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Southern White Teams Just Didn’t Play Black Ones, but One Game Ended All That
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. On a Saturday night 40 football seasons ago, just before kickoff of the penultimate game in his career, Coach Jake Gaither of Florida A&M strode toward midfield of Tampa Stadium. There he extended his hand to the opposing coach, Fran Curci of the University of Tampa, and they strained to speak above the din of a capacity crowd.
“Jake, this is bigger than I thought it would be,” Coach Curci recently recalled saying.
“Not me,” Coach Gaither responded.
Both men were trying to fathom the event they had set into motion, the first interracial football game in the South, a landmark in sports and civil rights that has gone relatively uncelebrated. It pit the Florida A&M Rattlers, long one of the dominant teams among black colleges, against the Tampa Spartans, a rising power that was overwhelmingly white.
What was at stake that night was twofold. The match-up would prove whether a black team with a black coach from a black school really could compete with a white one. And, in a city that suffered a race riot two years earlier, the stadium was divided racially into its Tampa and A&M rooting sections, and the spectators had to demonstrate that they could peaceably coexist.
Forty years later, the veterans of that game reunited here over the weekend as part of Florida A&M’s homecoming gala, during which the 2009 version of the Rattlers beat Norfolk State, 34-20, with the satisfaction of having succeeded on both counts.
Florida A&M won that 1969 game, 34-28, and despite the intensity on the field, with more than a thousand yards of total offense and the result in doubt until the last 30 seconds, harmony reigned in the stands.
Speaking to about 725 people gathered for the homecoming gala, Mr. Curci repeated the generous words he had spoken to reporters back on Nov. 29, 1969: his team had been outplayed and he had been outcoached. Jake Gaither was not there to hear them on Friday, having died in 1994 at age 90, but a number of his players were. The surviving member of his 1969 coaching staff, Bobby Lang, was M.C. for the evening.
“It was a gamble, and Jake took it,” said Eddie Jackson, a longtime administrator at Florida A&M who recently wrote a history of football there, “Coaching Against the Wind.” “If he’d lost, you know what everyone was saying before ‘Jake’s a good coach, but he’s a good black coach.’ Jake said afterward he wanted to win that game more than any game he ever played.”
He went to extraordinary lengths to do it. A man deeply knowledgeable and eloquent about black history, Coach Gaither nonetheless had maintained a public distance from the civil rights movement. Conversely, segregation benefited his university and team by shutting off all of Florida’s white schools to the best black students and athletes in the state.
Yet by 1967, Coach Gaither had begun privately lobbying members of Florida’s Board of Regents, which oversaw state schools of both races, to allow him to play a white team. A year later, when Mr. Curci took over as head coach in Tampa, Mr. Gaither found a willing collaborator.
Trying to make a small-time program big-time fast, Mr. Curci was scheduling and beating larger schools like Tulane and Mississippi State. A game against a black team, he knew, would generate a large crowd and plenty of coverage. And he also had his idealistic reasons; he had broken the color barrier within Tampa, recruiting its first black players.
“There were comments coming out like, ‘There’s going to be a riot,’ ‘Someone’s going to get hurt,’ blah blah blah,” Mr. Curci recalled of the atmosphere leading up to the game. “But this was a historical event, and it had to be done.”
Among his players, Coach Gaither made no mention of the path-breaking nature of the game. They understood without needing to be told.
“I had the feeling it was a game we had to win,” Bennie L. Johnson, then a defensive end and now the pastor of a Miami church, said during the homecoming gala. “We thought we were just as good as Florida or Florida State. But those opportunities weren’t presented. Tampa was.”
One of his teammates, Melvin Rogers, added: “It was an opportunity for us to be measured against white schools on an equal basis. And it’s not egotistical, but the reality is, we always felt we were competitive.”
Coach Gaither made a point of inviting the other titan of black college football, Coach Eddie Robinson of Grambling, to watch the game as his guest. On the eve of the game, Coach Gaither spoke with unusual bluntness to The St. Petersburg Times, telling a writer about athletic segregation, “This is the end of an era, and I’m very glad it’s come to a halt.”
It ended in high style. The game featured more than a dozen players later drafted by the National Football League and three who went on to win Super Bowl rings Hubert Ginn of A&M and Jim Del Gaizo and Noah Jackson of Tampa. A week after defeating Tampa, Jake Gaither beat Grambling in the final game of his quarter-century as head coach, retiring with a career record of 203-36-4.
The coming of integration to Southern football degraded the caliber of the black teams. Football factories like Alabama, Louisiana State and Florida State scooped up recruits who, in the past, would have gone to a Grambling or a Florida A&M. For its part, Tampa gave up football after the 1974 season.
Still, neither Coach Gaither nor his rival and comrade, Coach Robinson, doubted the wisdom of breaching racial lines. “There are still some rednecks who’d object,” Coach Robinson told a Tampa Tribune reporter after the game, “but there are enough people who are concerned about seeing good football to make it possible for us, too. They know we have to live together now.”
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