Fifty years and 20-hour bus rides since Southern University and Athens shared an exchange





I watched a documentary a while back when Alabama played USC. Alabama's stadium is in what is/was considered a black neighborhood back then. Black people were not allowed in the stadium and watched games from outside. Well as USC was coming in to the stadium some of the white saw all these black players and said:

"Wow who are we playing Grambling."

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When I read articles like this I get really angry when I hear young black kids speaking negatively of HBCUs. These kids fail to realize that if it were not for an HBCU they would not be at these white institutions.
 
The Founder said:
I watched a documentary a while back when Alabama played USC. Alabama's stadium is in what is/was considered a black neighborhood back then. Black people were not allowed in the stadium and watched games from outside. Well as USC was coming in to the stadium some of the white saw all these black players and said:

"Wow who are we playing Grambling."

--------------------------------

When I read articles like this I get really angry when I hear young black kids speaking negatively of HBCUs. These kids fail to realize that if it were not for an HBCU they would not be at these white institutions.
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I was just telling that story today to an associate.......lol
 
The Founder said:
When I read articles like this I get really angry when I hear young black kids speaking negatively of HBCUs. These kids fail to realize that if it were not for an HBCU they would not be at these white institutions.
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The questions one should ask ones self is:
1. Why are they speaking negatively of an entity they reportedly have no knowledge of (historical)?
2. Why are descendants of color not being taught the history, value, and legacy of HBCUs?
3. What are HBCUs doing today to distance themselves from the old paradigm of "we all dey got so dey gotta' come to us?"
4. See #3 above (marketing and outreach), are HBCUs joining the fray of many others who are proactively recruiting the brightest and best?
5. See #4 above (financial support), do HBCUs have the financial backing in their recruiting departments?
6. See #5 above (lol), exactly where/who are HBCUs targeting? Upper echelon? Avg students? Suburban students? Country students? Urban students? What demographic are they targeting?

It's not 1960 anymore so the 1960 mentality should've died a loooooooooong time ago, imho. In order to be competitive, one has to recruit competitively, imho.

What I find highly perplexing today, and a lot of us are even a product of "it," is how a young man of color, who is physically and somewhat lol mentally gifted, desires to associate himself and perform for someone who refers to him as "you're just like a son to me" lol but doesn't look like him in skin complexion. I guess I'd be singing the "you're like a son to me song" too if my 2.3million $ a year job w/ plush lifestyle for self and self's family depended upon landing the big strong buck's physical prowess and ability to skirt the APR compliance for 4-5 yrs. :)
 
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Rayfield Wright came out of high school around 1963 out of Griffin, Georgia and went to Fort Valley State. He is in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and won two Super Bowl rings with the Cowboys. I will ask my relatives, who went to school with Wright and his brother (who played college basketball with Rayfield), if they played against the schools in Athens. Rayfield Wright was also drafted by the Cincinnati Royals of the NBA. I know some of his family members quite well.

If the guys ran track and made it to the state meet, they would have gone to Fort Valley to compete. It was where the state meet was for Black athletes until the late 1960s.

A cousin of ours worked in Vidalia when Mel Blount was in high school.

There are a lot of stories that 24 hours in a day would not be long enough to tell.
 
Bewildered said:
The questions one should ask ones self is:
1. Why are they speaking negatively of an entity they reportedly have no knowledge of (historical)?
2. Why are descendants of color not being taught the history, value, and legacy of HBCUs?
3. What are HBCUs doing today to distance themselves from the old paradigm of "we all dey got so dey gotta' come to us?"
4. See #3 above (marketing and outreach), are HBCUs joining the fray of many others who are proactively recruiting the brightest and best?
5. See #4 above (financial support), do HBCUs have the financial backing in their recruiting departments?
6. See #5 above (lol), exactly where/who are HBCUs targeting? Upper echelon? Avg students? Suburban students? Country students? Urban students? What demographic are they targeting?

It's not 1960 anymore so the 1960 mentality should've died a loooooooooong time ago, imho. In order to be competitive, one has to recruit competitively, imho.

What I find highly perplexing today, and a lot of us are even a product of "it," is how a young man of color, who is physically and somewhat lol mentally gifted, desires to associate himself and perform for someone who refers to him as "you're just like a son to me" lol but doesn't look like him in skin complexion. I guess I'd be singing the "you're like a son to me song" too if my 2.3million $ a year job w/ plush lifestyle for self and self's family depended upon landing the big strong buck's physical prowess and ability to skirt the APR compliance for 4-5 yrs. :)
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Let me partially take a stab at numbers three, four and five. Our schools are more than capable and competent when it comes to academics. A person can go to our schools and get a strong and sound academic background. It has been proven for over 150 years. I will give HBCU an A+ when it comes to academics. HOWEVER, I will give our schools a big fat red F when it comes to telling our story. Predominately White institutions generally do a very good to excellent job to telling their stories. We do not in my opinion.

