(11-29-2023 05:36 AM)AssKickingChicken Wrote: JR…In 1968 Alabama needed a new basketball coach. Bryant (who was also AD) called Adolph Rupp (Bryant had once coached at Kentucky) and asked for a recommendation. Rupp said to call CM Newton. In the interview, Newton said he’d take the job if he could recruit blacks. Bryant said he could.
In addition to being a chain smoking alcoholic, my biggest criticism of Bryant (I’m also a Bama fan) is he didn’t try to push for integration earlier. I think it might have helped the state overall but that’s delving too deep into something that probably shouldn’t be discussed here.
C.M. Newton was one of the finest people representing an academic institution for athletics, that I ever knew. He actually recruited me, but academically. He listened, asked appropriate questions, and gave wise responses.
Look, I lived it, and strangely, later in life I would even know Vivian Malone Jones, Shorty Price (the clown of Alabama politics) and some of Wallace's family. And as to Bryant's vices at least he lived in a day when those didn't lead his headlines and he had a few more than just those two. But he couldn't have pushed for it sooner and kept support for what he was doing. Most of the state was rural and they would have fought it tooth and nail politically. Even George Corley (Wallace) knew that. His stance on the matter was purely political, as he showed later in life when he won re-election with the black vote.
I personally knew the man he first took the office from. And he would laugh and say that he was only defeated because he didn't push segregation enough. Sadly, the state advanced only as far as the public would let it. You know the old saw about leadership? The leader is the one out in front of the mob and only by echoing the mobs' sentiments does he stay there. It's a backasswards way to lead anyone, but if the mob is in the majority, it is what politicians do, and if the politician is clever enough, he can get the mob to tone down the rhetoric and accept change before the mob turns on him.
Those times and those sentiments made politicians, mostly trained legal minds, act like the mob to get elected. Those in the process personally knew better. It was like Wallace standing in the schoolhouse door to keep a young Vivian Malone from enrolling at the U of A. It was a staged event for the voters, and nobody in government believed it to be otherwise. The enrollment was going to happen. It was a lot like the advice that Richmond Flowers would give to MLK and members of the NAACP about what was obtainable through protests and when and how to achieve it. Ultimately while King listened, he did what he thought was best. But each tempered the other. All of it was designed either to appease the voters or staged to slowly move them off of the status quo. I grew up in a military family. It was all ridiculous to me, but in retrospect it was an interesting synergy between what needed to happen and slow-walking it to get it to happen once the populace was resigned that it would happen (Federal action), and at a time when most of the populace was embarrassed by the actions of its radicals who acted criminally to try to prevent it. The 60's represented holding onto the bitterness of the past for both the rural whites and African Americans. The 70's finally began to move past the 100-year-old wounds of the nation. Bryant, like the politicians, had to wait for the right moment, and at Alabama it took waiting until after they got their butts kicked by a fully integrated team which played the best athletes it could recruit, instead of the best white athletes it could recruit, to make the supporters realize it was past time to settle the issue. Football meant more than racism! Let that sink in next time people chastise the "SEC! SEC! SEC!" chant. Winning in football, was more important than racism! Somebody should do a dissertation on that one.
Now history can make heroes and villains out of whoever they wish, but a lot of the rhetoric (and some
was just hateful) was about catching the voters up to what had to happen so that when it did happen, resignation to change would outweigh fighting it. In that regard Bryant and Jordan were no different than Patterson, Wallace, and what followed.
While born in the South, I spent my formative years up North and out West. Prejudice was everywhere, it just impacted different groups of people in each of the various locations. Sadly, mistrust and group identity outweigh the good of individual people in too many places, ignorance always pigeonholes people and grows disunity. Now here late in life, I see the manipulation of hatred happening again. It never ends well.
But again, the Federal courts and football through NIL and pay for play are introducing change through sports as they did in the 70's with Title IX. This time it is fighting a system which profited from blacks and whites and others alike, and at the expense of the aforementioned people's health through the lure of professional ball kept them coming and playing in college. That too has been fought tooth and nail but by the institutions instead of mobs. And that too is leading to upheaval in its own way, as it will bring about more consolidation as well as division due to the segregation of schools by earning potential. Oddly ironic isn't it.
