If merit is supposedly the measure for upward mobility in America, then how many coaches compiled more achievements than Gaither at FAMU, Eddie Robinson at Grambling, and John Merritt at Tennessee State? Gaither put together a career winning percentage of .844, Robinson set a major-college record with 408 victories, and 10 of Merritt’s 21 teams at TSU either went unbeaten or lost just once. Many of the players developed by these coaches excelled in the NFL and went into the pro football Hall of Fame—among them Charlie Joiner of Grambling and the San Diego Chargers, Richard Dent of TSU and the Chicago Bears, and Ken Riley of FAMU and the Cincinnati Bengals.
In one respect, like other Black institutions that paradoxically flourished amid segregation, HBCU football was its own proud, unapologetic, self-contained world. Yet the scorning of Black head coaches by the major football programs inevitably left a condescending stain. As John Merritt famously put it, HBCU football was played “behind God’s back.” Eddie Jackson, a longtime administrator at FAMU, said of Jake Gaither, “An invisible asterisk hung over his incredible career.”
In the culture of the American South, the secular religion of college football stood not as an incidental element of segregation but as one of its pillars. Until 2010, Mississippi’s team took a Confederate soldier, “Colonel Reb,” as its mascot, and the segregationist Governor Ross Barnett once delivered an anti–civil rights speech at halftime. Before being revised several years ago, the Alabama fight song included the verse, “You’re Dixie’s football pride, Crimson Tide.”