Even as the stain of segregation complicated the lives of Paul “Bear” Bryant and his Alabama football program during the 1960s, one unknown act belied the stereotype of the coach and his Crimson Tide.
On a memorable night in 1963, Charlie Thornhill stood before a banquet room filled with people, dressed in his best Sunday go-to-meeting clothes, and proudly accepted the Player of the Year award from the Roanoke Touchdown Club in Roanoke, Virginia. The powerful tailback, who had scored more than two hundred points in his senior season of high school, made history by becoming the first African-American player to win the prestigious trophy as well as the first black person ever feted in such a way by Roanoke’s white establishment.
The guest speaker for the evening, duly impressed by the way Thornhill handled himself, not to mention his incredible statistics, pulled him aside at the end of his evening, draping his large right arm around the player’s shoulders.
“Son, where are you planning on going to school?” Paul Bryant asked.
Trying to fight off a case of nerves, Thornhill looked up at Bryant, unable to believe he was meeting the famed coach in the flesh.
“Well, I have an offer on the table from Notre Dame,” he said.
“Don’t sign anything yet,” Bryant said. “I want to tell somebody about you.”
Somebody was Michigan State head coach Duffy Daugherty.
As the region exploded on the issue of race, Bryant reluctantly continued to watch talented African-American athletes in his state and across the South flock to historically black colleges, like Florida A&M and Grambling, and to major universities in the Midwest, East and West.
The folks who wanted to equate Bryant with George Wallace failed to recognize how the continued segregation of the Crimson Tide hurt the Alabama football team most of all, costing it many fine African-American athletes who could have made the Tide even stronger. Some bigots across the state and elsewhere certainly pointed to the dominance of the all-white Crimson Tide as an example of white supremacy, and while this ridiculous idea held no currency in the Alabama athletic department, the philosophy underpinning it caused some very misguided people who nevertheless loved Bryant’s program to see him as a kindred spirit, simply because the door remained closed to African Americans. This could not have been further from the truth. Unable to recruit blacks himself, he often steered talented players elsewhere, as demonstrated by the case of Charlie Thornhill.
No program pursued a more aggressive policy toward minority athletes than the Michigan State Spartans, who became a Big Ten power by exploiting the political situation that kept Southern teams segregated. Although MSU’s percentage of minority students was not much higher than Alabama’s in the years after the Tuscaloosa campus was integrated in 1963, the football program recruited Southern blacks aggressively—including Texas native Bubba Smith, one of the greatest defensive players of all time—making the colorful Daugherty a kind of Harriet Tubman figure, running a football equivalent of the Underground Railroad during the traumatic days of the civil rights movement.
Daugherty, one of Bryant’s closest friends in the coaching profession, acted quickly on his buddy’s tip and signed Thornhill out from under Notre Dame’s nose.
“Coach Bryant said he would like to have me play for him, but the time wasn’t right,” said Thornhill, who turned down the chance to break the color barrier at the University of Maryland. “We talked about things opening up at Alabama in the future, and he seemed very anxious for that to happen, but he understood how tough it would be for someone like me to play at Alabama in those days. He told me about how Duffy was playing a lot of blacks…making a statement that was pretty hard to ignore…and that it would be a good place for me.”
EXCERPTED FROM THE MISSING RING. Copyright 2006 by Keith Dunnavant. All rights reserved.
