College football is a parade of colors, from neon to neutral, primary to pastel. The Crimson Tide, the Golden Eagles, the Blue Devils, the Red Raiders, the Purple Aces, the Yellow Jackets, the Mean Green, the Cardinal, the Orangemen, the Rainbows.
Hard to believe that it wasn’t that long ago college football boasted another color: all white.
Only 25 years ago, Wilbur Jackson brought a new color to Crimson Tide football and made history by becoming the first black to receive a scholarship to play at the University of Alabama.
And this season marks the 25th anniversary of the first black to officially play for the Tide, when John Mitchell ran down the field of the Los Angeles Coliseum in the season opener Sept. 12 against Southern California.
“I wasn’t a pioneer,” Mitchell said. “I was a college kid trying to get an education and play football.”
It all happened with so little fanfare, given the volatile history of integration in Alabama. It had not even been 10 years since then-Gov. George Wallace had made his famous stand in the schoolhouse door, since the National Guard had been called out to escort James Meredith to class just across the state line at Ole Miss.
Yet, by the start of the 1970 season, there were black students at the university and a black athlete on the basketball team. Most of the state’s high schools had been integrated and there were black athletes playing at other Southeastern Conference schools.
“I was surprised when I came here and there weren’t any black players,” said Jeff Rouzie, a linebacker from Jacksonville, Fla., who arrived at Alabama in 1969.
That makes it hard to understand Mitchell when he says, “I grew up an Alabama fan. I remember all those great teams in the ’60s. Everyone knew Lee Roy Jordan, Joe Namath, Kenny Stabler.
“But I knew I wouldn’t get the chance to play at Alabama. I wanted to–not to prove anything, but to just see if I was half the athlete I thought I was. But I knew they didn’t recruit blacks.”
So the good black athletes went elsewhere.
“As far as Alabama and Auburn, I knew about them (growing up),” said Jim Holifield, an exceptional black athlete in the mid-1960s in Bessemer, Ala. “I heard their games on radio. But it wasn’t a thing where black kids were pulling for Alabama or Auburn.”
Holifield, now a high school football coach, went to Jackson State and later played for the New York Giants in the NFL.
“I felt I was better than those guys they had at Alabama,” Holifield said. “I was proud of that team we had at Jackson State. We had, potentially, a better team than anybody in the country. The reason I say that is that the year I was drafted, we had 11 players drafted, and another four signed as free agents.
“That’s another thing that got me. Here I was, a guy from Bessemer, right up the street from Alabama, and hardly anybody knew about me. I was more well-known up north than here.”
Legend has it that what convinced then-coach Paul “Bear” Bryant to break the color barrier at Alabama was the 1970 game against Southern Cal, when a black fullback named Sam Cunningham led the Trojans to a 42-21 romp over the Tide at Legion Field.
“I’ve heard that story, too,” said Jackson, who earned all-SEC honors at Alabama and went on to a nine-year career in the NFL. “But I was already there. In fact, I was sitting in the stands that night. It’s a good story, though. I laugh when I hear it and say, `What about me?’ “
Jackson, from Ozark, was a freshman on that 1970 team, but in those days, freshmen weren’t eligible under NCAA rules.
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“USC was one of my favorite teams growing up,” Jackson said. “That was my first time to see them in person, though. They had Sam Cunningham, Clarence Davis and Jimmy Jones, a black quarterback, something you didn’t see in those days. They just overpowered us. It was eye-opening for everybody.”
What probably is closer to the truth is that Bryant’s teams were slipping, having gone 8-3 in 1968 and 6-5 in 1969. In other parts of the nation, other teams were surpassing his Tide by tapping the untouched resources of the South’s black population.
The story of how Jackson came to be recruited and signed by Alabama varies, depending on who is telling it.
But the one constant is that Bryant did not make a big deal of it. He just told his assistant coach–a young man named Pat Dye–that he wanted Jackson.
“I had a real good quarterback here named Alan Kelly that people were recruiting,” said Tom McClendon, who coached Jackson at Carroll High School in Ozark. “The way I heard it is that one day Coach Bryant went into Pat Dye’s office, and Pat just happened to be watching film of our team.
“He asked what Bryant thought, and Bryant said, `That quarterback looks all right, but I like that No. 80 catching all those passes.’
“No. 80 was Wilbur Jackson. He was a wide receiver that I only had for one year. He’d been over at D.A. Smith (High, where the blacks went) until his senior year. When I first saw Wilbur, I timed him, and I couldn’t believe how he could run.”
Dye, who went on to become head coach and athletic director at Auburn, recalls it differently.
“I went out to practice one day at Ozark and Coach McClendon told me he had a great athlete there, so much faster and stronger and more physical,” said Dye. “They’d throw him a hitch pass and he’d go 70, 80 yards for a touchdown. And he was a great kid.
“I never thought about breaking barriers, really. I was just recruiting Wilbur.
