Editor’s Note: The 2021 Alabama football season marks 50th anniversary of the desegregation of Alabama football. The Paul W. Bryant Museum on the campus of The University commemorates the achievement in diversity with an exhibit beginning Saturday, October 23.
This is Part 2 of a series on Paul Bryant’s efforts in integration.
The move to Texas A&M (which would be the last Southwest Conference team to desegregate, long after Bryant departed) offered no hope on the racial barrier recruiting front. Bryant, however, was athletics director as well as head football coach in College Station, and as such was able to schedule games against desegregated teams. In 1940-41 Bryant had been an assistant coach at Vanderbilt under Red Sanders, who had moved on to UCLA and won a national championship with a team that had many Black players. Bryant arranged a game against the Bruins in Los Angeles in 1955. It was a Friday night game, the first time a SWC team had played a desegregated team, and UCLA took a 21-0 win. The next day the Aggies and Bruins players went together to the Los Angeles Coliseum to watch a Southern Cal game.
In 1956, Bryant’s Aggies would win the SWC championship. A non-conference game was arranged with Villanova, where Bud Dudley was athletics director. Dudley agreed to a game at Kyle Field in College Station against A&M, the first time an SWC team had hosted an integrated team. TAMU opened the season with a 19-0 win.
Though not directly analogous to Bryant’s efforts in diversity, his Texas A&M plan was similar to one used later at Alabama.
Following the Junction Boys preseason camp, A&M’s depleted roster won only one game in 1954. In 1955, Bryant scheduled a game against powerful UCLA in Los Angeles. The Aggies lost that game, but went 7-1-1 the rest of the season (the best A&M record since the John Kimbrough teams of 1939-40). And in 1956, Texas A&M was the undefeated SWC champion.
He then scheduled defending national champion Maryland (coached by Navy buddy Jim Tatum) to open the 1957 season in Dallas with a nationally televised game. The Aggies defeated Maryland and A&M was ranked No. 1 until a late season loss to Rice, generally attributed in part to it becoming public knowledge that Bryant would leave A&M at the end of the season to go to Alabama.
In 1969, Alabama had a 6-5 record, but Bryant rekindled the Tide. AD Bryant took advantage of the NCAA allowing a 12th regular season game to schedule a tough opponent, Southern Cal coached by his friend, John McKay. Alabama lost that game, 42-21, but rebounded the next year with an 11-1 record, SEC championship, and the start of another dominant period in college football. And it would be the beginning of the African-Americans as a part of the Crimson Tide.
After “Mama called” him back to Alabama in 1958, didn’t take long for Paul Bryant to arrange for another game against an integrated team. As at A&M, he came to Tuscaloosa as athletics director and head football coach. His second team was invited to play in Bud Dudley’s new Liberty Bowl in Philadelphia against Penn State – an integrated team. With the permission of Governor John Patterson, the Tide made its first bowl appearance since the end of the 1953 season and Bama’s first game against an integrated team.
Desegregating Alabama’s football team was a hard nut to crack, of course, with George Wallace elected governor in 1962 promising “Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and who in 1963 tried to block African-American students from enrolling at The University.
The word from on high was always, “not yet.”
Next: Bryant Returns To Alabama
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