Sure, there are exceptions. Grambling with Robinson, Nicholson and Jones had and executed a plan, but too often we wait for the major media outlets to do the reports. This is a mistake, a huge mistake.

Last week I was listening to Derrick Boazman on Atlanta's WAOK during the afternoon drive time. The subject of HBCUs came up late in the program. Callers talked about the benefit of our schools, but a few said that we (our schools) do not tell our own stories.
 
EB said:
Let me partially take a stab at numbers three, four and five. Our schools are more than capable and competent when it comes to academics. A person can go to our schools and get a strong and sound academic background. It has been proven for over 150 years. I will give HBCU an A+ when it comes to academics. HOWEVER, I will give our schools a big fat red F when it comes to telling our story. Predominately White institutions generally do a very good to excellent job to telling their stories. We do not in my opinion.

Sure, there are exceptions. Grambling with Robinson, Nicholson and Jones had and executed a plan, but too often we wait for the major media outlets to do the reports. This is a mistake, a huge mistake.

Last week I was listening to Derrick Boazman on Atlanta's WAOK during the afternoon drive time. The subject of HBCUs came up late in the program. Callers talked about the benefit of our schools, but a few said that we (our schools) do not tell our own stories.
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I don't have to look far, unfortunately, to understand this situation because it was I who was educated by bearkats, longhorns, aggies, lumberjacks, owls, mustangs, and cougars primarily and exclusively from grades K-12. Not one panther, not one tiger, not one delta devil, not one not one not one. And that's inclusive of me growing up w/in a 37.5 mile distance from PVAMU's front door. I knew about PVAMU from listening and walking the campus when a young kid - father/uncle attended, aunts attended. I knew about sTu - cousins attended. But those old SWC/Big 8 folks embedded in me their persona, along w/ academic foundation, for following and desiring to be a part of the Big 8 or SWC. As I look around these parts today, among physically and mentally gifted young men and women, I see the same exact situation occurring - esp w/in my family (2nd levelers) smh.

Speaking for the PVAMU phenomena locally (exclusively), I don't think the local kids have a negative view of the school and I'm not kidding w/ my next statement... Approximately 8 days ago (2 Weds ago), a kid asked me about the paraph I had on (PVAMU) and asked me wasn't PVAMU near San Antonio. We're 42.3 miles from PVAMU's front door. The bball HSer thought PVAMU was near San Antonio. :( I'm not kidding. I'm not joking. A lot of these new-age new millen kids are NOT being educated about HBCUs local or afar in their school districts where AAs do not exist in those admin/instr positions. And it doesn't help when you have a school that WAS committed to recruiting out of its footprint. ::read::
 
The Founder said:
I watched a documentary a while back when Alabama played USC. Alabama's stadium is in what is/was considered a black neighborhood back then. Black people were not allowed in the stadium and watched games from outside. Well as USC was coming in to the stadium some of the white saw all these black players and said:

"Wow who are we playing Grambling."

--------------------------------

When I read articles like this I get really angry when I hear young black kids speaking negatively of HBCUs. These kids fail to realize that if it were not for an HBCU they would not be at these white institutions.
Click to expand...


That's funny because the story that I was always told is that Bear Bryant was trying to get Alabama to recruit black athletes and was having a hard time getting the old establishment to buy into the idea. So he schedule a game against USC knowing full well that they had the superior talent and he used that to convince them that either they let him recruit black players or they would be left behind.

There's even a comedian that was on Alabama team at the time that tells the story about how USC running back were running circles around them. I'm still trying to find a copy of it. It's the funniest shit I've ever heard.


The epic beatdown of the Alabama Crimson Tide by the USC Trojans at Birmingham’s Legion Field on Sept. 12, 1970, is the subject of a new documentary on the Showtime premium cable network.

That historic 1970 game -- in which John McKay’s visiting Trojans, with their all-black starting backfield, pounded Paul “Bear” Bryant’s all-white Crimson Tide 42-21 -- is viewed by many sports historians as the defining moment in Southern college football history that accelerated the integration of the Alabama football program.


