For a very long time, most of the major college football programs wanted nothing to do with Black players. While UCLA did boast the backfield of Kenny Washington, Woody Strode, and Jackie Robinson (yes, that Jackie Robinson) in the late 1930s, that was the exception.
In 1959, Alabama was set to play Penn State in the Liberty Bowl. Alabama’s Board of Trustees threatened to boycott the game because Penn State had an integrated team. As late as 1970, when the Crimson Tide played USC, Bear Bryant’s team had no Black players. Head coach Paul “Bear Bryant” had tried with seven walk-on players in 1967, but none made the team. As Bryant later said, neither the administrators nor the fan base would stand for an integrated team.
Sadly, this was par for the course in certain conferences. Some Southern schools had signed Black players, but in 1966, though half the schools in both conferences had integrated in a general sense, there were still no Black players in either the SEC (the Southeaster Conference) or the SWC (the now-defunct Southwest Conference). The SWC finally broke their ban when Baylor and SMU recruited Black players, but the SEC held out.
That changed after the Alabama-USC game, a 42-21 win for the Trojans in which USC running back Sam Cunningham ran up and down Alabama’s defense, and USC’s long-integrated team beat the daylights out of Bryant’s white team in general. In the end, for competitive reasons alone, those who had blocked Bryant’s calls for integration had to back down.
In the absence of opportunity at those more storied programs, Black players in the South found different ways to succeed — the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) that had been playing football since the late 19th century and were able to bring in some of the greatest football talent ever seen.
While the major Southern programs insisted on institutional racism, HBCUs were able to recruit and benefit from the talents of athletes like these:
The all-time leader in career receptions, receiving yards and most career touchdowns (Jerry Rice, Mississippi Valley State). The player with the most sacks in a single season (Michael Strahan, Texas Southern). The only man to ever win both a Super Bowl ring and an Olympic gold medal (Bob Hayes, Florida A&M). And the namesake for the NFL’s most prestigious honor (Walter Payton, Jackson State).
Nearly 10 percent of the players in the Pro Football Hall of Fame came from HBCUs, which is an amazing number given the relatively low number of players who were able to break into the NFL after their college successes, given the NFL’s own institutional racism. The NFL had a ban on Black players from 1934 through 1946, and as late as the 1950s, a lot of NFL teams wouldn’t even send their scouts to HBCUs, though all teams were well aware of the talent available.
In 1959, Black players accounted for about 12 percent of NFL rosters. What opened the floodgates was the formation of the American Football League in 1960. The new league had no such ban or quota, and signed the best players regardless of color. Still, per historian Charles K. Ross, of the 173 Black players who played in the NFL between 1946 and 1962, only 42 came from historically Black schools. And from 1946 through 1960, no player from an HBCU was selected higher than the fourth round.
In 1963, the Kansas City Chiefs became the first professional football team in any league to select a player with the first overall pick when they drafted defensive linemen Junius “Buck” Buchannan from Grambling State. The NFL did not see fit to select Buchannan until the New York Giants picked him with the 256th overall selection in the 19th round, because Buchannan had agreed to play for the Chiefs so quickly.
As the AFL grew and became fully competitive with the NFL, the older, more established league finally had to realize that its own racism was shutting it out of some of the best talent football would ever see. It was a long road from that 12 percent to NFL today, where over 70 percent of rosters have Black players, and goodness knows there’s a long way to go when it comes to the coaching and administrative sides of things, but it was the HBCUs who held, fostered, and perfected so much Hall of Fame talent while the bigger and more established schools turned away. The HBCUs built the bridge Black players needed, and the list of players who played at those schools because they had no other options is truly transcendent from a talent perspective.
Here are the 51 best players in NFL history who attended Historically Black Colleges and Universities. If you’re not familiar with the history, prepare to be amazed at the names.