The Working Catholic: Student Athletes by Bill Droel

Early this month James Daniels, now a guard for our Chicago Bears, called out racial disparity in the Iowa Hawkeyes program. Many other former students then reported prejudice and outright racial comments by athletic staff at University of Iowa. A coach has been dismissed from the school, taking a $1.1million severance with him. (His yearly salary had been in excess of $800,000.)

Productive conversations about race are occurring among players at many other schools and many coaches now realize that athletics can be a force for social improvement.

  Chicago was totally taken by the Loyola University Ramblers basketball team during March Madness 2018. They were 15-3 in their Missouri Valley Conference and then won thrilling games in the NCAA tournament, advancing all the way to the Final Four. Media attention to this remarkable team gave an occasion to recall another Ramblers team.

In 1963 Loyola won the title game with a last second basket in overtime against University of Cincinnati Bearcats. The tournament is an important moment in NCAA history, but not because of its thrilling finish. The Ramblers used four Black starters during the season, violating a gentleman’s agreement among coaches to limit the number of Black starters. At some games during the season the Chicago team took abuse from opponent’s fans. In the second round of the March 1963 tournament, Loyola was matched against Mississippi State Bulldogs. That team had to use two airplanes (in case half the team got caught) to sneak out of town ahead of a court order prohibiting them from playing an integrated team like Loyola. There’s a famous photo of the pre-tip off handshake between a Black Rambler and a white Bulldog.

            In January 1965 the integrated basketball team at Father Ryan High School in Nashville beat an all-Black team from Pearl High School by one point. Thomas Freedman (N.Y Times, 1/9/15) supplies details on the game’s bigger significance. The white players at Ryan were not supposed to play the Blacks from Pearl or from any other segregated school. Ryan was the first integrated high school in Tennessee and in 1897 Pearl was the first high school for Blacks in that state. In 1945 Ryan took its first prophetic step by including a Black student on its inter-mural speech team. Around that time Ryan’s principal was asked to tally the school’s racial composition. We don’t have white or Black students, he asserted. “We have Father Ryan students.”

Pearl, which became Pearl-Cohn at a new location in 1983, also had to violate racial strictures to play Ryan. Perry Wallace (1948-2017) was a star Pearl player in that game. He went on to be the first Black player in the Southeastern Conference for Vanderbilt.

John Seigenthaler (1927-2014) was a Ryan student back when the school integrated. A priest at the school gave him a copy of Mind of the South by W.J. Cash, a 1941 analysis of racial caste in the South. Reading it was my “first exposure to issues of race,” Seigenthaler later reflected. “My idealism began” with that book and during my days at Ryan, he said. And who was Seigenthaler? He became a courageous editor for The Tennessean, covering many civil rights stories. He also served U. S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1925-1968). In that capacity he was sent to Montgomery in 1961 to protect the Freedom Riders. Seigenthaler was seriously injured by a segregationist mob there, causing Kennedy to make civil rights a high priority for the administration.

Freedman concludes his story by noting that the practical reforms from the 1950s-1960s civil rights movement depended “on a reservoir of moral decency among whites, some of them secular liberals, but many of them sharing the religious principles proclaimed by activist black ministers.” And so it is today; more evidently so in recent weeks. When Blacks and whites cooperate, racial reforms can happen. Not fully enough; not quickly enough. But change occurs. Schools, including their athletic programs, are part of the new humanity.

Droel edits INITIATIVES (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629), a newsletter about faith and work.