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All-American in Every Way

© Grimace Boyer

The year was 1916. General Pershing chased Pancho Villa in Mexico. Woodrow Wilson beat out Charles Evans Hughes for reelection. The Brooklyn Robins fell to the Boston Red Sox in the World Series. And on a small athletic field on the campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey (where the game known as 'college football' had been born exactly 20 years earlier,) two men stood, squaring off against one another.

"We've got a lot of Southern boys on this team, and they don't want to play against your man Robeson," said "Greasy" Neale, the coach of the West Virginia Mountaineers.

The other man, Rutgers coach G. Foster Sanford, looked pensive. A year ago, he had benched Robeson in a game against Washington & Lee for the same reason. None of the players wanted to play against someone they deemed 'racially inferior.'

Sizing the situation up, Sanford turned to Neale, smiled, and said plainly: "Well, Grease. If they don't like it, they can go home."

What followed was quite possibly one of the bravest performances in sports history. In an era in which we are quick to label athletes as "heroes," we have lost sight of some of the ones that were. One of those was Paul Robeson, the first black player at Rutgers, the birthplace of college football. He and Brown University's Fritz Pollard were the first to break the color barrier in American college football. He was also the first black All-American.

The game that followed was intense. The West Virginia squad took all of their anger, hatred, and frustration out on Robeson, who stood his ground. His play was crucial in Rutgers' holding their opponents scoreless. At halftime, Neale looked at his locker room full of angry Mountaineers.

"Any player who can take that beating, give as good as he gets, and isn't squealing to the refs, isn't colored. He's a white man. Go out there, play like hell, but give him a break."

The game ended in a 0-0 tie. At game's end, as the West Virginia squad left the field, Paul Robeson was left in the locker room, stripping off his socks. Chunks off flesh fell to the floor with them.

The moral victory was neither the first nor the last of Robeson's life. He would go on to great fame as an actor, singer, and political activist. Born in 1898, the son of a minister, Robeson blazed trails that to this day remain important.

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