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
The Legend of Trinidad Chambliss might seem exhausted by now. The media slices and dices the newly minted folk hero’s story as he chases a College Football Playoff national title at Ole Miss a year after he led Ferris State to the NCAA Division II championship.
But there’s more.
The tale is underscored by Ole Miss playing Miami Thursday in the Fiesta Bowl serving as a CFP semifinal, but Chambliss crossed 2025 thresholds into hallways longer than the distance between DI and DII doors. The Versailles-like Hall of Mirrors reflect the histories of Gideon Smith and Eric Marshall upon him.
If you’re not familiar with Smith and Marshall, don’t dismiss their tales. After all, President Harry Truman said, “The only thing new in the world is the history you do not know.”
At Ferris State in Big Rapids, Michigan, Chambliss walked in the early 1900s footsteps of Smith, the son of a Virginia slave. Smith’s journey crossed thresholds as a Hall of Famer at three colleges — Ferris and Michigan State as an athlete and Hampton University in Virginia as a coach.
At Oxford, Mississippi, Chambliss plays on turf that barred Marshall during 1960s segregation from attending the college near his family’s home. Marshall, a quarterback who led his segregated high school to a Black state title, boarded Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad. But before his trip north, he watched U.S. Army trucks rumble down his street to quell a riot on the Ole Miss campus. In 1962, a mob of 3,000 White supremacists tried to block the admission of Mississippi’s first Black student, James Meredith. Folk singer Bob Dylan wrote a 1962 song about the riot, “Oxford Town.”
It can’t be stated enough times, especially for millennials, that segregation is recent history, not ancient. All-White football teams were the norm in the South until the late 1960s.
The national media likes to romanticize how the Ole Miss Riot may have cost the 1962 Mississippi football team a shot at the national title, it skips over hundreds of “Eric Marshalls” denied opportunity. Where is the reckoning? Ole Miss football didn’t have its first Black football player until 1972.
Even Alabama coach Bear Bryant, whose dragged his feet as the seventh of 10 Southeastern Conference schools to include a Black player, joined the 20th Century before Ole Miss. By the 1970 season, 33 of 37 major southern programs included Black players. The last four in 1972 were Ole Miss, Georgia, LSU and Tulane.
Smith, who was from Hampton, Virginia, was the first Black football player at Ferris State in 1912 and the first Black football player at Michigan State, 1913-15. As the head coach at Hampton, a Historically Black College and University, his 1922 team won the Black football national title. His career record was 102-47-13.
PHOTO: Gideon Smith poses on the right with his 1912 Ferris State teammates.
Smith has been enshrined in three Halls of Fames — Ferris State, Michigan State and Hampton. He’s also on the College Football Hall of Fame ballot for coaches.
Michael Oriard, a former Notre Dame and Kansas City Chiefs player, knows Smith’s history. He’s an author of books on football in American culture as an Oregon State “Distinguished Professor American Literature and Culture.”
Oriard, while interviewed for ESPN’s 2019 series on the 150th anniversary of college football, commented specifically on Smith while the segment noted the impact of a small number of Black players in the game’s early days.
“The fact that Gideon Smith started at Michigan State in 1913 — called Michigan Agriculture College at the time — may be most significant because as the first player at Michigan State, he’s in a way the pioneer for the really astonishingly, exceptionally integrated Michigan State teams of the 1950s and 1960s.”
But you can’t have Smith at Michigan State without Woodbridge Ferris, who founded the school in 1885. He was later Michigan’s Governor (1913-17) and a U.S. Senator representing state (1923-28).
Ferris, upon reading Booker T. Washington’s book, “Up from Slavery,” was motivated to establish a program that brought a dozen Black students from Hampton to Ferris. Washington attended Hampton before he was later better known for founding Tuskegee University.
Ferris’ plan for Black students who began to arrive from Hampton was prepare them to transfer to a four-year school. Smith, it turned out, was a great natural athlete and learned football at Ferris.
PHOTO: Gideon Smith and his 1913 Michigan State teammates were honored on the 40th anniversary of their unbeaten 1913 season that included the school’s first win over Michigan.
