![]() ![]() “The South stands at Armageddon,” he ranted in a telegram. He urged Georgia’s Board of Regents to prevent the state university from taking the field. When the States' Rights Council of Georgia, co-founded by Griffin, called on Georgia Tech to boycott the Sugar Bowl rather than play an integrated team, the governor turned the game into a political football. “No matter how much the Supreme Court seeks to sugarcoat its bitter pill of tyranny, the people of Georgia and the South will not swallow it,” he declared. Board of Education of Topeka ruling, Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin vowed to defend his state’s segregationist policies. READ MORE: Civil Rights Movement Georgia Governor Tries to Bar Georgia Tech from Playing Jones, played in New Orleans against Loyola University.īut when Sugar Bowl officials agreed to Grier’s participation as well as Pittsburgh’s demand that its 10,000-seat section in Tulane Stadium be integrated, one segregationist governor ignited a national controversy. That month, three Black starters from the University of San Francisco basketball team, including future Hall of Famers Bill Russell and K.C. Segregation extended to the stands of Tulane Stadium, where white fans bore tickets stipulating they were “issued for a person of the Caucasian Race.”Īlthough colleges from the North routinely benched Black players when they traveled to the Deep South, change was coming slowly by December 1955. Instead, Black players watched the action from the press box and were barred from practicing or staying in the same hotel as their teammates. ![]() The 22-year-old Black fullback with a balky knee was thrust into the national spotlight not because of his football exploits, but the color of his skin. At a time when many Southern states barred African Americans from attending public universities, officials in segregated New Orleans invited Grier’s team to play Georgia Tech in the 1956 Sugar Bowl.Īlthough integrated teams had received invitations to the bowl game before, no Black player had played in the contest since its 1935 inception. ![]() The news stories capturing the country’s attention in early December 1955 did not concern Rosa Parks, however, but University of Pittsburgh football player Bobby Grier. The day after a Black woman refused to yield her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, America’s latest battle over civil rights garnered front-page headlines. ![]()
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