Wilbur Jackson, the first black to sign a football scholarship at Alabama, was a freshman and ineligible to play in 1970, but a year later, John Mitchell, the first black to dress out and start for the Tide, helped lead Alabama to a 17-10 upset of USC in Los Angeles.

http://www.al.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2013/11/historic_1970_alabama-usc_foot.html
 
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It did not, as one of Bryant’s former players, Jerry Claiborne, famously said, “do more for integration in Alabama in sixty minutes than Martin Luther King, Jr. did in 20 years.” But it did, as one Southern Cal player points out in Against the Tide, give the University of Alabama some religion when it came to recruiting football players. The next year, the Crimson Tide had a black varsity player: John Mitchell. Mitchell, the first black player to start for Alabama, later became the first black assistant coach at the University. Stories like Mitchell's began to crop up elsewhere in the South: Ozzie Newsome, Alabama’s All-American receiver in the mid-1970s, went on to become the first black general manager in the National Football League, and Sylvester Croom, a center, one of the first black stars Bryant recruited after the SEC game, later returned as an assistant coach at Alabama and, in 2004, became, at Mississippi State, the first black coach in the SEC.
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http://www.theatlantic.com/entertai...ege-football-didnt-happen-in-one-game/281557/
 
It's a real easy story to tell but never gets told....the pwcs bought the best players plain and simple in that era...they recruited the black coaches and gave them token spots on staff just to recruit black kids...plain and simple.....

It's still done to this day under different guidances

And also, you cannot recruit from inner city anymore as suburbs are where the numbers are...problem is though blacks don't hold key positions in these suburban high schools so the kids are fed diversity from day 1 and steered towards that from the top
 
the band fan said:
..the pwcs bought the best players plain and simple in that era...they recruited the black coaches and gave them token spots on staff just to recruit black kids...plain and simple.....

It's still done to this day under different guidances

And also, you cannot recruit from inner city anymore as suburbs are where the numbers are...problem is though blacks don't hold key positions in these suburban high schools so the kids are fed diversity from day 1 and steered towards that from the top
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+1. Saw it. Lived it. Still seeing it.
 



The Founder said:
I watched a documentary a while back when Alabama played USC. Alabama's stadium is in what is/was considered a black neighborhood back then. Black people were not allowed in the stadium and watched games from outside. Well as USC was coming in to the stadium some of the white saw all these black players and said:

"Wow who are we playing Grambling."

--------------------------------

When I read articles like this I get really angry when I hear young black kids speaking negatively of HBCUs. These kids fail to realize that if it were not for an HBCU they would not be at these white institutions.
Click to expand...

Around that time Bryant said that he was going to get bigger, stronger and faster players. Clarence Davis, a USC running back, said that Bryant told him that he was not going to let a player get out of the state. Davis was born in Alabama before moving to New York and later California. He won a Super Bowl with the Oakland Raiders under John Madden.

In 1971 Alabama went 11-0 with a win over USC in Los Angeles. In the Orange Bowl, Nebraska defeated Alabama 38-6. In 1977 Nebraska won in Lincoln in a back and for game against a senior named Ozzie Newsome and Alabama. The next year Nebraska came to Birmingham and lost 20-3. The game was not that close. Some consider Alabama the team of the decade of the 1970s for college football.

In the 1980 Sugar Bowl Alabama defeated Arkansas and Lou Holtz 24-9. The game was not that close. Holtz said that he was going to get bigger, stronger and faster players. In 1988 Notre Dame, coached by Holtz, went 12-0 and got the national title.
 
Bewildered said:
I don't have to look far, unfortunately, to understand this situation because it was I who was educated by bearkats, longhorns, aggies, lumberjacks, owls, mustangs, and cougars primarily and exclusively from grades K-12. Not one panther, not one tiger, not one delta devil, not one not one not one. And that's inclusive of me growing up w/in a 37.5 mile distance from PVAMU's front door. I knew about PVAMU from listening and walking the campus when a young kid - father/uncle attended, aunts attended. I knew about sTu - cousins attended. But those old SWC/Big 8 folks embedded in me their persona, along w/ academic foundation, for following and desiring to be a part of the Big 8 or SWC. As I look around these parts today, among physically and mentally gifted young men and women, I see the same exact situation occurring - esp w/in my family (2nd levelers) smh.

Speaking for the PVAMU phenomena locally (exclusively), I don't think the local kids have a negative view of the school and I'm not kidding w/ my next statement... Approximately 8 days ago (2 Weds ago), a kid asked me about the paraph I had on (PVAMU) and asked me wasn't PVAMU near San Antonio. We're 42.3 miles from PVAMU's front door. The bball HSer thought PVAMU was near San Antonio.
C:\Users\EARLSM~1\AppData\Local\Temp\msohtmlclip1\01\clip_image001.png
I'm not kidding. I'm not joking. A lot of these new-age new millen kids are NOT being educated about HBCUs local or afar in their school districts where AAs do not exist in those admin/instr positions. And it doesn't help when you have a school that WAS committed to recruiting out of its footprint. ::read::
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I can believe it despite the impact PV has had on Black education in Texas.

