1958 University of Buffalo Bulls' Stand Against Discrimination

In my research for my blog on Turner Gill, I ran across this story on the 1958 University of Buffalo Bulls football team. I have always been a sucker for stories regarding the stand against things that are adamantly wrong. There was a lot of wrong decades ago against a lot of people (not just black people).



In 1958, the University of Buffalo football team won eight of nine regular-season games and was awarded the Lambert Cup as the best small-school program in the eastern United States. Team co-captains Nick Bottini and Lou Reale received the trophy during a Sunday night broadcast of "The Ed Sullivan Show" and dined that evening in Manhattan's famous Toots Shor's Restaurant.

Days later, the Bulls were invited to face Florida State in the 13th annual Tangerine Bowl in Orlando, Fla. -- still the school's only bowl bid in 102 years of football.

In anticipation of their trip south, players were measured for new sport coats at The Kleinhans Company in downtown Buffalo. But before fabric for the coats ever was cut, the university learned that the team's two African-American players, starting halfback Willie Evans and reserve defensive end Mike Wilson, were not welcome in Orlando.

The Orlando High School Athletic Association, the Tangerine Bowl Stadium's leaseholder, prohibited blacks and whites from playing together. Despite the protestations of the Orlando Elks Lodge, the bowl game's sponsor, the Bulls would be allowed to participate only if Wilson and Evans did not play.

The university and coach Dick Offenhamer left it to the team to decide whether to accept the bid. The players gathered in a basement room of Clark Gymnasium on the Buffalo campus to take a vote. Bottini and Reale held small paper ballots in their hands, but before they could pass them out, the players spontaneously and unanimously rejected the bid.

"We weren't the same team without Willie and Mike," guard Phil Bamford remembers. "Whether they were benchwarmers or stars, we wouldn't have been the same team."

The "Real Reason" that Turner Gill was not chosen as the Auburn University head coach?

I am a reader of a blog called "I Date White" which deals in the life of Eathan and his life in Dallas as a divorced father of 2 sons. I find the blog interesting because his topics deal with interracial relationships.

I read his new entry this morning and had to comment on it and also share it with others. I am not one of those "angry black men" who think that "the man" is keeping us down because I have never in my life been kept down by anyone - black, white, yellow, tan, or red (hope no one took offense to that).

The blog was about Turner Gill, football coach for University of Buffalo Bulls and the reasons why he might have been taken out of the running of the Auburn University coaching job vacated by Tommy Tuberville. He certainly had a better record than Gene Chizik.

Although the "color barrier" of a black SEC coach was already broken by Sylvester Croom who coached Mississippi State University from 2004-2008, in my opinion, would have been a symbol of how the SEC and other southern collegiate conferences have changed over the last decades (as demonstrated in the HBO special "Breaking the Huddle: The Integration of College Football).

If the reasons given in Eathan's blog have any merit to why Coach Gill was not picked for the Auburn job, this is a sad day for college sports.

Check out the blog below and you decide.

http://idatewhite.com/2009/01/01/idw-person-of-the-year-2008/