In the reports and commentary concerning the recent senior-leadership departures at the University of Missouri, some pundits on ESPN and MSNBC have speculated on the possibility that the threatened strike by the school’s varsity football team that forced the toppling might spread to other campuses nationwide.
Widespread campus protests and disruptions are memories of a bygone era. Student-athletes in revenue-producing sports — football and men’s basketball — generally were nonparticipants. As NFL and NBA salaries and the integration of black athletes into these leagues increased, talented black players at elite Division I universities focused on moving into professional careers and the ranks of the rich and famous gladiators.
A generation later, the Tigers of Mizzou football players likely dream similar dreams. But, in the last week, this team of mostly African-American young men tested a theory this writer has held for more than a decade: If black students, faculty and staff want rapid, positive change in campus racial climates, they need to enlist the help of the basketball and football players.
The Tigers, with the support of their coaching staff, merely threatened to not play. Although the impact of a Tigers football shutdown would have been enormous, in the cost-benefit calculus the good derived from standing up for racial justice was great and the risk of their bluff being called was low.
Football is king in America. Thus, within a few of days of football players threatening to boycott unless Missouri university system President Tim Wolfe resigned, he and Chancellor R. Bowen Loftin did, and black interim president, Michael Middleton, has been named.
In 1970 at Syracuse University in New York — a different time and place — things did not go so smoothly or predictably. In career-ending moves, nine black football players, erroneously dubbed the Syracuse 8, refused to report for spring practice. They boycotted the Orangemen team, protesting what they believed to be unfair treatment of black team members at the hands of their own head coach, Ben Schwartzwalder. The young men, supported by legendary 1957 alumnus Jim Brown, wanted an integrated coaching staff, better medical care, race-neutral competition for starting positions and as much academic support as the white team members received.
The complicated series of events and realities that unfolded in Syracuse in 1970 stand in sharp contrast to the Missouri outcome of 2015. In 1970 professional football salaries were handsome, but a fraction of the unimaginable wealth available to very good — and not necessarily the best — players today. Still, the 8 were black risk-takers on an overwhelmingly white team that were unhappy with the team, not the university and its leadership. Furthermore, though a revenue-generator, football money at even elite programs in 1970 would be rounding errors in 2015. In short, the Syracuse 8 were as powerless in 1970 as the Mizzou Tigers are powerful in 2015.
Just six years earlier, in 1964, all of the black student-athletes in the sweep of varsity sports at Syracuse protested with less fanfare and no power. They were fed up with the indignities associated with competing against Jim Crow schools from the South and presented a petition, signed by 17 or 18 athletes (depending on who was counting), modestly requesting that the Orange not include those schools in its schedule. This group included the 1963 NCAA gymnastics champion; Dave Bing, who would become the No. 1 draft pick in the 1966 NBA draft, a college and professional basketball hall of famer and mayor of Detroit; Floyd Litte, a future NFL and college football hall of famer; and Billy Hunter, a future head of the NBA Players Association and U.S. attorney for the Northern District of California. Faculty and student support was encouraging, and the offending schools disappeared from Syracuse schedules.
This blend of stymied and victorious protests did not incite national movements in the cause of civil rights among student-athletes or anyone else on campuses beyond the Hill in Syracuse.
Although racism continues to infect nearly every aspect of American society today, in this writer’s native Missouri a perfect storm of egregious incidents of racial harassment, a Gandhi-like hunger strike by graduate student Jonathan Butler, a self-admitted ditherer at the flagship university’s helm, the freshness of the nearby Ferguson tragedy and its tumultuous aftermath, as well as a majority-black football team willing to take action placed the University of Missouri in a unique place.
Those seeking racial justice and race-neutral meritocracies in the American academy cannot count on that kind of lightning striking twice.
Robert Hill is a Pittsburgh-based communications consultant, a former vice president at Syracuse University and a former vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh.
First Published: November 13, 2015, 5:00 a.m.
