Since black football players Jim Brown, Ernie Davis and Floyd Little achieved greatness wearing orange from 1954-1966, Syracuse University has often been viewed as progressive in its treatment of minority athletes.

But life was not always easy for black athletes. Nine SU football players-Greg Allen, A. Alif Muhammed, Clarence ‘Bucky’ McGill, Duane Walker, John Lobon, Ron Womack, Dana Harrell, Richard Bulls and John Godbolt-boycotted the 1970 season in racial protest.

The school invited the players back to campus in September 2005 for the first time to discuss their struggle as part of the weekend-long minority event, ‘Coming Back Together 8.’ Yet the forum was publicized poorly and few people attended.

After 36 years, the Syracuse athletic department will finally honor the nine players at the Carrier Dome during halftime of Saturday’s game against Louisville.

The players’ protest is largely unknown on campus today and details remain fuzzy.

In a nutshell, the black players felt football coach Floyd ‘Ben’ Schwartzwalder and his coaching staff didn’t give them equal academic support and medical care and wanted the university to hire a black assistant coach.

Even though the school conceded to hiring a black coach, the players still planned to sit out the season after they refused to sign an agreement written by the university justifying their suspension for missing spring practice.

The black players were allowed back on the team to play in the first home game, but the fans were not quiet. A peaceful protest outside the stadium turned into a riot on Marshall Street.

The players decided to boycott the rest of the season, realizing their reinstatement was disingenuous. Many of them risked chances at professional football, but their efforts are now going to be acknowledged.

It is important to recognize the historical context of the boycott to fully understand the story. The Vietnam War was reaching its apex, and SU was at the forefront of college protests. After the Cambodian Incursion, students feared a spike in draft calls. Students across campus staged a strike in May-the same week several Kent State students were killed by the National Guard-and the semester ended early.

The football boycott stemmed from a string of protests, black and white, around the country.

‘We thought it was crazy and that it had never been done before, but we really had to make a statement,’ said Bulls, who transferred from SU in 1972. ‘Coming out of high school with so many hopes and promises playing for a major program, to find out we weren’t being evaluated purely on talent was unnerving because we were all really young.’

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The story started in the spring of 1969 when the nine athletes first accused Schwartzwalder of discriminatory practices and pressed for the hiring of a black assistant coach.

‘We really wanted a coach who could understand our needs, because there have never been so many black athletes at one time at Syracuse,’ Muhammed said. ‘There had never been six African-American athletes recruited at one time before our class.’

After a successful season, the players began to feel stonewalled. Although they were promised a black coach would be hired, there appeared to be no progress. Schwartzwalder seemed unyielding to their requests.

Schwartzwalder brought former Syracuse star Floyd Little in to help get spring practice underway in 1970. Little, who is black, was critical of some of the players in a story that appeared in The Daily Orange on April 14. Soon after his comments were published, the players stopped attending spring practices and vowed not to return until a black coach was hired.

‘We thought we were making a statement to let the football program and the University know that we were serious at first,’ Allen said. ‘We had no idea how much the thing would escalate.’

Schwartzwalder was a Syracuse legend. He coached Orangemen stars like Little, Brown, Davis and Jim Nance. He led SU to its only national championship in 1959. The old coach was beloved by the entire community, and everyone was looking forward to his 22nd season at the helm.

But there was another side to Schwartzwalder. He was a brash West Virginian, a paratrooper in World War II who jumped on D-Day, rose to the rank of major and even won a Purple Heart in his career. He was from a different time, and was very set in his ways.

David Bennett, a history professor in the Maxwell School of Public Citizenship since the 1960s, said he did not think Schwartzwalder was racist, but an ‘old-fashioned American patriot’ because of his military days.

‘He coached so many great black players, I think he thought of himself as a pioneer for black student-athletes,’ Bennett said. ‘This was a tragic culture clash between a legendary coach who thought of himself as a true patriot and a group of motivated athletes from another era.’

The players saw him as an unyielding old-time football coach too stubborn to change the way he dealt with black players.

‘He was brought up with a different set of values than we were,’ Bulls said. ‘He was not worried about being politically correct. It was his way or the highway, and he had absolutely no racial sensitivity at all.’

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Several weeks before fall practice was scheduled to start in August 1970, Muhammed, Walker and Harrell took their complaints to the Human Rights Commission of Syracuse and Onondaga County and filed a grievance.

