Memories of Race and Football

Pulling Alabama into a Post-Civil War Society

Photo by Carol Highsmith's America on Unsplash

It’s an old story.

In 1970, the Alabama Crimson Tide football team hosted the University of Southern California Trojans in Birmingham, Alabama, for the season opener. The all-white Alabama team faced an integrated Trojan squad that featured Birmingham native Clarence Davis at halfback, Sam Cunningham at fullback, and Jimmy Jones, also Black, at quarterback. Most Alabamians didn’t believe a Black man could navigate the waters of quarterbacking a big-time football program.

“They just aren’t smart enough,” was a line I heard from family and friends.

I was there on that early September evening at Birmingham’s Legion Field, which bordered both a lower-class Black housing project and an upper-middle-class Black neighborhood, which bore the name “Dynamite Hill” after Klansmen and non-robe-wearing racists regularly bombed homes there in the late 50s and early 60s, usually waving Confederate flags before and after.

Still, other realities occurred as if none of this violence and hate mattered.

The Alabama football program, for instance, seemed to be in decline in 1970. The last undefeated season was in 1966, and in the years after, Bama won eight games in 1967 and 1968, and then only six games in…