University of North Carolina Athletics
Jacobs: UNC Football Helped Promote Racial Tolerance
October 17, 2011 | Football, Featured Writers
Oct. 17, 2011
by Barry Jacobs, TarHeelBlue.com
A front-page story in the Daily Tar Heel invited North Carolina fans to join the football team and school band at Chapel Hill's Pittsboro Street siding to board the "Tar Heel Special," arriving some 13 hours later at New York's Pennsylvania Station. At the other end of the ride the student newspaper promised in a headline the "Metropolites Will See Display of Dixie Grid Style," which it went on to describe as "polished, organized football."
Translation: first-year coach Ray (Bear) Wolf's team, which had attempted a mere 30 passes in wins over Wake Forest, Tennessee, and Maryland, would run the ball around and through the New York University Violets. That was in fact the case as UNC won 14-13 on October 17, 1936 before 8,000 fans at Yankee Stadium. On a field dampened by a morning-long rain, Tom Burnette's extra point after the Heels' second touchdown spelled the difference as NYU came roaring back.
But "the University of North Carolina's first New York City gridiron invasion," as the New York Times dubbed the visit by "the Southerners," was more than just another hard-fought game. Thanks in part to supportive UNC system president Frank Porter Graham, a progressive light in the South, UNC became the region's first major university to intentionally defy racial orthodoxy at a time when separate but equal held sway across much of the United States.
Not until 1947, when Harvard played at Virginia, would an African-American athlete compete in modern football on the campus of what were then all-white major Southern universities.
For several preceding decades a so-called gentlemen's agreement was in effect that promised Southern schools wouldn't have to face a black player, even at a Northern venue.
"The possibility of competing against a black opponent was simply not acceptable to white southerners," explained writer Charles H. Martin in 1999 in The North Carolina Historical Review, "because two or three hours of equal competition on the playing fields would undermine the fundamental assumptions of black inferiority and racial subordination on which white supremacy and segregation were based."
Washington and Lee, a Southern Conference member, pulled its team off the field and went home in 1923 rather than face an African-American quarterback at a Pennsylvania school. In 1934 the University of Michigan benched a black star at Ann Arbor to placate visiting Georgia Tech. In 1937, when it discovered Syracuse's Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was black rather than Asian, Maryland insisted the visitors sideline their star quarterback for a game at Baltimore. NYU left an African-American player behind in New York in 1940 to satisfy the preferences of its hosts at the University of Missouri.
So it went before and after the Tar Heels agreed to a three-year series in New York against NYU, then a respected football team coached by Mal Stevens, eventually a College Football Hall of Famer. Such intersectional games were uncommon. Far rarer was Carolina's willingness to play despite the presence on the Violets' roster of 217-pound Ed Williams, whom the Times described in 1936, in the manner of the era, as "the big Negro sophomore."
Back then, The Daily Tar Heel and all but four members of the school's 151-member, professorial-rank faculty implored the university's trustees in vain to admit the daughters of UNC profs and employees as freshmen and sophomores. It was a time when, after an NYU receiver tripped over a photographer trying to catch a pass for an extra point, the Heels graciously consented to having the play rerun.
Williams, a reserve, played against those Heels, who finished 8-2 in 1936. He started and starred in 1937 against a 7-1-1 squad before leaving the game in the third quarter when he was "badly shaken in an attempted advance," according to the Times. While some claimed Williams was intentionally injured, a fact of life for African-American players for many years prior to integration, and perhaps beyond, the truth of the assertion is uncertain.
What was incontrovertible, however, was Graham's support for the Tar Heels' early deviation from the shunning of black opponents by Southern football teams.
Graham was noted for preaching racial tolerance. Typical was a 1937 speech at a ceremony dedicating nine buildings at what is now N.C. Central University in Durham. "Equal opportunity for education should not depend upon the section of the country, nor of the race to which one belongs," Graham said. "Every human being has a spirit personality equal in the sight of God. The education of the whole child is precious above either race, color, or creed."
Accepting the series against NYU without condition fit Graham's worldview, as he explained to one critic who accused him of inconsistency in opposing persecution of Jews in Poland while acquiescing to segregation in North Carolina.
"If I were personally to have followed your logic, I should have then joined in the protest against a Negro representing New York University on the football field against the University of North Carolina," Graham wrote in reply. "Instead, as you would say, I inconsistently maintained that the brilliant Negro halfback should rightfully play for New York University regardless of any protests by those who would seek to decide on the membership of one of our rival teams."
Of course there were such protests, including a letter from a Florida man who warned Graham bitterly that "if Negro players continue to be admitted against you, in a few years someone will say that you cannot have your rights except by having Negro players of your own."
Carolina's conference brethren took up its competitive example. In 1938 Duke went north and beat Sidat-Singh and Syracuse. Five weeks earlier Maryland similarly traveled to Syracuse and, in a bit of poetic and athletic justice, was routed 53-0 as Sidat-Singh and his teammates got their revenge.
Seventy-five years after the Tar Heel Special arrived in New York, it's worth recalling the boost given the process of acceptance by a UNC football squad that took the field to tackle Ed Williams and the racism of their day.