“It turned out he was in my area to recruit, and he was good enough to play at Alabama, so we recruited him. I don’t think any other major school was recruiting him that I knew of. I think it was us and Tuskegee.”
Jackson said Dye first talked to him during spring practice of his junior year, and again after his first game that next fall.
“I really wasn’t thinking about being the first black to sign with Alabama,” Jackson said. “Really, I was just thinking about going to school. Probably the only way I could go was a scholarship, and Alabama was the only school offering, so the decision was easy to make.
“I knew there were no other blacks on the football team, but it never crossed my mind about being different. It was just a matter of going to school.”
Of course, Dye knew he was bringing the first black player to Alabama.
“Sure, I had those conversations with him,” Dye said. “I told Wilbur when I was recruiting him that there was no way for me to tell him what to expect if he came to Alabama. The only thing I could assure him was that I believed our players would treat him the way they treated each other, no differently.
“I’m sure that wasn’t 100 percent true. But I know Wilbur, when he left Alabama, was highly respected in every regard, as a man and an athlete.”
The team was told nothing about it. In fact, having a black teammate was nothing new to them.
“In Gadsden, we’d been playing with blacks since the 9th grade,” said John Croyle, a defensive end who came in with Jackson. “Wilbur was an athlete who just happened to be black.
“Of course, many of us had grown up in the South our whole lives and had prejudices, but I never saw any once we got to Alabama. The coaches didn’t treat Wilbur and John any different than they treated anyone else. We were all just football players.”
Jackson believes that the issue was settled by the sheer force of Bryant’s personality.
“I never got any looks or snide remarks that I can recall, not even in class,” Jackson said. “Coach Bryant had a strong hold on what was going on, and what he said, that was it. It may not have been what some people believed or wanted to believe, but once he said it, that was it. People realized that.”
The reception wasn’t always so cordial among fans, however.
“I had people tell me (if we signed Wilbur) they’d never come to another game,” Dye said. “I told them, `That’s your choice.’ “
Jackson remembers being the only black among the 40 or so football players that showed up for recruiting trips on weekends at Alabama.
“One night, Coach Bryant had all the recruits out to his house,” Jackson said. “He took me aside and said that if I came there, and if there were ever any problems, to come see him and he would take care of it. That was the clincher for me. I took him at his word and I never had problems.”
The impact of USC’s victory over Alabama did lead to the signing of Mitchell, however.
Months after that victory, USC coach John McKay was talking to Bryant before Alabama played Oklahoma in the Astro-Bluebonnet Bowl at the end of the 1970 season.
“McKay and Coach Bryant were real close,” said Clem Gryska, a former Bryant assistant who now works in the Bryant Museum. “Evidently, McKay called Coach one night and, during the conversation, said, `I’m going to get one of your boys, a kid from Mobile who is in junior college in Arizona.’
“The next day, we had staff meeting. Hayden Riley was sort of in charge of recruiting, and Coach brought out the fact that Southern Cal was going to sign a good player from Alabama, and if he was that good, we needed to sign him.
“Right after the game, Coach Riley and Pat Dye flew into Mobile, found John (Mitchell) on their way home from the game and started recruiting him.”
At Eastern Arizona junior college, Mitchell had blossomed, and when Southern Cal came calling, Mitchell said yes.
Until he got a visit from the Alabama coaches.
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“Three weeks before I was supposed to start class at Southern Cal, Coach Dye was in my home, with Coach Riley, asking me if I’d like to go to Alabama,” Mitchell said.”I’d always been an Alabama fan. I knew all the great players who’d been there. I wanted to see if I measured up.”
Mitchell said his mother knew he’d made the right choice after the 1971 Southern Cal game in Los Angeles.
“She was standing near Coach Bryant when a sportswriter asked him how many black football players he had, and he said, `None,’ ” Mitchell said. “Then he told the sportswriter he didn’t have any white football players either, that all he had were football players.
“He won my mother over right then. And I never had a problem. There were great guys on that team: Johnny Musso, John Hannah, a lot of good people. And there was never a racial problem.”
Mitchell went on to earn all-SEC honors at defensive end and, upon graduation, joined Bryant’s staff as an assistant coach. He now is an assistant with the Pittsburgh Steelers of the NFL.
Of course, after Jackson and Mitchell, the door was open. In 1971, Alabama went 11-1 and the Tide went on to be the winningest team in college football in the 1970s.
Now, looking back, Mitchell says he sees what he did and how it opened doors for other black athletes.
But neither he nor Jackson thinks of what they did as anything special.
“I really didn’t think about it until two or three years after my playing days were over,” Mitchell said. “Then I realized I had the opportunity to do something no one had done before.
“But if it hadn’t been me, it would have been somebody. For me, it was what I got out of playing at Alabama. Even today, all these years later, if you say you’re from Alabama, people want to know if you played for Coach Bryant, and then you start getting thousands of questions.
“That has opened a lot of doors for me. It still does.”