Needing guidance, they turned to SU graduate student George Moody for assistance. He became the boycotting players’ representative for the rest of the protest.

‘Our situation began to engross the entire African-American community on campus and in the area,’ McGill said. ‘He was a sharp mind, and bouncing the information off him was a real help.’

Under pressure from Chancellor Corbally that summer, Schwartzwalder hired a black assistant, and the players were ready to return. Unfortunately, the team was not ready for them.

After returning for one day, Schwartzwalder individually informed the players they had all been suspended for sitting out spring practice four months earlier. Athletic Director James Decker stood behind the coach and agreed with the decision.

‘It was the last straw because all we were doing was responding to the umpteenth broken promise,’ Muhammed said. ‘It was like, ‘What is this?’ They needed to do something to show us some respect.’

Three days later, Corbally forced Schwartzwalder to take back the suspended athletes on the condition they signed a six-point agreement justifying the suspension. The statement said the players were ready to recommit to the team and understood their spots on the depth chart would be affected.

With the opportunity to play sitting in front of them, the players were faced with a difficult decision. They wanted to get back on the field but realized the statement was ridiculous. Nevertheless, Allen said they were ready to take the offer until they learned the rest of the team did not have to sign.

‘It’s easy to say now we ruined our chance at the NFL,’ Muhammed said. ‘Back then we thought we may lose our bonus money, but we thought we were still good enough to play. Things just didn’t work out that way.’

Fall practice came and went, and the team began preparing for the home-opener against Kansas. About a week before the game, the players delivered a proposal for their reinstatement to Corbally.

The proposal laid out a list of expectations for the university, including the hiring of more black professionals, authorizing an investigation of the university’s racism and appointing an advisory committee to ensure racial equity.

Corbally did reinstate the boycotters five days later, apparently on the recommendation of Schwartzwalder and a team vote. Corbally also announced the formation of a 12-member committee to investigate the players’ claims of racism.

The announcement came the same day Syracuse mayor Lee Alexander threatened cancellation of the Kansas game, and possibly the entire football season because demonstrators were rumored to disrupt the game if the black players were not reinstated.

The vote was tainted, and many of the white players thought they were forced to take the black players back. They voted on the statement, ‘We will take the suspended players back in order to play this week’s game.’

The next day, some white players threatened to stage a boycott of their own if the black players were reinstated.

‘The other guys didn’t quite understand how we could put our concerns as African-American football players over the general team,’ Allen said. ‘They had more difficulty with it than the rest of the student body or anyone else.’

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As black community members continued planning their protest at the game, SU students began organizing a protest of their own. The day before the game, student leaders from the Student Association and the Black Student Union called for a student boycott of the game and Schwartzwalder’s immediate resignation.

But the city still feared protests and violence at the game and sent nearly 100 policemen to Archbold Stadium. For more than an hour before the game, 300 students, 200 of them black, picketed outside all entrances to the stadium. Handing out pamphlets about the situation, the picketers asked ticket holders why they ‘supported a racist institution.’

Only 25,000 of the expected 32,000 attended the game, and after it started, the picketers moved to Marshall Street. The peaceful protest became a riot, and Syracuse police came with pepper gas. Six people were eventually arrested.

‘There were many students here who remembered what it was like to be on campus during the strike,’ Bennett said. ‘This was a chance to recapture some of that excitement.’

The black players announced they would continue their boycott after the game, calling their reinstatement ‘mythical.’

‘We weren’t really sure because we all had our dreams and expectations,’ McGill said. ‘But once we made a commitment we were going to be strong we knew we had to go through with it to the end.’

It took 10 months of testimony, but the players were finally vindicated in December when the committee published a 38-page report calling the ordeal ‘an act of institutional racism unworthy of a great university.’

The report recommended that the boycotting players should not be punished for their actions, the athletic administrative board should be replaced and a new code should be written outlining basic rights for all SU athletes.

‘We thought we may be blacklisted by what happened,’ Bulls said. ‘We were worried this may affect us later in our professional careers, but I am very humbled by this honor. We never thought it would come this far.’

The boycott did not affect their professional lives. While none made the NFL, all nine have become successful in careers ranging from business to education. But they will always remember taking part in a monumental movement that may have been just a speck in the course of history, but forever changed the athletic program at SU.

‘We didn’t know what to do, we were kids,’ Muhammed said. ‘We were 18, 19 yearsold in college, but we wanted change. We wanted change for the better.’

Published on October 18, 2006 at 12:00 pm