Breaking SWC Color Barrier Tops Fry's Memories

[jtstang]

Some schools like Michigan State and Southern Cal in the 1960s were exceptions but this idea that Big 10, Pacific Coast and Eastern schools were loaded with blacks prior to the 1970s is a crock of [deleted].

Careful man, you're treading real close to sounding like you're making excuses for racism, which if true would make you full of the same crock.

[EastStang]

First, going along with the crowd when the crowd is morally wrong is gutless. Going against the morally wrong crowd is courageous. Southern apartheid during Jim Crow was and is morally wrong. It is not much different than the defense the Germans had to the holocaust, "well we didn't want to go against the Motherland". Jerry LeVias and Hayden Fry could have just sat by and let the crowd continue to dictate behavior or they had to rock the boat. That was courageous and was absolutely worthy of all the accolades that are coming to them. That is probably one of the proudest moments in SMU sports history and no one should deny or diminish that fact. I think that northern states had a much more sinister form of discrimination that wasn't legislated but was societal. Evidence of that appeared when the City of Boston moved to integrate its school system. You would of thought they were talking about Little Rock. But southern states had legislated apartheid. Blacks and whites could not intermarry. Blacks had to go to separate schools, ride in the back of the bus, and sit in separate waiting rooms or face jail. It was that environment that Jerry LeVias and Hayden Fry faced in 1965.

[Rayburn]

jt, you need a reading comprehension test.

My point was that SMU and all the other schools in the South were hampered by official segregation outside the campus and off the field. Therefore, when SMU (or North Texas, for that matter) takes the step to offer a guy like Levias a scholarship, it is a courageous act.

HOWEVER, those colleges and universities in the sanctimonious north, east and west -- where Jim Crow was not the law -- could have had more blacks on their rosters and DID NOT. What was their problem? They didn't have to navigate the minefields SMU or Houston or North Texas or other schools in the South did, yet they still had very few blacks on their rosters. This was so until the mid-1970s.

To help you further, I'm talking about hypocracy here.