He transferred to Michigan State and continued playing. He led the then-small school Spartans to their first two wins over national power Michigan, in 1913 and 1915. He was later a professor, coach and athletic director at Hampton.
These stories are told in two of my books, “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.”
When Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty recruited quarterback Jimmy Raye in 1964 out of segregated Fayetteville, N.C., Raye said he was motivated by the portrait of Smith he saw at Jenison Fieldhouse.
“I realized what he faced must have been overwhelming,” said Raye on Page 57 of RAYE OF LIGHT, “and I felt the obstacles I faced were not as insurmountable.”
In the 1960s, Daugherty blended his Midwest roster with Black players from the segregated South steered to him by southern Black high school coaches and White southerners opposed to segregation. They respected Daugherty for the fair chance he provided Black athletes.
In 1962, the Associate Press reported Michigan State’s 17 Black athletes were the most in major college football history. The report didn’t state the Spartans broke their own records throughout the 1960s.
Oriard was a Notre Dame freshman when the Irish met Michigan State in the 1966 Game of the Century. The Spartans lined up 20 Black players, 11 Black starters, two Black team captains, College Football Hall of Famers George Webster and Clinton Jones, and Raye breaking ground under center.
Notre Dame lined up one Black player, Alan Page. Nore Dame, though, wasn’t alone. Until the late 1960s, colleges followed an unwritten quota limiting Black athletes to a half dozen or so.
Daugherty was the first coach to ignore the quota limits. As an example of the quota limits, USC’s 1962 national title team numbered only five Black players and its 1967 national championship roster only seven despite a campus located in populous and diverse Los Angeles.
If a coach is limiting Black athletes to a half-dozen, he’s accepting only prospects labeled today as 4- and 5-star prospects. But Daugherty gave undersized Black athletes an opportunity same as White players.
Two examples were Raye and Marshall as quarterbacks. Marshall (1963-67) and Raye (1964-67) were recruited aboard Daugherty’s Underground Railroad and played on the Spartans national title teams, 1965 and 1966. Their stories are told in my books.
PHOTO: Michigan State’s Eric Marshall, who rode Duffy Daugherty’s Underground Railroad from segregated Oxford, Mississippi, rolls out for yardage in a 1967 game.
Marshall learned about Michigan State’s 1954 and 1956 Rose Bowl teams from his father since many African Americans adopted the Spartans as their team for its Black stars. Marshall’s mother, Susie Marshall, was an integration advocate for Oxford schools. When she died in 2013 at age 100, a newspaper story in the Oxford Eagle was headlined: “Beloved educator Susie Marshall passes away.”
The degree Marshall earned at Michigan State impacted his future sooner than expected. After he graduated an no longer had a college deferent from the Vietnam War draft, he recalled the night he watched the Army quell the Ole Miss riot.
“I saw the efficiency of the military,” Marshall said on Page 212 of “THE RIGHT THING TO DO.” “They knew what they were doing and took over the city. I never forgot that.”
He decided if he was going to Vietnam, he was going as an officer. He used his diploma to enroll in Officer Candidate School. He also finished Ranger School.
Marshall served in Vietnam as a Lieutenant leading a platoon that cleared tunnels in the Cu Chi region near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. When his officer enlistment was up, Marshall, feeling better respected in the Army than general U.S. society, decided to remain in the Army. He retired as a Lt. Colonel. He later worked in San Francisco’s public schools, including as a principal at Burton High School.
Chambliss’ path was cleared for him by Smith, Marshall, Raye and other pioneers of college football integration, even though their stories weren’t told by Bob Dylan.
Ken Burns, the historian and award-winning film maker of documentaries, says Americans like stories tied up in a simple bow. Chambliss’ success at Ole Miss can be tied up in a simple bow. The story that made it possible for a Black football player to succeed in the Deep South is tougher to untangle and tie into a bow.
The Legend of Trinidad Chambliss won’t include the pioneers who set his stage for him.
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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.
