![]() ![]() From left to right: Bob Viney, a 6-foot, 214-pound end Don Bierow, a 6-foot-1, 231-pound tackle Harold Lucas, a 6-foot-2, 286-pound middle guard Buddy Owens, a 6-foot-2, 221-pound tackle and Bubba Smith, a 6-foot-7, 268-pound end. (Original Caption) Michigan State University thinks what’s up front does not count and this 1,220 pounds will be up front when MSU takes the defensive against Purdue in their game at Purdue. And, in some cases, according to those agreements, black players would be held out of games against non-integrated white teams. For instance, most Southern universities did not allow black athletic participation. 1966 MICHIGAN BASKETBALL ROSTER SERIESSupreme Court, a series of inappropriately named “gentleman’s agreements” held that white universities could stymie black athletes. But Daugherty and his assistants built a network of coaches at segregated black high schools by holding clinics specifically for coaches barred from attending white football clinics and camps.Īlthough the concept of separate but equal had been struck down in 1954 by the U.S. Michigan State was not even the first school in its own state to field a black athlete. ![]() Other black players had played at predominantly white institutions before this great migration. Raye and his teammates were more trailblazers than pioneers. I just went to play football and to get an education.” “I didn’t think of it as being any first anything. “At the time I was being recruited, I didn’t think of it as any kind of social pioneering experience,” Raye said. It was about whether I was going to get a degree. “My mom’s main concern – as we talked to the Michigan State coaches – was about whether I was going to get an education and graduate,” said Raye, now 73 and living in the Fayetteville area. ![]() Raye, who went on to play defensive back in the NFL and enjoy a long coaching career, had climbed aboard Spartans coach Duffy Daugherty’s “underground railroad,” which brought in the first large influx of African American athletes from the South.įor Raye’s mom, the concerns were strictly academic. “The apprehension was about whether I’d get to play the position that I wanted to play or whether I’d be switched,” Raye told The Undefeated, “or that I had never played against white players.” Raye said his family assessed his escape from segregated Fayetteville, North Carolina, to take a chance at college football’s promised land.įor Raye, a star football and basketball player among the all-black high school leagues in the early 1960s, the main concerns involved football. Jimmy Raye II was the quarterback of the 1966 national title team for the Spartans. This is the story of one of those players. However, the catalyst for true integration of college football began with the success of Michigan State’s 19 national championship teams, which featured 20 black players. As college football embraces its 150th season, black athletes have been at the center of that story.Īs early as 1890, black athletes have played football at predominantly white universities. ![]()
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