What would Jeff Johnson, ISU alumni association CEO, ask Jack Trice today? ,
Jeff Johnson, CEO of Iowa State alumni association, says there are lessons to be learned from Jack Trice
Randy Peterson, rpeterson@dmreg.com
- Born and raised in Ames, Iowa, Laura Martin Luckert retired from a career in corporate communications and is currently living in Venice, Florida.
During this year’s Farmaggedon football game played in Ames, Iowa, between Kansas State University and Iowa State University, ESPN announcers paused during a break in the action to give a brief shoutout to the man for whom Jack Trice Stadium is named. Solemnly, but without any detail of the college athlete’s backstory, they agreed Jack Trice was an inspiration.
From Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds’ perspective, it must have come as a relief that the sports announcers did not travel down that “woke” road she calls critical race theory, which would have had them telling the story of an African American player who was racially targeted by a Minnesota team and died a day later from injuries.
For that would require Reynolds to walk the fine line she drew when signing into law last year a bill she said forbids the teaching of critical race theory.
“I am proud … to promote learning, not discriminatory indoctrination,” Reynolds said in a statement at the time.
What we can learn from the legacy of Jack Trice is that while it is easy for politicians like Reynolds to toss around pejoratives like “discriminatory indoctrination,” it is much more difficult, but necessary, to confront, to teach, to consider the factual history.
The only reason Jack Trice was in Minnesota in the first place on Oct. 6, 1923, to play a football game was because Minnesota offered a venue when the Missouri Valley Conference refused to allow its schools to compete against a team with a Black player on its roster.
A letter from the University of Missouri athletic director was sent to Dean S.W. Beyer at Iowa State that very week with the reminder that “we (University of Missouri) cannot permit a colored man on any team that we play.”
Racism remained a dominant theme of the Jack Trice story even after his death. When a student group in 1975 proposed that the new ISU football stadium be named after Jack Trice, school administrators stalled.
More:A legacy impossible to forget: Inside the decades-long battle for Jack Trice Stadium’s name
Despite significant pressure from students; staff; and others including Sen. Hubert Humphrey, actor Paul Newman, and the Des Moines Register’s popular columnist Donald Kaul, it would take an entire generation, 22 years, before Jack Trice’s story would be memorialized.
Finally, on Aug. 30, 1997, University President Martin Jischke formally dedicated “Jack Trice Stadium,” making Iowa State University the first Division I school in the country to name a stadium after an African-American athlete.
In 1975, when the new ISU football stadium opened on the south side of Ames but long before it was named Jack Trice Stadium, I graduated from Ames High School. My secondary education, unfortunately, did not include history lessons about the Tulsa Race Riot or the Trail of Tears. Nor did I learn the story of Jack Trice, which transpired just a mile from my school.
Indeed, it was decades later, while watching an Iowa State football game on television, that I took note of and researched the name of the venue: Jack Trice Stadium. I read for the first time the story of a young college athlete who was not even allowed to live on campus with his fellow teammates because he was Black.
Politicians like Reynolds are not saving young people from “discriminatory indoctrination.” They are contributing to continued ignorance and to a white-washed narrative that fits hand-in-glove with other systemic racist tropes like “the replacement theory.”
As Iowa State University begins to undertake its plans to honor Jack Trice by marking 100 years since his death, I can only hope his story, his history, will be taught honestly without obfuscation in classrooms across Iowa and the rest of the country, and that lessons of diversity, inclusion, and equality will be learned by many.
Born and raised in Ames, Iowa, Laura Martin Luckert retired from a career in corporate communications and is currently living in Venice, Florida.
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