The Johnny Bright Incident Was An Indelible Stain on NCAA College Football

  

An isolation and blow-up from a series of photographs in the Des Moines Register clearly show Johnny Bright  being smashed in the face after handing off the ball.  The brutal late his was the third time Bright was knocked unconscious in the first quarter of a 1951 Drake vs. Oklahoma A&M football game

It was the most brutal and flagrant on-field racist attack in NCAA college football history.  The irrefutable evidence was splashed on front pages across the country.  The leading contender for the 1951 Heisman Trophy was severely injured and knocked out of a game causing his undefeated team to lose its only game of the season.  Yet no action was taken against the player who assaulted Johnny Bright, the coach who ordered the hit and drilled the assault in practice, or the administration which apparently approved, defended, and covered up the attack.  In fact, for decade after decade the University denied any wrongdoing and refused to apologize to the wounded player or the team they cheated.  It was not until September 28, 2005 that an Oklahoma State University President acknowledged wrongdoing in a letter to the President Drake University.  The apology came almost 54 years after the assault and 22 years after the victim’s death.

Johnny Bright was born to a working class African American family on June 11, 1930 in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He was raised with three brothers and a sister by a single mother.  At the city’s Central High School, he was an excellent student and lettered in football, basketball, and track and field, leading his football team to a city title in 1945, and helped the basketball team to two state tournament Final Four appearances.  He also played local league softball and was a successful amateur boxer.

Bright was one of the most heavily recruited high school athletes in the nation when he graduated in 1947.  He accepted a scholarship at Big Ten powerhouse Michigan State University (MSU.)  It was not a good fit.  As a freshman he was unhappy with the direction of the football program and disappointed that coaches seemed to actively discourage “wasting time” on academics instead of concentrating on football. 

Bright dropped out of MSU and accepted a track and field scholarship at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa a smaller but prestigious university.  Bright’s scholarship allowed him to try out for the football and basketball squads, but because he was a transfer he was redshirted for football in his freshman year.  During his college career he lettered in all three sports.

Drake competed in the Missouri Valley Conference (MVC), then considered a second tier college conference.  Within the conference Drake was a traditional powerhouse.  Once he became eligible for varsity play in his sophomore year, Bright quickly helped the program step up to a whole new level.  In 1949, his sophomore year he rushed for 975 yards and threw for another 975 to lead the nation in total offense.   The Drake Bulldogs finished their season at 6–2–1.  In Bright’s junior year as a halfback/quarterback he rushed for 1,232 yards and passed for 1,168 yards, setting an NCAA record of 2,400 yards total offense and again led the team to a 6–2–1 record.

Early in his freshman year Bright became the first Black player to compete against MVC rival Oklahoma A&M at Lewis Field in Stillwater.  A&M, which would later become Oklahoma State University, had just, extremely reluctantly, become officially integrated that year.   Bright, then unknown, competed without incident or controversy and led his team to a victory over the Aggies.  In his sophomore year Drake hosted the contest between the two teams and once again Bright romped over the Oklahoma team.

 

In his senior year Johnny Bright was leading all college players in total yardage and both passing and rushing as a half back/quarter back for Drake University and was the odds on favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.

Before the beginning of the 1951 season and Bright’s senior year, he became a genuine national star.  He was rated by sports writers as the hands down favorite to win the Heisman Trophy.  As his team began to roll up victory after victory, Bright became an open target at A&M.  The student newspaper, The Daily O’Collegian, and the Stillwater News Press, reported that Bright was a marked man, and several A&M students were openly bragging that Bright “would not be around at the end of the game.”  A&M Coach Jennings B. Whitworth, an Arkansas native, exhorted his team repeatedly during practices to “get that Nigger!”  He ran special drills featuring his toughest defenseman, tackle Wilbanks Smith practicing how to do just that.

On the day of the game, Bright led a 5-0 team and was the nation’s leading collegiate scorer.  But in the first ten minutes of the A&M game bright was knocked unconscious three times by Smith.  The third time, after Bright handed the ball off to Drake fullback Gene Macomber, and well behind the play, Smith smashed into his face with his elbow, breaking Bright’s jaw.  Despite the pain, Bright was able to stay in the game long enough to complete a 61-yard touchdown pass to Drake halfback Jim Pilkington a few plays later.  But he was unable to play after the first quarter.  For the first time in his college career Bright had less than 100 yards total offense.  Without their star player, the Bulldogs fell to the Aggies 27-10.

