Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for November 7, 2008 SPORTS AND SOCIETAL CHANGE

Bryan Burwell is a sports columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. His column today is yet another personal example that explains in clear terms the very visible emotion generated among people of all colors by the election of Barack Obama...

No matter what President Barack Obama is able to accomplish in these challenging times, one thing is clear...profound change HAS come to America.

Desegregation in sports paved way for Obama

By Bryan Burwell
ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

The year was 1964, and the ball field and the doctor's office were no more than a 15-minute drive from the White House. I was a 9-year-old and I played on a Little League team that was full of nothing but black faces because we lived in a country that engaged in a separate but unequal way of life. On that day, my older brother and I walked home after practice and I saw something that until that moment I had only seen on the evening news.

A "whites only sign" on the porch of a doctor's office.

It was a jarring intrusion on my young life. I had been living in a segregated society all along, but that was probably the first time I could remember being confronted by it up close and personally. Two years later, after our family moved into the Maryland suburbs, my brother and I were part of the first wave of black kids who would not only integrate the Maryland public schools, but the local boys' club, too.

Now I was on another ball field on another Little League team in the working-class suburbs, and for the first time in my life I was playing side by side with white kids, who were sharing the same misgivings with me. We weren't used to this. Our young minds had already been conditioned to believe that those faces that didn't look quite like ours were boogey men.

Sports was about to change all of that.

We were about to become part of the first generation of America's youth that would find out on the level playing fields of sports that we weren't so different after all. The beginning was rocky and uncomfortable for all of us. We engaged in name-calling and fist fights, and a ton of mistrust. But eventually, we worked it out on our own.

I remember the first time I knew that we were a team was on those Saturday afternoons when our integrated team would play a segregated one, black or white. Tensions would arise in the heat of competition, and when racial epithets were hurled our way, an amazing thing happened.

We didn't divide into black kids and white ones. Like a scene right out of "Remember the Titans," we stood together as a team and we would not back down from anyone on our way to the county championship.

I recall this moment now because of an e-mail I received Tuesday night as I was watching the election returns on CNN in my basement family room when the television networks proclaimed that Barack Obama had just been elected the first black president of the United States. The e-mail was from a white buddy of mine I have known for 35 years, and he was sitting in a hotel room on the other side of the world. His name is Lee Zeidman, and he was in Zurich, Switzerland, and he was watching CNN, too.

From opposite sides of the globe, two D.C. kids — one black, one white — who became friends largely because of sports, were both getting a bit emotional and philosophical. We both pondered how sports had played a large role in paving the way for America's first black president.

From Joe Louis to Tiger Woods, from Jackie Robinson to the 1970 Alabama-Southern Cal game that helped change the face of southern college football, sports in no small way helped America get its racially divided mind right for this historic moment.

I laugh sometimes when I hear people talk about sports in frivolous terms. The conventional wisdom is that we frolic in a playground of idle distraction, an escape from the world's more serious business. But I'm old enough to know better than that.

Nearly 30 years ago, I was a sports writer at the Baltimore Sun on assignment at the University of Alabama. I was researching an article about how, on the 25th anniversary of the historic Brown vs. Board of Education court case, college sports had been affected by that Supreme Court decision outlawing Jim Crow's so-called "separate but equal" doctrine. I had spent a large part of the day with the legendary football coach Paul "Bear" Bryant, who in 1970 had cleverly orchestrated a historic game between his still-segregated, highly ranked Crimson Tide team and John McKay's highly-ranked but very integrated University of Southern California Trojans.

Bryant had met with McKay in a Los Angeles airport early that year to set up the game. He knew the only way he could break the resistance to him recruiting black players was to show his stubborn state what they were missing. So he went to McKay, who had been playing with black players for a while, and they hatched the plan. As we sat in his office, Bryant leaned back and rocked in his overstuffed leather chair and in that deep, gravely voice that dripped with a heavy southern drawl, the Bear spoke.

"I knew it couldn't be my idea to recruit (black players)," he said. "It had to be (the white Alabama fans'). That's why the game had to be at (Birmingham's) Legion Field."

The game turned into a USC rout, with Sam Cunningham, a bruising black kid running wild over the Crimson Tide for 135 yards and two touchdowns in a 42-21 Trojan victory. Bryant smiled when he retold the story, particularly one of the most memorable moments of that historic afternoon.

"Late in the game, after (Cunningham) had run all over us, my defensive coordinator Jerry Claiborne came up to me and said, 'Coach, I think Sam 'Bam' Cunningham just did more for integration in the state of Alabama than a thousand Martin Luther King marches.'"

Bryant leaned closer as he delivered the real punch line of the story. The room filled up with the sound of his deep voice rumbling with humor. "White folks kept comin' up to me after that game and they couldn't believe how good Sam Cunningham and all those other colored boys were," Bryant said. "They all kept sayin' 'Hey coach, we gotta get us some of them boys, too.'"

We are an American culture that never changes in radical seismic shifts. We may romanticize that change comes in one of those abrupt, landscape-altering tremors, but the reality is that our society historically creeps toward change like the erosion of a shoreline.

Bryant was smart enough to know that. His plan wasn't to destroy racial ignorance on that fateful afternoon. But a year later, there were two black football players on campus, and with that, the resistance to change had begun to erode. By the not-so-simple act of just letting us play together, the racial boogey man's demise was whittling away, slowly edging us towards a distant night in November that back then didn't even seem like a dream.