Breaking the Line

When the 2013 college football season kicks off in couple weeks (I can't wait!), the players we cheer for are just as likely to be black as white.  According to the NCAA, in 2010 45.1% of Division I football players were white, 45.8% were black.  In the NFL in 2010, 67% of players were black.  For football fans born in the 1960s or later, seeing black players on college or pro teams is not an issue.  But for our parents' generation, color mattered on the playing field, as it did everywhere else.

In Breaking the Line: The Season in Black College Football That Transformed the Sport and Changed the Course of Civil Rights, Samuel Freedman tells the story of the historic meeting, in 1967, of two storied football programs, when the Grambling Tigers met the Florida A&M Rattlers in the Orange Blossom Classic.  Eddie Robinson, Grambling's legendary coach, had a long-term goal of sending a quarterback to the NFL.  FAMU's Jake Gaither worked for years for the chance to play his team against a white college team.  Both men recognized that until black colleges faced white colleges on the gridiron, and unless black quarterbacks call the signals in the NFL, black colleges and black players would always be considered second rate.

For alumni and fans of Grambling and FAMU, breaking the line will be a walk down memory lane.  Drawing on contemporary accounts, as well as extensive interviews with a huge cast of characters, Freedman recreates the world of 1960s black college football in way that made me wish I were there.  The play-by-play of the games (he lists game film in the bibliography) have the potential to bog down the narrative, but Freedman artfully works the games into the broader story.

And the story is much broader than football.  The experiences of the players and coaches during this tumultuous time in our nation's history demonstrate the bravery and dedication it took for these men simply to live their lives and pursue excellence in the classroom and on the field.  As they heard from their coaches, parents, and teachers, they had to be twice as good to succeed in a white world.  I came away from the book with a renewed admiration for black Americans who struggled to live peacefully during the Civil Rights era, and an appreciation for the impossibly fine line they had to tread between cooperation with white establishment and advocacy for black advancement.  The subtitle may have overstated the importance of the events in the book, but, at the very least, the experiences of these colleges and their football programs are representative of the times.

The irony of the book, and of the Grambling and FAMU football programs, is that the coaches succeeded, all too well.  While racism will likely survive as long as there are mean and evil people, institutional racism is on the wane.  No longer does a talented black athlete have only Grambling, FAMU, or some other black college to play for.  The most talented athletes have their pick, even playing at colleges which were most grievously racist in their admissions policies.  And black quarterbacks, well, as a Baylor fan, I am delighted that RG3 chose to play for Baylor, not a black college.  So now we witness games like the one I went to last fall, where a moderately talented TCU team wiped the turf of their newly remodeled stadium with the Grambling Tigers.  (Grambling's band was better, though!)

Gaither recognized this problem, noting that, in Freedman's words, "integration was the solvent for dissolving every institution black people had created for themselves."  Few would disagree that racial integration has, on the whole, made our country a better place.  But for black people in the United States, the weakening of great black institutions, not least the Grambling and FAMU football programs, has been a tough price to pay.

Whether you are football fan or not, whether you are black, white, or other, Breaking the Line is a terrific read and an enlightening look at race relations in the U.S.  Pick it up.



Thanks to Edelweiss and the publisher for the complimentary electronic review copy!