No penalty was called on Smith for the flagrantly late hit.  After the brouhaha over the attack reached national proportions the MVC refused to take any action.  A&M President Oliver Willham denied anything happened even after evidence of the incident was published nationwide.  Drake withdrew from the Conference in protest.

The evidence that caught the nation’s attention was a series of photographs taken by Des Moines Register cameramen John Robinson and Don Ultang.  They picked up on rumors sweeping the stadium that day that Bright would be targeted.  They set up their cameras specifically to follow him in play.  In six shots they captured the whole sequence of the play from Bright’s hand-off to Smith’s elbow smashing into his face which ran on the front page of the next day’s paper.  The photos were so dramatic that they also ended up on the cover of Life magazine.  Robinson and Ultang won the Pulitzer Prize for their effort.

The Register followed up with an in-depth investigation by reporter Bob Spiegel who interviewed many spectators at the game who confirmed the threats circulating and quoting comments from an A&M player on the bench which confirmed that the attack had been planned and drilled.

The NCAA investigated the incident but took no action against Smith or A&M, much to Drake’s outrage.  They did tweak rules about late hits and illegal blocking and established a new rule requiring ball handling players wear helmets with face guards.

 

                                                                        Bright showed his jaw wired shut in a press photo 

After the game Bright’s jaw was wired shut.  He most likely also suffered a concussion, although those kinds of head injuries were not well understood at the time.  He was only able to see limited action in the team’s remaining three games, but he earned 70 percent of the yards Drake gained and scored 70 percent of the Bulldogs’ points over the whole season anyway.  The limited action in the last games probably cost Bright the Heisman.  He finished fifth in voting anyway.

Bright was taken fifth in the NFL Draft, picked by the Philadelphia Eagles.  Bright would have been the first Black on the team.  He was concerned that he would not be well received by the many Southerners on the team.  He was not eager, he told people later, to be “football’s Jackie Robinson.” 

Instead after playing in the post-season East-West Shrine Game and the Hula Bowl, Bright unexpectedly accepted an offer from the Calgary Stampeders of the Western Interprovincial Football Union, the precursor to the West Division of the Canadian Football League, leading the Stampeders and the WIFU in rushing with 815 yards his rookie season.  In his third season in Canada, Bright was traded to the Edmonton Eskimos.  He went on to win three Gray’s Cup Championships with the team, be elected CFL’s Most Outstanding Player in 1959, and establish numerous offensive records in a 13 year long pro career.  When he retired in 1964 he was the League’s all-time leading rusher with, had five consecutive 1,000 yard seasons, and led the CFL in rushing four times.  He is a member of the Canadian Football Hall of Fame, the College Football Hall of Fame, the Missouri Valley Conference Hall of Fame, the Edmonton Eskimos Wall of Honour, the Alberta Sports Hall of Fame, and the Des Moines Register Iowa Sports Hall of Fame.

 

After college Bright declined to be the "football Jackie Robinson" in the NFL and instead  played in Canada where he became the Canadian Football League's record setting Most Outstanding Player and a Canadian Football Hall of Fame honoree.

But the football honors were only part of the remarkable legacy of Johnny Bright.

Like most Canadian football players of the era, Bright held down a full time off-season job.  Using his Drake Bachelor of Science degree, Bright became an Edmonton school teacher.  Over the years he turned down several offers from the NFL because it would have meant giving up teaching.  Bright eventually became principal of D.S. Mackenzie and Hillcrest Junior High Schools in Edmonton.  In profound gratitude for the opportunities Canada provided him, Bright became a citizen in 1962.

Bright was frequently asked about what had become known as the Johnny Bright Incident.  He expressed surprisingly little bitterness toward Wilbanks Smith.  While acknowledging that there was “no way it couldn’t have been racially motivated…What I like about the whole deal now, and what I’m smug enough to say, is that getting a broken jaw has somehow made college athletics better. It made the NCAA take a hard look and clean up some things that were bad.”

Bright died of a massive heart attack on December 14, 1983 at the age of only 53, at the University of Alberta Hospital in Edmonton, while undergoing surgery to correct a knee injury suffered during his football career. He was survived by his wife and four children.

 

Bright's other legacy as an outstanding and beloved teacher and principal was honored by this Edmonton school.

