Racism, Activism, and Integrity in College Football: The Bates Must Play Movement

Abstract

This book focuses on the massive student protest at New York University (NYU) in 1940–41 against the administration's refusal to allow the football team's African American star, Leonard Bates, to accompany it to play at the University of Missouri, which did not admit Blacks. It was standard practice for northern universities to withdraw their Black athletes from competitions at southern schools. If the southern school requested the withdrawal when they were the visiting team up north, their northern opponent often complied. In this case study, Donald Spivey provides insight into racist practices in college sports and how a student movement challenged them in the period and emerged as a potent force.Spivey's interviews with Bates, conducted in the 1980s, and later with six members of the “Bates 7,” the NYU students who initiated the challenge to the administration's decision to comply with southern/border state Jim Crow requirements, are an important feature of his work. Bates discusses his youth in Depression-era Harlem, supporting his siblings and mother by toiling on the docks, and his adjustment to college life and sports. The Bates 7 activists explain how they waged a grassroots campaign against racism in a period before the rise of a mass civil rights movement. The initiator was African American; most of the other six appear to have been Jewish or of Jewish background. The university imposed severe punishment on the seven activists, suspending them for the remaining three months of the spring 1941 semester.The student protestors used a wide range of innovative tactics, many of which were adopted by campus activists a quarter of a century later. These included mass leafleting; petitions with vast numbers of signatures; rallies attended by as many as 3,000 persons; picketing; and a sit-in at a dean's office. Buttons with the slogan “Bates Must Play” were distributed. Protesters coined poignant slogans, such as “No Missouri Compromise,” drawing a parallel between the NYU administration's complicity in maintaining the color line and Congress's unwillingness to acknowledge the immorality of slavery in 1820. The protestors emphasized that northern universities helped solidify Jim Crow by scheduling games with segregated southern and border state universities. The “Bates Must Play” movement persisted for several months after the November 2, 1940, NYU-Missouri game, focusing attention on the administration's withdrawal of its African American athletes from track meets and basketball games below the Mason-Dixon line.Spivey demonstrates the larger impact of the protestors’ campaign by noting the support it received from prominent Americans. These included Eleanor Roosevelt; Paul Robeson, Black activist and world-renowned singer and actor; esteemed Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas; Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the 1947 Journey of Reconciliation; labor leaders Mike Quill and Joe Curran; and Jewish football star Benny Friedman.Spivey emphasizes that the African American press provided considerably more coverage of the protests than mainstream newspapers. He does report that New York Mirror sportswriter Dan Parker was an exception in backing the protests. Spivey should also credit Jesse Abramson of the New York Herald Tribune, who during the Bates campaign blasted the NYU administration for “being dictated to by Southern schools” for more than a decade.The author could contextualize this work by giving attention to the bitter conflicts between students and administrators at New York colleges and universities in the 1930s, which doubtless energized many of NYU's protestors. For example, Columbia president Nicholas Murray Butler expelled undergraduate Robert Burke in 1936 for leading a picket line challenging his decision to send a delegate to celebrate the 550th anniversary of Nazi Germany's Heidelberg University, a carefully orchestrated Hitler regime propaganda festival. The expulsion precipitated a wave of student demonstrations and rallies at Columbia the next semester. Boas was active in the unsuccessful campaign to have Burke's expulsion rescinded. In 1934, Butler also fired instructor Jerome Klein for circulating a petition protesting Columbia's invitation to Nazi Germany's ambassador to deliver a speech extolling Hitler's policies. The academic careers of both men were permanently destroyed. To this day, Columbia's administration refuses to issue an apology, despite repeated appeals for it to do so.Moreover, Spivey might have compared NYU students’ fierce challenge to their administration's capitulation to Jim Crow with the lack of response from students at Boston College. The Jesuit institution barred its African American player, Lou Montgomery, from participating in the 1941 Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against Tennessee and even from games against southern schools in Boston. The Sugar Bowl took place just two months after the NYU-Missouri contest.Nevertheless, Spivey should be congratulated for bringing to light an important but neglected episode in civil rights history and for locating and interviewing nearly all the Bates 7 and Bates himself. He describes this process in the book, which finally led to the NYU administration acknowledging wrongdoing in 2001.