Through the Banks of the Red Cedar: My Father and the Team That Changed the Game

by Maya Washington

for Black players at Michigan State, the philosophical ideals of Martin Luther King Jr. and John A. Hannah had never been fully executed or tested in real-world American settings. They were essentially lab rats in a well-intentioned living laboratory. Bubba tested the limits of his metaphorical cage daily.

She sought counsel from her pastor, who essentially asked her, “If everything else about him is compatible, does his skin color matter?”

Marcia, Bubba Smith’s college girlfriend. She was white, growing up in Lansing, which was all white back then. Too bad the author didn’t report which church’s pastor provided such woke counsel.

As a boy, early in his dad’s coaching career, Bubba stumbled upon a horrific sight in Orange, Texas. A group of white men were torturing a Black man on the north side of town. Bubba quickly hid behind a bush. The men burned the letters “KKK” into the Black man’s skin as he screamed. Bubba was paralyzed as the smell of burnt flesh singed horror into his being. He’d witnessed an act of hate that he wasn’t able to stop. No matter how much love you might create and experience in your own home, he learned, the world outside its doors is filled with hatred and violence—and there is nothing you can do about it.

Even Bubba’s own mother, Georgia, suffered after she gave birth to a baby girl, who died a few days after she was born because they couldn’t be seen at the white hospital, because they were Black.

“They weren’t supposed to date white girls. They could mess around with white girls, but they weren’t supposed to date them seriously.”

The black football players at MSU when Gene Washington and Bubba Smith attended.

One of the few times they actually went out in public, he walked about five paces behind her, fading into the crowd while they walked home from the Lansing Theater downtown. “What are you doing?” Marcia called to him. “Keep going. Just keep going,” he said, waving her on. “No! I know what you’re doing,” she protested, stopping in the sidewalk. He caught up to her in a few strides. “Well, do you want people to know you’re walking with a nigger?” he scolded. “If I didn’t want them to know I was with you, I wouldn’t be with you! I’m not walking ahead of you anymore!” she fumed.

Bubba Smith.

It seemed to me that there were a lot of beautiful, educated, and successful Black women to choose from, but that Black men saw whiteness as a more significant measure of attractiveness than any other attribute.

Burnice Goudeau supported my dad’s proposal provided that he promised he would make sure that my mom completed her education. I’ve always fancied my dad a feminist in this way. I was never told that I couldn’t achieve in school or life because of my gender. Knowing that my mother’s father cared about her academic endeavors as much as my dad supported mine as a young woman fills my heart with gratitude.

This “Game of the Decade” would prove to be a major milestone in American race relations. Whether they knew it or not, the teams were playing for more than just a National Championship. MSU’s team, with 20 Black players and 11 Black starters, had been called the “Grambling of the North.” The racists poked fun at how Black Daugherty’s team was, at the same time that Black fans and Pacific Islanders across the country applauded. Symbolically, this epic match between Notre Dame, with only one Black player, Alan Page, and the Spartans, whose starting lineup was Blacker than any seen at a predominantly white institution ever, signaled a turning point in college football history.

For the first and only time in professional football history, four players from the same college team, all African American, were drafted in the first round, within the first eight picks.

He also had one more championship to grab in the spring of 1967. Even though the football season was over, he was still an NCAA athlete with a Big Ten outdoor track meet ahead of him. His last and final opportunity to defend his 1966 title in the 120-yard high hurdles ended with a record-setting time of 13.7 seconds that stands to this day.

When did college track switch to the metric? 1976, so this record lasted for at least 11 years.

My dad and men of his generation from La Porte, Baytown, and Beaumont speak of how many talented Black athletes lived in their communities. No matter how much of that athletic talent and academic potential was cultivated in southern states in the 1950s and 1960s, white supremacy and racism kept those young men (and women, prior to Title IX) from full participation in higher education as athletes or even as students.

Football created a microcosm where the rules of race in America were suspended for four quarters.

Minnesota nice, a kind of racism that smiles in your face and discriminates against you in the same breath. If the man hadn’t recognized my dad from the newspaper, they might have been yet another Black couple who couldn’t obtain housing in the area because of their skin color.

First real estate agent lied by claiming there wasn’t any condos for sale or apartments for rent, but he lied nicely.

my dad completed a master’s degree in college student personnel administration.

Gene Washington.

My dad developed a passion for counseling students of color and created channels for them to gain employment through hiring fairs with top companies in Michigan and throughout the country. He even coordinated the university’s first minority career fair, possibly one of the first of its kind in the United States. He understood that football wouldn’t likely last forever. A career in diversity and inclusion was both urgent for his friends and colleagues looking for employment and also rooted in his understanding that he could make a difference, the way the Smith family and those who’d supported him along the way had made a difference in his life.

One of the most incredible revelations for me is the fact that my dad always had a day job while he was playing professional football. During the season he worked part time at 3M Corporation in Minnesota as a human resources recruiter. He’d work all day Monday, then split his time in the office in the mornings Tuesday through Friday, from 7:00 to 11:00 a.m., then he’d report for Vikings football practice. Saturdays the team practiced, then on Sundays they played their games. Even if the Vikings had an out-of-town game on Sunday, he’d be back at 3M first thing Monday morning.

The four-year agreement between the AFL and NFL to complete the merger set 1970 as the first season the two leagues would be officially combined. This meant that my dad and his teammates played and won against the Cleveland Browns in the last ever NFL Championship at the end of the 1969 regular season. The game was played at Met Stadium on January 4, 1970, in eight-degree weather with a wind chill below zero.

Joe Kapp was named Most Valuable Player for the 1969 season. In his acceptance speech, he refused the honor because as he saw it, all 40 of his teammates were valuable. The team soon adopted the slogan “40 for 60”—40 players playing as one for 60 minutes.

Jim Finks, the Vikings general manager, offered my dad a new contract at a reduced salary.

In 1972, my dad, Clinton Jones, Charlie West, and 12 other players filed a lawsuit led by John Mackey, president of the NFL Players Association, to challenge the Rozelle rule in the United States District Court. Judge Earl Larson ruled in favor of the players in Mackey v. NFL on December 30, 1975. The Rozelle rule was found to violate antitrust laws, and the court’s judgment acknowledged that the application of the rule damaged players’ professional careers. The ruling didn’t come in time for my dad or others who retired before or shortly after the court’s decision, but their efforts made free agency and multimillion-dollar contracts possible for players today.

the researchers at the Brain Bank studied the CTE in Bubba’s brain, they gave it the classification of Stage III CTE with symptoms of cognitive impairment and challenges in judgment and planning. He was the 90th out of 94 NFL players to be diagnosed with CTE after he died in 2011, at age 66.

Race-norming uses a scoring framework that assumes Black men have lower cognitive skills than white men and therefore must perform lower than whites to demonstrate sufficient mental decline to qualify for an award.