In 2006, the football field at Drake Stadium, in Des Moines was named in Bright’s honor.  Four years later his second career was recognized with the opening of Johnny Bright School, a kindergarten through grade 9 facility in Edmonton.

And what of the villains?  There seems to be some kind of karma and rough justice in the case of Coach Whitworth.  He left Oklahoma A&M after four years as head coach in 1954 with a losing 22–27–1 record. Then he went on to coach his alma mater, the University of Alabama from 1955 to 1957 where he posted miserable a 4–24–2 record that included a 14-game losing streak from 1955 to 1956.  He was fired and replaced by the legendary Bear Bryant.  Whitworth could only get an assistant job at Georgia, where he worked for one year.  He died in 1960 at the age of 52.

Wilbanks Smith was said to have had a successful career in engineering and to have been devoted to community service.  He was said to have taken “personal responsibility for the incident” mainly to deflect criticism of his coach, team, and the University but he never expressed any regret at injuring Bright or made any attempt to contact him or make amends. 

With typical grace, Bright shrugged it off, saying he felt “null and void” about Smith, but adding “The thing has been a great influence on my life. My total philosophy of life now is that, whatever a person’s bias and limitation, they deserve respect. Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs.”

  

 

 

 

 

  

Shirley Chisholm Knocked Down the Doors for Black Women in Politics

Vice President Kamala Harris may now preside in the Senate and be able to cast crucial tie-breaking votes. Black women from veteran California Congresswoman Maxine Waters to influential relative newcomers like the Squad’s Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Cori Bush as well as Illinois’s own Lauren Underwood, all owe a debt of gratitude to a pioneer.

On November 5, 1968 a slender and bespectacled early childhood educator became the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress.  It would not be the last of Shirley Chisholm’s political firsts.

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born in Brooklyn, New York, on November 30, 1924 the oldest of four daughters to immigrant parents Charles St. Hill, a factory worker from Guyana, and Ruby Seale St. Hill, a seamstress from Barbados. 

When her mother struggled to raise her children while working, Shirley and two sisters were sent to live with their grandmother in Barbados in 1931.  They lived on her grandmother’s farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church where they attended a one room school.  She later wrote of the experience:

Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason….Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love. I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn’t need the black revolution to tell me that.

The girls returned to New York in 1934 during the depths of the Depression. A star student in New York public schools, in 1940 Shirley was admitted to Girls’ High School in Bedford–Stuyvesant, a highly regarded, integrated school that attracted girls from throughout Brooklyn. From there she went on to Brooklyn College from which she graduated with honors in1946.  During college she was noted for her debating skills.  Her impressed instructors urged her to consider entering politics but she demurred saying that she had a double handicap as both Black and female.  Instead, she became a pre-school teacher.

During the post-war years Shirley met Jamaican immigrant Conrad O. Chisholm, a private detective, of all things and perfect for the film noir era.  The young couple celebrated a festive wedding attended by many in Brooklyn’s large Anglo-Caribbean community.

                Shirley Chisholm as a young woman.

As Shirley Chisholm she continued to work while earning her MA in elementary education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952.  Armed with the graduate degree she became the Director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and then the Hamilton-Madison Child Care Center in Manhattan. And from 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for the New York City Division of Day Care.   

As an authority on issues involving early education and child welfare with a growing reputation, Chisholm was drawn to politics where she hoped to advance those issues and raise the voice of both Blacks and women.  She started as a volunteer with the then still White male dominated Bedford-Stuyvesant Democratic Club when such local clubs were the street-level power centers for New York City Democratic Party.  In the face of racial and gender inequality, she also joined local chapters of the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the National Association of College Women.

Chisholm and precinct voting reports from her 1964 election to the New York State Assembly.

Her political acumen and wide contacts led Chisholm to run for the New York State Assembly in 1964.  She became just the second African American in the Legislature.  She was re-elected to two more terms serving until 1968.  She accomplished much in Albany including opposing an English language literacy test for voting because a person “functions better in his native language is no sign a person is illiterate.” She was a prime mover in getting unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers, and enacting the SEEK program (Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge) which provided disadvantaged students the chance to enter college while receiving intensive remedial education.

She also worked tirelessly to expand Black voice and influence in government.  By early 1966 she was a leader in a push by the statewide Council of Elected Negro Democrats for Black representation on key committees in the Assembly. 

