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Journey of Reconciliation

By Brett Hoover

A football coaching icon, Wallace Wade used his notoriety to seek a new way of doing business in the South after leaving Alabama for Duke.

There is a simple fact that is often lost in the condemnation of the South for its racist past. That is that it has always been home to a lot of good people. Wallace William Wade was one of them.

As the story goes, when his father discovered that one of his teammates on the Brown University football team was black, young Wally was told to return to Tennessee. Not only did he ignore the demand, it was the first of a series of actions that would demonstrate his commitment to integration.

His decision to stay in Providence and play with that black player — College and Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard — resulted in his first Rose Bowl appearance, a trip he’d take five more times in his career as a head coach at Alabama and Duke.

But that first trip to Pasadena produced some lasting memories for Wade; memories that may have poured the foundation for choices he would make later in life.

The first racial incident involving Pollard came aboard the train at dinnertime. Pollard tried to sit with his teammates, as he had done since leaving the East coast, but the head waiter stopped him and told him it was unlawful, in the state of Oklahoma, for a black man to sit with white men. Teammate Ray Ward reported back to Providence that a riot nearly ensued before they learned it would be okay for Pollard to be seated alone and have white men join him. So that’s what they did.

Once the team got to Pasadena, it was greeted with an unusual New Year’s Eve downpour in Southern California. On the day of the game, which pitted Brown against unbeaten Washington State, a constant drizzle fell and the field quickly turned to mud. Large puddles had formed and the Washington State players began to hold Pollard’s head in the water after tackles. The situation became so serious that Brown coach Edward North Robinson — for Pollard’s personal safety — pulled him from the game, which the Bruins would lose 14-0.

Pollard’s mistreatment must have stuck with Wade, but when he became the head football coach at Alabama in 1923, racism was woven into the fabric of Southern society. That university would not allow a black student to enroll for four full decades, and that would happen only after the state’s governor had personally barred the door to African-Americans. That would trigger a showdown with the federal government.

Wade brought unprecedented football success to the Crimson Tide. He won three national titles in eight seasons in Tuscaloosa, capping each of those seasons (1925, 1926 and 1930) with a Rose Bowl victory. But he would stun the college football community after that last championship, leaving the Crimson Tide for a school with little football history — Duke University.

At the time Wade was tight-lipped about the move, which was secretly engineered the year before. But late in his life he told a sports historian that he was interested in the opportunity to direct a program that regarded academics as highly as athletics.

That is no doubt true. Even when he was a student at Brown, making that first Rose Bowl trip, he wrote in a log for the Providence Journal, “Both morning and afternoon, the boys spent considerable time plugging away on their books, not one member of the squad having forgotten he is a student first and a football player second.”

But something seemed unspoken about his surprising move. It would later seem like Wade was intent on making a stand on race relations, a stand that was unforeseeable — even in the very long term — in Alabama.

He first set out to establish a winning culture at Duke. Once that happened, he would be in position to accomplish the things that were important to him. The results in Durham, N.C., were immediate; he produced a Southern Conference championship and an All-American in 1933. By 1937, Wade had developed such stature that he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine.

The next season the Blue Devils were so powerful they started the season with six straight shutout victories before facing Syracuse University in Syracuse, where the Orangemen were 4-0 on the season.

Even though Wade was coaching in a segregated system of education, he did the unusual at the time, allowing an outstanding player of color named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh to play for Syracuse. He told the media that he wanted to play the Orange at its best, but it would be hard to imagine that he didn’t think of his little teammate at Brown more than two decades before.

The “Iron Dukes” wiped out Syracuse, 21-0, and finished the regular season at 9-0 — all shutouts — before a 7-3 Rose Bowl loss to Southern Cal. The Trojans didn’t score until the final minute of play.

Duke’s income from that Rose Bowl led to the construction of the famed basketball arena Cameron Indoor Stadium and — as the school’s athletic director as well as football coach — Wade hired Julian Abele of Philadelphia to design the building.

Apparently, it mattered not that Abele was African-American — in fact the first black student in architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Not only did Abele design Duke’s hoops cathedral, he later created the Allen Administration Building, another landmark at Duke.

Wallace Wade also became a landmark at Duke. Not only does he remain the school’s all-time winningest coach (in terms of both wins and percentage), the Stadium on campus has been named for him since 1967.

He was a remarkable defensive coach. Before he entered military service at the age of 50 in 1942, his teams (at Alabama and Duke) shut out 104 of their 184 opponents and won 81 percent of their games. As a point of reference, Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden have collectively coached 944 games and their teams have produced 74 shutouts.

Wade returned to coach the Blue Devils after the war, starting in 1946. His last season as a head coach, he had one more piece of integrationist history to make, when, in the second game of the 1950 season, Duke welcomed the University of Pittsburgh to Durham.

Pitt had a black player — sophomore lineman Flint Greene — who became the first African-American to play in an integrated game in the state of North Carolina. Prior to the game, Duke President Hollis Edens and Wade issued a press release which stated:

“Yes, we have heard that the Pittsburgh team has a Negro on the squad. When we schedule a team we, of course, expect to play on fair and even terms. The coaches of each team have the unquestioned right to play any eligible man they choose to play. We have neither the right nor the desire to ask a coach to restrict or limit his team’s participation because of creed or color. Duke fans and students have a fine record of treating visiting teams courteously. We have every reason to believe that this record will be continued.”

It was. The game was played without incident, on or off the field. Duke won 28-14.

One could read about Wade’s actions today and think that they didn’t seem particularly noteworthy. That’s because it is hard to imagine a time and a place where some would go to great lengths to preserve a system that was unfair and unjust. Slight challenges to the status quo could be met with harsh retribution.

Wade retired from Duke in 1950 to become commissioner of the Southern Conference. The University had not yet been integrated.

In 1955, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame — a year after Fritz Pollard.

Wade and Pollard — two pioneers in the racial integration of the game of football — would each pass away in 1986, more than seven decades after impacting each other’s lives as students at Brown University.

The lessons learned so long before were indeed passed on.

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