African-American Athletes in Arkansas (eBook)

THE ORIGINAL BLACK RAZORBACKS

DECADES BEFORE OFFICIAL INTEGRATION, A TEAM OF AFRICAN AMERICANS PLAYED ON UNIVERSITY GROUNDS, WORE RAZORBACK FOOTBALL UNIFORMS AND COMPETED WITH WHITES. IT APPEARS UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS COACHES EVEN TRAINED THEM.

Razorback linebacker Brooks Ellis had lived in Fayetteville his whole life, but had never heard of the “Black Razorbacks.”1 Not that he’s to blame. Hardly anyone, after all, remembers the group of young African Americans who donned old Razorback and Fayetteville High jerseys during the Great Depression and played football across Fayetteville and the region. These northwest Arkansas locals, who represented their region against other all-black teams from Russellville, Arkansas to Joplin, Missouri, formed a kind of regional “Negro leagues of football” that is all but forgotten by Arkansans today.

Their story upends common modern conceptions of athletic segregation in the Old South. Not only did this team scrimmage against white players from a then-segregated Fayetteville High School, but they did so on the grounds of the segregated University of Arkansas itself—under the watch and tutelage of white Razorback football coaches. Moreover, the white players often visited Fayetteville’s all-black neighborhood to play there. “That’s awesome to hear about,” Ellis said as he sat in the Razorbacks locker room in August 2015. His alma mater, Fayetteville High School, stood less than a mile away.

Ellis noted Fayetteville High School had, in 1954, become the first high school in Arkansas to publicly announce its desegregation—“I take a little pride in that”—but the fact that African Americans were regularly playing against the all-white Bulldogs decades before that was news to him. He added, “It would be cool to learn more about, obviously.”

Let us begin, then.

Much of the Black Razorbacks’ story comes to us from accounts of their games buried in the archives of the Northwest Arkansas Times, a newspaper run by civic leader Roberta Fulbright—the mother of U.S. senator J. William Fulbright. The most detailed known retrospective comes from Arthur Friedman, a white Fayetteville resident who attended Fayetteville High School in the early 1930s.

He often watched the Black Razorbacks’ scrimmages and games, and considered those times “the highlight of my growing-up years and school,” he wrote in a 1985 Northwest Arkansas Times article.2 Indeed he considered the African-American players, many around his age, as friends.

All-black high schools proliferated in the east, central and south parts of Arkansas, but none existed in its northwest corner. The teenage African Americans in Washington and Benton counties seeking high school education had to move to Fort Smith to attend Lincoln High School, or relocate to more distant all-black schools in towns like Hot Springs.

The lack of educational resources for older black students in northwest Arkansas, in part, reflected the overall scarcity of blacks in the area. But it also represented the state’s allocation of fewer resources to its minority citizens. Consider that in 1928-29, the state spent an average of $35.05 per white student in its public schools compared to $14.38 per black student, according to Educating the Masses: The Unfolding History of Black School Administrators in Arkansas, 1900–2000.3

Some northwest Arkansas teenagers didn’t attend high school at all, or did so sporadically. This may explain why the Black Razorbacks sometimes scheduled early-afternoon weekday games during the school year. Arthur Friedman fondly recalled feigning sickness as a teen to skip school and attend one of those games against the all-black Joplin Pirates. He tried to keep it a secret from his parents, but his father figured out the ruse. He knew Friedman had been sent home for illness but never made it there. His suspicions of Friedman’s playing hooky were confirmed when he saw a recap of the Black Razorbacks’ game in the Fayetteville Daily Democrat the next morning.

Press coverage from white-owned and staffed newspapers, the only newspapers in northwest Arkansas, is a sign the Black Razorbacks benefited from biracial community support. So are reports citing attendance figures of up to 300 people for one of their home games. This is a large number of people in an era when Fayetteville’s overall population was less than 8,000 people, including a few hundred black residents. Certainly a large percentage, and possibly a majority, of the fans watching these all-black games would have been white residents.

In the Jim Crow era in many parts of the Old Confederacy, white spectators did not congregate at black sporting events. But Fayetteville was unusual. First of all, the University of Arkansas attracted more out-of-state professors, graduate students and administrators to this area compared to most parts of the state. Many came to Arkansas from regions outside of the South, places where Jim Crow laws did not so thoroughly permeate society.

Additionally, the town had so few black residents relative to whites that the two races could not, for practical reasons, separate even if that was what they wanted. Black Fayetteville natives often worked for and with whites in janitorial, food, hospitality and other service trades.

Although many black Fayetteville residents voluntarily lived in their own area of town, commonly known by white residents as Tin Cup4, they were not numerous enough to form a self-supporting community. So whites and blacks regularly commingled on the town square and in the poorer neighborhoods of south Fayetteville, and in and around the university.

Occasionally, white city leaders allowed official tribute to the contributions of black residents to their town’s heritage. One such instance came in 1928, when George Ballard, a local black poet, got permission to enter a float into the city’s 100-year anniversary parade on July 4. On this float named “Negroes of the Old South” rode some of the town’s eldest black residents, including “Uncle” Sam Young and Charles Richardson.

For at least a couple years around 1930, Friedman recalled, the Black Razorbacks were allowed to play on Fayetteville High’s Harmon Field. For how many years, specifically, is unknown. Fayetteville High first began using the field—then on the west side of town—in 1925.

In 1927, the city received funds from the New York City-based Harmon Foundation to upgrade the field.5 The son of a “Buffalo Soldiers” officer, the white William Harmon became a real estate developer and one of the nation’s foremost benefactors of African-American artists in the early 1900s. In the 1920s, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to municipal playgrounds across the nation.6 Sometimes the funds were for playgrounds meant to be enjoyed specifically by African-American children. This doesn’t appear to be the case with Fayetteville, though, considering the field’s location away from the black community and its status as the playing field of an all-white high school.

At some point in the early 1930s, “someone came up with a claim that the deed donating the area to the city of Fayetteville for recreational purposes stipulated that Negroes were never to be allowed to use the facilities,” Friedman recalled. And so, blacks were barred. (More than a little irony resides in the fact it was from a field named for, and funded by, one of the nation’s most egalitarian philanthropists.) To prevent a “racial hassle,” as Friedman recalled, the blacks moved to the center of the racetrack at the old Washington County Fairgrounds on Highway 62 West and there established a makeshift football field where they hosted out-of-town teams.

Since some white Fayetteville football fans personally knew the Black Razorbacks, it’s probable they were more likely to want to attend their games. According to Friedman, Fayetteville whites and blacks started playing each other in football in the 1920s. He recalled that as a child he and other white boys growing up on South Street played “weekly contests with the Black Razorbacks second team.” He recalled alternating playing “on the old Arkansas practice field directly east of Garland from the fieldhouse” and a “field strewn with rocks on Willow Avenue in the middle of Tincup [sic].”

On university grounds, the whites often routed the second-teamers, Friedman recalled. Sometimes the Black Razorbacks got so beat up they had to summon a local taxi driver named “Mud” Shelly to take them home. Shelly charged a quarter for the trip back to Tin Cup, making them pile en masse into his car or stand on the automobile’s running boards, Friedman recalled.

Friedman adds that the head football coach of the official Arkansas Razorbacks, Fred Thomsen, occasionally stopped by to scout these scrimmages. As a Nebraska native, Thomsen likely held a more permissive attitude toward interracial competition, and of donating old jerseys to African Americans co-opting his team’s name, than some natives of the South would have had. Nebraska had limited but unenforced Jim Crow rules,7 unlike the more elaborate discrimination laws in more southern Great Plains states and...