Major League Baseball legend Reggie Jackson recently revealed to a shocked Fox Sports baseball audience the atrocities he suffered while he played minor league baseball for the Birmingham A’s.
But what Jackson revealed about what a famous college coach said maybe even more shocking than what happened to him in Birmingham.
Jackson met the legendary Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant while in Birmingham in the late 1960s after a game in which he hit a couple of triples.
Jackson said Bryant came into the locker room to meet him and uttered a cruel slur.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” Jackson said “He said, ‘This is the kind of [N-word] we need to beat…” Bryant began naming other top college football coaches of that era.
He was naturally stunned by the comment.
“He meant it as a compliment,” Jackson said. “I didn’t take it as such,” adding that he did not respond to Bryant.
“I didn’t know what to say.”
Jackson first talked about this incident over 30 years ago in a Sports Illustrated article.
“It was while I was in Birmingham that I met Bear Bryant,” he said in the article. “His son was the general manager of the ball club. Bryant told me I was ‘the kind of [N-word] boy’ they needed to show the people in his state that we would be good athletes and be good for his school. He said it as a compliment. He said it with his arm around me. Whenever he came to New York, he always made it a point to come see me, and I enjoyed visiting with him. He meant no harm. That’s the way it was.”
The University of Alabama didn’t integrate its football team until 1971. Rumors were that Bryant wanted to do it earlier but couldn’t because of the politics of the state at the time, led by then-Governor George Wallace. There is no excuse for what Bryant said, though he was a product of his times.
Still, Bryant should have known better. It wasn’t until Alabama began to fall off the map in college football back in the late 1960s that they, like a lot of Southern football teams, decided to integrate their programs.
The most famous story about this is when an integrated Southern California team came to Birmingham to face the Tide and beat them soundly, which according to folklore, changed the minds of a lot of Alabama fans.
The joke was USC running back “Sam Cunningham did more for integration in the state of Alabama than Martin Luther King,” but it was no joke and it’s not funny.
After Alabama integrated its football team, they won several more national championships. After that, Bryant started his first Black quarterback, Walter Lewis, just before he retired.
I’m sure if Bryant were alive today, he’d be mollified by his comments to Jackson. But Bear, like many others of his time, eventually recognized their mistakes and corrected them. I’d like to think he’d probably apologize to Jackson if he were here today.
{AL.com}
