The North's Gentleman's Agreement with the South

Considering we just ushered in the first week of college football this past weekend, it’s fitting that this analogy leaped out at me. There has been an unholy alliance, an unspoken ‘gentleman’s agreement’ between the north and the south since the end of the Civil War – in politics and on the gridiron.

First, the gentleman’s agreement: it is “an informal agreement based on trust rather than on a legal document.” There was no legally binding contract between northern schools and southern schools…it was just understood. The agreement: We northern teams will respect your segregation laws and leave our Black players at home when we play you so as not to offend your southern sensibilities.

What about northern sensibilities? What about the Black players left back at home? And how many times did northern teams have to go down south and get their asses handed to them (without their Black players) before they decided to quit laying down their weapons before the vaunted south?

The Southern Myth Exposed

Up until the 30’s, southern teams got beat any time they played a team outside of the south. Alabama beat Washington in 1926 in the Rose Bowl and you would have thought they beat every northern team that ever played football! The head coach of Vanderbilt exclaimed “Alabama was our representative in fighting us against the world. I fought, bled, died, and was resurrected with the Crimson Tide.”

In Atlanta, their paper called it, “the greatest victory for the south since the first battle of Bull Run.” But you see, football is not just football in the south. It is a metaphor for the lost cause – the act of treason that caused a Civil War that they lost and they’ve never gotten over. They even used it as motivation as one historian notes in a pre-game speech given by Vanderbilt’s head coach in the 20’s where he “included an anecdote about how the grandfathers of fielding Yost’s Michigan team killed the Commodores’ grandfathers in the Civil War.” While northern and western teams continued to field integrated teams, the SEC refused to play any team with Black players on it.

And just like the way of life they were trying to protect in the Civil War, it was never about democracy or rule of law or even justice. They wanted to protect the slanted playing field in society, on the gridiron, and in our government, and in many ways they have.

As a society, we’ve allowed southerners including southern politicians to glorify this southern myth and it is reflected in every level of our society.

Keep Getting Whooped or Take a Stand!

The Gentleman’s Agreement was northern teams acquiescing, agreeing to play those teams but leave their Black players at home. Look at how many southern bowl games there are. The Cotton Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, all held in the south, all part of the segregated south where Black fans couldn’t even enter the stadiums to see these eventual SEC teams play.

Miami relaxed their stadium integration ban for the Orange Bowl in 1950. In 1953 Alabama with a 9-2 record and ranked 8th by the Associated Press was looking at possibly being matched up with Syracuse in the Orange Bowl. Syracuse had a black player on its team, one who was quarterback in 1952 but was injured in 1953 and probably would not be able to play.

Less than 20 years earlier, Syracuse got whooped by Maryland because they complied with the gentleman’s agreement to sit their star player. They got beat 13 to nothing. The next year when Maryland had to play all of Syracuse’s players, Maryland lost 53 to nothing. Anytime a northern or western team complied with the southern rule, the gentleman’s agreement, they lost (Pay attention Democrats!) and the south was able to continue to blanket themselves in this enduring myth of southern superiority.

In ’53, Syracuse got the shit beat out of them. They scored only six points to Alabama’s 61. That’s all that the SEC and the University of Alabama needed to revive the southern myth – the football myth of superiority. And despite Syracuse’s only Black player being injured and not having played all season in ’52, Alabama made sure that if he could play in the Orange Bowl, Alabama would not take the field.

Before the infamous Paul “Bear” Bryant became head coach of Alabama, they had a head coach who, while head coach at Oklahoma State ordered his players to target the Black quarterback of their Iowa opponent, Drake University. He was knocked out three times, literally in the first seven minutes of the game “and left the game when the final blow broke his jaw.”

Racial tension in the country at large was moving to a boiling point. Here’s what the power brokers behind the Alabama athletic administration were saying, simply at the possibility of playing a team with black kids on it:

"I notice they name Pittsburgh as a prospective team…Pittsburgh has FOUR fine negro players. Other eastern teams have negro players. SO if anything did come-in the way of an invitation we want to be sure to insist that no negroes be allowed in the game."

Most schools outside of the SEC (Deep South) began desegregating their teams around the end of WWII after so many Black men had served in a newly integrated army valiantly, but in the south, not so much. It would take those teams many years and the north refusing to play them before they would accede to the progress happening in the country – sort of.

Well, that posed a problem. See, in order to be in the mix for the national title or even bowl games, those SEC teams were going to get shut out if they continued to refuse to play integrated teams from the north and the west. Instead, what ensued was more than a decade (and for Alabama two-plus decades) of inbred contests where the SEC only played all-White southern teams – but still wanted to be in the mix as the best team in the nation.

When you take a stand, you win!

Penn State is one of those teams that refused to acquiesce to segregationist demands. Alabama was invited to play them in the Liberty Bowl in 1959 and they threatened to boycott rather than play an integrated Penn State team.

The fight on the field became a symbol for the fight that was going on throughout the south in the late 50s and 60s to end segregation in the south. Western and northern teams found spines to reject the idea that all-white teams should be ranked or named national champs because they refuse to play integrated teams…but not all. Some continued to wink and nod to the unspoken gentleman’s agreement to not let those Black players play when segregated teams came to town or when their opponents went south.

It was about upholding “the southern way of life.” It wasn’t about winning a football game. Segregationists clung to the University of Alabama as the standard bearer of that so-called way of life that they were hell-bent on protecting. Soon, Alabama would be the ONLY all-white team, even in the SEC.

Yet now, there was massive pushback on the field and in society at large against this white supremacist hold on the south that was finally being exposed. An LA Times reporter at the time wrote that the 10 and 0 Alabama team from 1961 “an all-White team has no business being No. 1.” In 1964 when once again Alabama was crowned national champ, the same LA Times sportswriter wrote, “’National’ Champion of war? The Confederacy? This team hasn’t poked its head above the Mason-Dixon Line since Appomattox.”

To This Day...

For any sports fan (not looking at the game as a symbol for a century-old war), the idea of awarding a national title to a team who refused to play some of the best teams in the country because they had black players on them, by 1966, that argument was simply weak. So finally, Alabama paid the price for their unrelenting grip on the idea of segregation when they were not invited to the national championship game in 1966 – the decision Paul Finebaum asserted last November was somehow a slight to Alabama – still!

As recently as 2015, sportswriters worked to help reinforce the myth when the SEC went 7 and 5 in bowl games BUT were 2 and 4 against ranked teams. All that mattered for the storyline was the 7 – 5 record. That southern sportswriter continued on conflating the myth of the rebel south with their so-called storied prowess on the football field:

“The past is not dead, it’s not even past. And the SEC doesn’t even need to rise again, because it hasn’t been knocked down yet. And it won’t be. That’s because it’s the SEC’s world, the rest of college football is just living in it.”

To this day on ESPN, Alabama, “Bear” Bryant, the SEC myth continues to be promulgated. But in sports, it’s just a metaphor. In politics, it has real-world consequences. These gentleman’s agreements may tip the football field one way or the other. But they are also tipping our society backward to a bygone period that is best left dead and buried. Not looking at this in historical perspective has left Democrats blind, deaf, and dumb – completely unequipped to fight a century-old battle that began with a symbolic victory over the vaunted north in 1926 (despite it actually being the west).

Make sure to check out the full episode "Democrats, If Not Now, When?" from The New Progressives Podcast, available on iTunes! Follow us on FB @TNPPodcst and on Twitter @TNPOnlyForward!