We are constantly and importantly reminded of the struggle to desegregate our society. Often, that fight is massive with tumultuous marches and rallies, but there are countless lesser known incidents that are just as significant in bringing about the end of segregation.
Several days ago at Michigan State University in East Lansing, a ceremony was held to induct the 1965-66 football team into the college’s hall of fame. The event centered on the first fully integrated college team in the country that was a national champion for two years in a row. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Coach Duffy Daugherty and the school’s president John Hannah, 20 Black players recruited from the south, in effect, integrated the gridiron.
What Daugherty and Hannah did was labeled an underground railroad movement because of what predecessors had done a century or so before to facilitate the passage of African Americans fleeing bondage. The Spartans scaling the racial barrier in college football complemented the heroic efforts that transpired elsewhere during the Civil Rights Movement.
Writer Eugene Meyer in his blog, praising a new documentary, touched on another even lesser known desegregation moment in the nation’s capital 65 years ago at Glen Echo Amusement Park. As Meyer explains, Blacks had been barred from the park until a coalition of Black students from Howard University and largely Jewish residents of nearby Bannockburn mounted “a successful months-long protest.” Meyer wrote that “After the arrests in 1960 of five Black students who dared to ride the carousel and an unrelenting desegregation campaign, the park owners opened its doors to everyone. Ultimately, the park closed and was purchased by the National Park Service, which still owns and operates a vast variety of activities there for the community at large.”
The annals of American history are full of these often forgotten mini-struggles and to a great extent the battles continue, and the lesson from all this is that the word desegregation may sound old and archaic, there is still much to be done to completely integrate our society.
Nikole Hannah Jones? Isn’t that the woman who wrote the Bullshit history article that all the history experts said was wrong? She fits right in your ” newspaper”.
“Still much to be done to integrate our society?” Like what? You say that but have no recommendations? Black’s like living among one another, well whites like the same thing. Just whine and cryabout nothing.