In 1968 a Federal Court ordered redistricting created the newly re-drawn 12th Congressional District centered on Bedford-Stuyvesant which was expected to give Brooklyn its first Black Representative.  After the previous white Representative chose to run in a more favorable District, Chisholm faced two other Black candidates in the April primary—State Senator William S. Thompson and labor union officer Dollie Robertson.  She ran with the campaign slogan “Unbought and Unbossed,” an acknowledgement that the fading remnants of the old Tammany machine which backed Thompson.  She won the nomination.

Her rising star was recognized when she was elected as the Democratic National Committeewoman from New York State and attended the notoriously raucous Democratic National Convention in Chicago that August, her first introduction to the national stage.

Despite this, political odds makers rated her as an underdog in the November General Election where she faced a much better known opponent, James Farmer, the Director of the militant civil rights organization the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and a vocal proponent of the rising Black Power movement.  Farmer ran on the Liberal Party ticket and had the support of the New York Republicans who still had the allegiance of many older Blacks who remembered it as the party of Lincoln.  But Chisholm crushed him in the election by a two to one margin thanks to her deep roots in the community and the perception that Farmer, a Southerner, was an interloper.

Chisholm celebrated her election to Congress with supporters in Brooklyn.

Congress did not exactly open its arms to the freshman member from New York.  She was assigned to the Agriculture Committee which she considered was an insult to her urban district.  But a close friend and supporter Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, the Hassidic Lubavitcher Rebbe, suggested that she use to committee to expand food assistance to the poor.  She then partnered across the aisle with Republican Senator Robert Dole of Kansas to expand the Food Stamp program and later played a critical role in the creation of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) program.

That kind of political practicality came into play in her second term when she voted for Hale Boggs of Louisiana for Democratic House Majority Leader over John Connors of Michigan. Despite affection for Connors, she could count votes and knew there was no way he could then be elected.  She supported Boggs over a symbolic protest.  The House leadership rewarded her with an appointment to the Education and Labor Committee where she felt she could best represent her constituents.

Chisholm was a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1971 and the same year, she was also a founding member of the National Women’s Political Caucus.

Chisholm's presidential bid announcement rally at  the Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, New York in January 1971.

Late in 1971 Chisholm decided to launch a long-shot campaign for the 1972 Democratic Presidential nomination as a strong opponent of the Vietnam War and critic of military spending as well as an unabashed supporter of women’s rights and for social justice.  At the Brooklyn announcement of her bid she called for a “bloodless revolution” at the Democratic Convention in Miami.  She told her supporters:

I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of this country, although I am a woman and equally proud of that. I am the candidate of the people and my presence before you symbolizes a new era in American political history.

She became the first Black to seek a major party nomination for President and the first woman to run as a Democrat.  The political establishment, including most of the male members of the Congressional Black Caucus, was hostile or indifferent.  The press regarded her as a merely symbolic candidate and largely ignored her campaign.  Without deep pocket donors her campaign was cash strapped from the beginning—she raised and spent only about $300,000 over the entire primary and caucus season and was only able to get on primary ballots in 14 states and could not even afford to visit many of them.  Yet she plunged ahead.

It was a complex and crowded field led by anti-war Senator George McGovern of South Dakota and by the Happy Warrior, former Vice President and 1968 nominee Hubert Humphrey.  Alabama Governor and ardent segregationist George Wallace was running this time as a Democrat and was expected to sweep much of the South and pick off votes of disgruntled working class Whites in Rust Belt States.  Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the Senator from Boing, was running as a pro-war moderate liberal and North Carolina Governor Terry Sanford hoped to woo moderate Southerners.

Chisholm set tongues wagging when she visited Wallace in his hospital room after he was shot in an assassination attempt in May.  She cited common humanity and noted that the African-American community had lost leaders to assassins.  None-the-less, she was heavily criticized by many Black leaders.

It was only after Wallace was shot that Chisholm was given the same Secret Service protection as the other candidates despite at least three credible threats on her life.  Prior to that her husband was her personal bodyguard.

                        A poster from Chisholm's Presidential campaign recycled the slogan from her first Congressional campaign.

She was blocked from participating in televised primary debates, and after taking legal action, was permitted to make just one broadcast speech.

Chisholm won the largely meaningless New Jersey Primary “Beauty Contest” but gained only two delegates because she did not field a full slate of Convention Delegates.  Overall, she won 28 delegates during the primaries process and garnered 430,703 votes, 2.7% of nearly 16 million cast and represented seventh place among the Democratic contenders.

