Celebrating Martin Luther King Day
January 19, 2009 03:43 PM | General
(2:30 pm)
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| John Mallory |
Today we celebrate Martin Luther King Day. Tomorrow the country will inaugurate its first African-American president in Barack Obama.
Split end Oscar Patrick, part of the second wave of African-American athletes to play football at West Virginia University in the late 1960s, always held out hope that the country would one day have a black president.
“When we consolidated schools my senior year at Big Creek High School (in 1965) I knew I was going to see it,” Patrick said a few months ago. “People won’t believe me but I knew it.”
Patrick came to WVU at a time when the country was in the midst of a cultural revolution. Much has been written about the 1960s, influenced heavily by the Vietnam War that rocked college campuses and the civil rights struggle championed by Dr. King.
West Virginia University successfully integrated its athletic program in 1961 when Morgantown’s Phil Edwards joined Stan Romanoski’s track squad. A year later, the football program added Dick Leftridge and Roger Alford.
Two years after that in 1964, Ron Williams, Ed Harvard, Jim Lewis and Norman Holmes joined the freshman basketball team. These were the first African-American athletes to ever play in the Southern Conference.
The face of college athletics was changing by the mid-1960s, thanks to Duffy Daugherty at Michigan State and Don Haskins at Texas Western.
Daugherty and Haskins both proved that teams could win with African-American players. Daugherty’s Spartans won a share of the national title in 1965 with a lineup predominantly made up of African-Americans. It shattered the myth that football teams could not win by playing more blacks than whites.
A year later, Haskins transformed college basketball by winning the national title in 1966 with an all-black starting lineup. As irony would have it, Texas Western defeated an all-white Kentucky team for the championship.
Patrick remembers that game and admitted he later turned down an opportunity to integrate the Kentucky program.
“Kentucky was closer to me than West Virginia was,” Patrick recalled. “They came and asked me if I wanted to be the first black player there in both basketball and football and I told them they were crazy. I’m going to a school that I like.”
West Virginia by then was integrated with players like Garrett Ford, John Mallory and Ron Williams starring for the Mountaineers. But culturally, Morgantown was still adapting.
“There was hardly any social life,” Mallory once recalled. “In those days there were maybe 100 black students in the university. Out of those 100, there were only about 12 of those students who were athletes. There were no fraternities for us. During rush they used to bang on our door and when we would come to the door they would say, ‘Oh, we have the wrong room.’ We knew what that was about.”
Garrett Ford, the first African-American assistant football coach in 1970 who later moved into athletic administration, said the players in the mid-1960s were totally unprepared for what they encountered – especially on road trips in the south. At some places, Ford was told that blacks were not permitted outside the hotel after 6 o'clock.
When Jim Carlen arrived in 1966 no coaches on his staff had ever recruited a black athlete. Middle guard Carl Crennel was the first African-American player assistant coach Bobby Bowden had ever successfully recruited.
Carlen knew times were changing and he wanted to take a proactive approach with his football program.
“Coach Carlen came up to me and told me he couldn’t recruit black athletes here,” Mallory said. “I told him (the school) had to go out and get black women here. When you bring kids on campus they see the situation. If they can’t have dates and be normal, they are going to go to other places where they can.
“The way I understand it, Carlen went to the administration and they made a great effort of getting more minority students into WVU, particularly females,” Mallory said.
Eventually things improved. By the late 1960s, the school had modified its fraternity system to include blacks and the administration made a concerted effort to recruit more minorities to campus. WVU also took a proactive approach to the demonstrating that had erupted on college campuses around the country. There were no major disturbances at West Virginia.
Ben Williams became the first black quarterback to start a football game for the Mountaineers in 1973, but by then the fact that he was African-American was barely mentioned in the newspapers.
Today, some of the most revered athletes in WVU history also happen to be of African-American descent. More than 20 years after he last played, Major Harris still draws large crowds whenever he returns to the Mountain State.
And quarterback Pat White has reached iconic status in West Virginia University sports history.
Their path to WVU was cleared by pioneers like Phil Edwards, Dick Leftridge, Roger Alford, Garrett Ford, John Mallory, Norman Hill, Ron Williams, Jim Lewis, Ed Harvard, Norman Holmes and Carl Head in the 1960s.
Today as we celebrate the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, let’s also be sure to remember West Virginia University's pioneering athletes as well.
Note, for those interested in learning more about West Virginia University's athletic pioneers consult this web site http://sportsintegration.wvu.edu/
