stanford recruiting more Black athletes. Until the late 1960s, Stanford was like other schools from coast to coast — they complied with an unwritten quota that limited Black athletes to a half-dozen or so.
For example, in 1960s college football Alabama and Texas with segregated rosters and USC and Notre Dame with limited Black players won national titles. USC won its 1962 national title with only five Black players and 1967 national crown with only seven despite a campus located in populous and diverse Los Angeles. Notre Dame’s 1966 national title team numbered one Black player, Alan Page.
It was a sports journalism failure the media avoided race and didn’t grasp college football’s changing face. Backstories of Siemon and other leaders, Black and White alike, went untold. In a country with a history of responding to racial change with two steps forward and one back, Siemon-like leaders reasserted bending the moral universe’s arc.
With time, Shockley better understood Siemon’s quiet influence. One White teammate, Jim Merrill, spelled it out to Shockley in a text prior to a team reunion.
“Jim Merrill said he grew up one way with his mom and dad,” said Shockley, “and he thanked me for opening his heart and eyes.”
Shockley added, “It’s a learning process. Stanford was made a better place with contributions from minority players. The impression we made changed the racial trajectory of many of our teammates. I know that as a fact.”
Not to mention the school’s administration and coaching hires.
In 1995, Stanford’s Provost, Condoleezza Rice, an African American who was later Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, hired Tyrone Willingham as the Stanford’s head coach. At the time, Willingham was one of only four Black head coaches among 108 major college schools.
Four seasons later, Willingham was the first Black head coach to take a team to the Rose Bowl when the Cardinal won the 1999 Pac-10 championship. Wisconsin beat Stanford, 17-9, in the New Year’s Day 2000 Rose Bowl, but the door to the 21st Century was opened.
Back in 1970, that “learning process” played out in Stanford’s season opener on September 12 at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas. The No. 10-ranked Cardinal (called the Indians until 1972) upset No. 4 Arkansas 34-28. With a Top 10 matchup and Stanford quarterback Jim Plunkett a leading Heisman Trophy candidate, ABC-TV aired the opener as its national game of the week (back when there was only one national game of the week on TV).
For 1970 context, Arkansas was only one season removed from the 1969 Texas-Arkansas showdown that Texas won 15-14 to go down in history as college football’s last all-White national champion. Arkansas, had it stopped Texas’ late touchdown drive, otherwise would own that dubius distinction. Arkansas joined the 20th century when Jon Richardson, the Razorbacks’ first Black varsity player, made his debut and scored a touchdown against Stanford.
Plunkett (Hispanic/Native American) led an all-minority backfield with two Black running backs positioned behind him, Shockley and Jackie Brown. Shockley, whose moniker was “The Shocker,” rumbled to 149 all-purpose yards and three touchdowns.
On that same date, another college football racial milestone was established. Georgia Tech sophomore Eddie McAshan, who was the Deep South’s first Black starting quarterback, led the unranked Yellow Jackets to an upset of an integrated South Carolina roster that was ranked No. 17.
But with sports journalism failing to grasp 1960s progress, those two milestones went unappreciated in real time. They were later superseded in college football lore by a 1970 USC-Alabama fairytale that was crafted two decades after the game.
The false narrative claimed Alabama coach Bear Bryant scheduled USC as a game to lose at Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama. He wanted the shock of a loss to an integrated team for him to gain permission from his bigoted fan base to recruit Black athletes.
Bryant never made such a claim in his 1974 autobiography, BEAR, or in interviews prior to his death in 1983. The myth also omits that Wilbur Jackson was Alabama’s first Black player as a freshman in 1970. Jackson and Bo Matthews both signed a Southeastern Conference letter of intent on December 13, 1969, nine months before the 1970 USC-Alabama game was played and a month before it was scheduled. When the NCAA permitted an 11th game in January, USC-Alabama scheduled a home-and-home series.
But with USC sophomore Sam Cunningham, a Black fullback, running for 135 yards and two touchdowns to lead a 42-21 victory, his performance was conveniently backed into history’s void to fit the fairytale as a parable.
Sloppy journalism entrenched an unvetted fairytale that jumped word of mouth among USC backers in the late 1980s to the print media in the early 1990s. With USC backers unaware of 1960s progress in the South, the myth served to embellish USC’s otherwise poor integration history. Alabamians embraced the source of any tale that obfuscated Bryant dragging his feet on integration into the 1970s.
The sloppy journalism continued into the 21st Century. HBO (2008), Showtime (2013) and ESPN (2019) aired documentaries without vetting the storyline. There was nothing singular about the 1970 USC-Alabama game. Not even Cunningham’s performance, which was topped by Shockley’s numbers on the same day.