At the Convention in July it was apparent that McGovern was the likely winner, but Humphrey still hoped to block his nomination.  He released his Black delegates to vote for Chisholm if they wished.  Mississippi had two contesting delegations—Regulars who supported Wallace or Jackson, and “Loyalists” mostly leaning for McGovern.  The Loyalists won the credential fight but some McGovern supporters became angry at public statement of the candidate which seemed to back pedal on his pledge to withdraw from Vietnam.  She ended up with 12 of the state’s 25 votes.  Mostly Black uncommitted delegates from Louisiana cast 18.5 of its 44 votes for Chisholm.  In the end, Chisholm won 152 delegate votes and finished fourth in the rollcall balloting.

Still, her historic bid was not a failure.  She declared that she ran, “in spite of hopeless odds ... to demonstrate the sheer will and refusal to accept the status quo.”

It was not a Democratic year anyway.  McGovern stumbled to the worst Electoral College drubbing in history.  Of course, Richard Nixon’s totally unnecessary spying on the Democratic National Committee and assorted dirty tricks soon took down his Presidency.

Chisholm returned to the House where she continued to pile up achievements.  She worked to improve opportunities for inner-city residents, was a vocal opponent of the Draft and supported spending increases for education, health care and other social services offset by reductions in military spending.  She also worked for the revocation of the Post-war Red Scare era McCarran Act of 1950 which authorized some of the worst domestic political repression in American history as well as the establishment of detainment camps that were originally intended for Communists and leftists but which the Nixon administration was considering using to detain Black militants, student radicals, and anti-war leaders.  During the Jimmy Carter administration, she advocated for equal treatment of Haitian refugees with anti-Castro Cubans.

In 1977 Chisholm was elected to the House Leadership as Secretary of the House Democratic Caucus, a position that had become reserved for a woman. 

But the same year her long time marriage to Conrad Chisholm ended in divorce.  A year later she married Arthur Hardwick, Jr., a former New York State Assemblyman whom Chisholm had known when they both served in that body and who was then a Buffalo liquor store owner.

Chisholm’s drive to secure a minimum wage for domestic workers finally paid off, in part because of her long ago kindness to George Wallace.  Wallace had returned to the Governor’s Mansion in Montgomery still wracked with pain from his injuries and confined to a wheelchair.  He also pursued a new policy of racial reconciliation with the appointment of Blacks to key positions on his staff and in the administration.  Wallace used his considerable influence with several Southern members of Congress to convince them to support Chisholm’s bill.

Her husband was seriously injured in an auto accident and Chisholm was dismayed by the disarray of liberal politics in the early years of the Reagan Revolution.  She announced her retirement after her seventh term, leaving Congress after the 1982 election.

                   Chisholm in maturity.

She taught at Mount Holyoke College as the Purington Chair at the prestigious women’s college, a position previously held by W. H. Auden, Bertrand Russell, and Arna Bontemps. She remained active in politics and co-founded the National Political Congress of Black Women and African-American Women for Reproductive Freedom.  She supported Jesse Jackson’s two campaigns for the Democratic Presidential nomination.  She also spoke widely on college campuses.

Arthur Hardwick died in 1986 and her own health began to decline.  In 1991 she retired to Florida.  In 1993, President Bill Clinton nominated her to be Ambassador to Jamaica, but she declined due to poor health. The same year she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

Chisholm died on January 1, 2005, in Ormond Beach, Florida after suffering several strokes.  She was buried in the Oakwood Mausoleum at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Buffalo next to her second husband.

                                          Chisholm's First Class Forever Stamp from the Postal Service's Black Heritage series.

Chisholm’s posthumous honors included being portrayed on a United States Postal Service Black Heritage First Class stamp in 2014 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.  New York Governor Andrew Cuomo dedicated the Shirley Chisholm State Park, along 3.5 miles of the Jamaica Bay coastline.  In a unique monument erected in New York City’s Prospect Park, the first woman to be so honored by She Built NYC, a public-arts campaign that honors pioneering women by installing monuments that “celebrate their extraordinary contributions to the city and beyond.”

 

Chisholm's Prospect Park monument in Brooklyn.

But Chisholm’s real legacy was the doors she opened.  Beneficiaries include Geraldine Ferrero, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and many of the women elected in the 2018 Blue Wave election and since.