This post of Mike Shatusky’s pick-six from the 1957 Michigan-Georgia game got a nice reaction, including from family members who had never seen the clip before. The response also yielded a question about an all-white Southern team traveling to Ann Arbor, and whether there was the anticipation of a repeat of the 1934 Willis Ward mess. You probably know that tale: Willis Ward, the lone black member of Harry Kipke’s ’34 squad, was benched as U-M succumbed to Georgia Tech’s refusal to play in a game against an African American.
It turns out this issue did indeed come up before Georgia visited in 1957. The Bulldogs fielded a segregated all-white team, while Michigan had at least three black players on the roster including starting back Jim Pace. [That’s Pace in the lead photo, via the U-M Bentley Historical Library]
Buddy Moorehouse, who along with Brian Kruger produced the Black and Blue documentary, the story of the 1934 Willis Ward/Georgia Tech game, recently appeared on NPR’s Stateside to discuss the matter. Moorehouse says then-Michigan athletic director Fritz Crisler nipped it in the bud. Crisler sought and got assurances from Georgia ahead of this game that there’d be no repeat of 1934. UGA would play the game in Ann Arbor despite U-M having black players on its squad. Here’s the full conversation with Moorehouse and it’s worth a listen:
Thanks to Greg Kinney of the U-M Bentley Library for sharing this clip.
Browsing the Michigan Daily, I found this statement on the University’s stance on the game. Rather than get trampled by the elephant in the room (like in 1934), or cancel the game, U-M steered right into it:
The University’s position was articulated in a statement observing it would be “educationally sound to bring young citizens of a Southern state to Michigan to play in an athletic contest with our teams on which Negro and white players are accorded positions on the basis of merit alone, without regard to race or religion.”
Michigan Daily, October 5, 1957
So there you go. My $.02: The handling of this issue in 1957 doesn’t necessarily make Michigan the bastion of racial equity, as you could argue if they really wanted to make a stand they would have canceled the match-up and used the announcement to denounce segregation. And apparently canceling the game was on the table but the U-M Athletics Board nixed this idea in February 1957. A statement from the Board argued that going forward with the game, “[will] make an affirmative contribution toward the betterment of racial relations in the United States.”
The Board concluded the matter thusly, stating, “We believe it would be legally, morally, and socially unjustifiable to cancel this game.”
There are also (fair) questions of why Michigan still only had a few black players on the roster. But net-net, it’s good to see that the memory of the mess, the fallout, and the lessons from 1934 weren’t lost two decades later.
