The Wolfpacker: An Independent Magazine Covering NC State Sports
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50 ■ THE WOLFPACKER Celebrating The Pioneers Who Integrated Southern Athletics Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu. PACK PERSPECTIVE BY TIM PEELER T he headlines, distributed in newspa- pers across the state of North Carolina, were jarring then and hard to read now: "Detroit Negro Will Not Play Against State." It was not big news, just four quick paragraphs that stated the Detroit Titans would not bring left end Jim McMillan to Raleigh for the Nov. 12, 1938, game at NC State's Riddick Stadium. Though later rendered moot by an an- kle injury McMillan suffered two weeks before the game against the Wolfpack, it was a seminal moment in the history of Southern football: proof that coaches below the Mason-Dixon line were skittish about playing against African American opponents, a lesson that is, or should be, remembered every February during Black History Month. McMillan was the first and only Af- rican American member of the Detroit football team, a local high school football and track star who joined as a walk-on in 1937. He became a starter the follow- ing year and had a big impact on Titans head coach Gus Dorais' innovative pass- ing game. Yet NC State coach Williams "Doc" Newton, who had replaced former Notre Dame coach Heartley "Hunk" Anderson prior to the 1937 season, was concerned about McMillan playing in front of a Ra- leigh audience that fall at the height of the Great Depression. He wrote a letter to Dorais, a longtime friend of Anderson, asking to leave McMillan in Detroit be- cause of a lack of housing opportunities in the Jim Crow South. Dorais responded promptly, and ex- cerpts of his letter were published in the state's largest media outlets at the time. "I didn't quite expect that it would be the proper thing to bring him down there to play for us," Dorais wrote, "so I will make arrangement to get somebody else ready to play his position and I don't think we will take him on the trip at all." As it turned out, it was a decision that apparently didn't need to be made nor publicized. McMillan suffered a severely sprained ankle two weeks before the State game and missed four consecutive weeks for the Titans. It did impede NC State's slow walk to- ward breaking the ungentlemanly "un- written rules" regarding playing against African American opponents. Beginning in 1935, at Anderson's behest, the Pack played four consecutive games in New York against Manhattan, a progressive Catholic school that had been fully inte- grated since World War I. Those games nudged North Carolina to begin a similar series against integrated New York University in the city, which pleased Frank Porter Graham, president of the UNC Consolidated System and an outspoken opponent of benching op- posing Black players. It also spurred both Duke and Maryland, fellow members of the Southern Conference, to schedule games against integrated Syracuse, which was led by Black quarterback Wilmeth Sidat-Singh. When NC State traveled to Detroit in 1939 for a return game against the Titans, McMillan was no longer on the team. He had lost his scholarship, he said, after school officials discovered he was dating a white co-ed. He finished his college career at Morehouse College in Atlanta. It wasn't until the early 1950s that the Wolfpack, then under the direction of Horace Hendrickson, began regularly playing against integrated teams. In February 1957, NC State was the first ACC school to integrate its athletics, when Irwin Holmes and Manuel Crock- ett participated in a freshman track meet against North Carolina at Raleigh's State Fair Arena. Holmes later became a three- year starter for the Wolfpack tennis team and was the first Black student-athlete to serve as a varsity captain at a Southern school. However, it was not until 1967 and '68 that football coach Earle Edwards added his first African American players. Both Marcus Martin and Clyde Chesney were walk-ons who were attending NC State on academic scholarships when they won spots on the roster during open try- outs. Edwards eventually recruited two Raleigh stars, Willie Burden and Charley Young, to become NC State football's first Black scholarship players. Mar- tin, Chesney and Burden all went on to earn doctorate degrees, and Burden was named the 1973 ACC Player of the Year. Young was a first-round pick of the Dal- las Cowboys after a decorated career at NC State. Whatever happened to McMillan, the Black player left behind by Detroit when it beat NC State, 7-0, at Riddick Stadium? He graduated from Morehouse, attended dental school, served as a dentist during World War II and eventually became the first Black dentist in Nevada. As a civil rights pioneer and activist, he organized several Southern-style sit-ins that were responsible for ending segregation on the Las Vegas Strip. The stories of how college athletics, especially in the South, worked their way to full integration are not always easy to read, especially through the lens of the Jim Crow era. They are, however, the reason Black History Month cel- ebrates the pioneers who helped make it happen. ■ Irwin Holmes was a starter for the Wolfpack tennis team in the late 1950s and was the first Black student-athlete to serve as a varsity captain at a Southern school. PHOTO COURTESY NC STATE ATHLETICS