September 12, 1970: STANFORD vs. ARKANSAS at LITTLE ROCK – Tom Shanahan Report
The documentaries and print stories falsely portrayed USC’s 1970 team as a juggernaut, but the Trojans finished 6-4-1 without a bowl game. Cunningham ran for only 353 yards and three touchdowns over the final 10 games.
Stanford beat USC 24-14 at midseason. USC finished the regular season with a 45-20 loss to UCLA. In 1971, the Trojans were again 6-4-1, including a loss to Alabama in the season opener at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Those two middling seasons were sandwiched by USC’s 1969 Pac-8 title (10-0-1) and the 1972 conference and national crowns (12-0-0).
So, what happened to USC’s talent in 1970 and 1971?
USC’s Charle Young, a tight end who was a sophomore in 1970 and All-American senior in 1972, blamed a racial divide developing upon USC recruiting more Black players in 1969 and 1970. Young appeared on “100 Yards of Football,” a USC-focused podcast. The hosts got more than they asked for from Young’s honesty.
“You are a sophomore and there were seniors in front of you,” Young said. “Here this guy (a Black sophomore) is getting credit and you’re not getting credit. You’re a senior looking to go to the NFL and the guy is taking your credit away. That creates adversity. That was being replicated all up and down the line.”
The one White senior player that Young named was Charlie Evans, a returning starter from 1969 who started the Alabama game and scored a touchdown that gave USC a 22-7 halftime lead. Evans was an NFL 14th-round draft pick who went on to play four seasons in the league.
In other words, USC’s 1970 and 1971 locker rooms didn’t have a player with Jeff Siemon’s presence.
Despite holes in the 1970 USC-Alabama myth, the fairytale lives on at the expense of Stanford’s 1970 and 1971 seasons. The roles of Plunkett, Shockley, Brown and Siemon are lost to history.
But they’re not alone.
At Army West Point, Gary Steele, Army’s first Black letterman in 1966, tells a story about Black Knights team captain Townsend Clarke. Before Army played Tennessee at the Liberty Bowl in Jim Crow Memphis, Clarke told Steele the team had his back if anything racial happened. Years later, Clarke retired as a General and Steele as a Colonel.
The Townsend-Steele story resonates worthy of a place in college football lore.
At Michigan State, Jimmy Raye, the South’s first Black quarterback to win a national title on the 1965 and 1966 teams, credited Dick Proebstle for his early development. Proebstle was a quarterback whose senior season was ended the previous spring football by a concussion. But coach Duffy Daugherty asked Proebstle to work as a volunteer freshmen team coach with Raye on his footwork. Raye faced a transition from an offense that threw the ball frequently in high school to an option offense in college.
In the 1966 Game of the Century, Raye was among Michigan State’s 20 Black players and 11 Black starters who faced Notre Dame and Page as its only Black player.
At Colorado, 1961 team captain Joe Romig, who is a College Football Hall of Famer, led his White teammates in support of their five Black teammates with a threatened boycott of the Orange Bowl. They united against Jim Crow in Miami. The Orange Bowl and Miami backed down.
The media ignored Colorado’s transcendent story unfolding nearly two years before MLK’s “I have a Dream Speech.”
There are other examples of schools in the South that desegregated and schools above the Mason Dixon Line that benefitted from Jeff Siemon-like leadership. Their stories of progress, though, go untold.
They’re lost in the shadow of a Bear Bryant fairytale.
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I invite you to follow me on Twitter @shanny4055
I’ll put my facts on the true pioneers of college football integration versus Bear Bryant fairytales against anybody, anytime, anywhere. Watch here.
Click here for my story on the 1962 Rose Bowl and Segregation and Alabama.
— Tom Shanahan is an award-winning sportswriter with two books on college football integration, “RAYE OF LIGHT, Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, the Integration of College Football and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans,” and “THE RIGHT THING TO DO, The True Pioneers of College Football Integration in the 1960s.” They are the most accurate accounts of college football integration in the 1950s and 1960s. They also debunk myths about the 1970 USC-Alabama game. The false narrative co-opted the stories of the true pioneers who stood up to Jim Crow and the KKK.
— Two children’s books also explain Michigan State College Football Hall of Fame coach Duffy Daugherty’s impact on integration through the Underground Railroad and the Hawaiian Pipeline: “DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” and “HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP.”
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PURCHASE LINKS, non-fiction books
— RAYE OF LIGHT, August Publications or on Amazon.
— THE RIGHT THING TO DO, August Publications or on Amazon.
PURCHASE LINKS, children’s books
— DUFFY’S COLLEGE FOOTBALL UNDERGROUND RAILROAD, Order from Barnes and Noble here and Amazon here.
— HOW DUFFY PUT HAWAII ON AMERICA’S FOOTBALL MAP, coming soon on Barnes and Noble and Amazon.