I was in Bryan High School (four to five miles from Texas A&M) and saw a sign that talked about tours of private Texas HBCUs and Grambling. I said to myself that this was how it was supposed to be done. However, I felt that (HBCU tours) was the exception rather than the rule.
 
the band fan said:
It's a real easy story to tell but never gets told....the pwcs bought the best players plain and simple in that era...they recruited the black coaches and gave them token spots on staff just to recruit black kids...plain and simple.....

It's still done to this day under different guidances

And also, you cannot recruit from inner city anymore as suburbs are where the numbers are...problem is though blacks don't hold key positions in these suburban high schools so the kids are fed diversity from day 1 and steered towards that from the top
Click to expand...

That is true on the recruiting. SMU was not the only story. You will get no argument from me.

Black principals and head coaches became assistant principals and coaches at the “integrated” high schools. At the beginning of Remember the Titans Denzel Washington’s character, Herman Boone, mentioned how he was passed over for head coaching positions. Note how the community had to politic for him to get the position. I know I am taking something from a movie (based on a true story), but those things happened often.

Let’s not forget how some grads of HBCUs steered their kids to non-HBCUs. In the book Black College Football by Michael Hurd, it was mentioned how FAMU’s Jake Gaither talked about that. I could not blame the coach.
 
the band fan said:
It's a real easy story to tell but never gets told....the pwcs bought the best players plain and simple in that era...they recruited the black coaches and gave them token spots on staff just to recruit black kids...plain and simple.....

It's still done to this day under different guidances

And also, you cannot recruit from inner city anymore as suburbs are where the numbers are...problem is though blacks don't hold key positions in these suburban high schools so the kids are fed diversity from day 1 and steered towards that from the top
Click to expand...


That's a pretty broad statement. I don't see that being everyone situation but more like everyone excuse.
 
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EB said:
I can believe it despite the impact PV has had on Black education in Texas.

I was in Bryan High School (four to five miles from Texas A&M) and saw a sign that talked about tours of private Texas HBCUs and Grambling. I said to myself that this was how it was supposed to be done. However, I felt that (HBCU tours) was the exception rather than the rule.
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Let me add this. I wonder if PV still gets a lot of students from Kansas City, Chicago, Michigan and DC.
 
EB said:
I can believe it despite the impact PV has had on Black education in Texas.

I was in Bryan High School (four to five miles from Texas A&M) and saw a sign that talked about tours of private Texas HBCUs and Grambling. I said to myself that this was how it was supposed to be done. However, I felt that (HBCU tours) was the exception rather than the rule.
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Seems like a common thing in this area. A local NAACP chapter president hosted and sponsored a week long summer "tour' lol of HBCUs in Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama.for HS jrs downward. Naturally, that caused some feelings between him/them and us (PVAMU/sTu grads). We couldn't understand why the backwards Texas College grad lol would do such foolishness. We reminded his light-skinded azz lol that there are 9+ division-I universities all w/in a 100 mile radius where he was standing @ that moment and those were more than capable of fulfilling any local child's need to further their education, w/ emphasis on PVAMU and sTu. He caught feelings; we all aren't on speaking terms as of 2 summers ago.
 
It happens to this day except its masked differently

you have several good black coaches on these staffs in the SEC making more money than ever made but no one will even consider them to be a head coach and they make too much money to even think about coming down......Their job is to recruit black kids and do the dirty work so they can get to campus

And this diversity think is real because a lot of educated blacks live in these Suburbs and their not hanging with a all black crew like I may have in the 90s

The threat is these kids Of hbcu grads growing up in a diverse environment and not understanding what our schools mean so they will go to a Texas State type of school because it is safe socially....

And the crazy part is, those kids still have a pool of friends from our schools that they admire from afar
 
EB said:
Let me add this. I wonder if PV still gets a lot of students from Kansas City, Chicago, Michigan and DC.
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I think so, he ended up at Yale, but my buddy's nephew Trai Byers from Empire went to PV he's from Kansas City and Trai's big sister Brandi was Miss Prairie View. Me and their Uncles along with some more of my homies form Kansas City went to PV. Also my roomate's lil brother sent 2 of his daughters to PV from Kansas City
 
the band fan said:
It happens to this day except its masked differently

you have several good black coaches on these staffs in the SEC making more money than ever made but no one will even consider them to be a head coach and they make too much money to even think about coming down......Their job is to recruit black kids and do the dirty work so they can get to campus

And this diversity think is real because a lot of educated blacks live in these Suburbs and their not hanging with a all black crew like I may have in the 90s

The threat is these kids Of hbcu grads growing up in a diverse environment and not understanding what our schools mean so they will go to a Texas State type of school because it is safe socially....

And the crazy part is, those kids still have a pool of friends from our schools that they admire from afar
Click to expand...


Those schools are no more diverse then ours are and I would venture to say we are more diverse when you break it down per student population
 
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