Jack Pitts is being inducted into the Georgia High School Football Hall of Fame Saturday evening. Jack was a great QB at Trinity, the black high school, in Decatur when I was at Decatur High. He was also an outstanding BB player. I saw Charlie Dudish, who received national recognition at Avondale, play several times. He wasn't close to as good as Jack. Dennis Chadwick at Decatur was very good and highly ranked, but Jack was at another level. Trinity won the GIA championship (the black GHSA) in 1965. Clarence Scott was also on that team. Clarence was inducted two years ago. He was an All-American at Kansa State and is in the Cleveland Browns Hall of Fame.
Jack signed with Michigan State and played freshman football. He broke his neck his sophomore year and never played for State. There is no doubt in my mind Jack would have been an All-American and NFL star had he not been injured. I've included an article from Sports Illustrated that is about that era of southern sports.
DEADLINE IN DIXIE
As of this moment, only Kentucky and Vanderbilt, among the 10
Southeastern Conference members, have Negroes on
athletic scholarships. Tennessee tried for some Negro basketball stars but missed out. Tulane, formerly of the SEC, has a Negro
baseba
ll player on academic scholarship. Georgia Tech, another ex-SEC school, has a nonscholarship Negro trackman, and Georgia had a Negro student who came out for football.
That, apparently, is it in the South—but not for long, thanks in part to Bruce Galphin, a columnist on The Atlanta Constitution; Charles Morgan Jr., director of the Southern Regional Office of the American Civil Liberties Union; a handful of faculty members; and the southern coaches. The coaches' pride in their craft or art, and the exigency of winning, can transcend—if not completely eliminate—prejudice.
Morgan has written to the U.S.
Commissioner of Education claiming that
racial discrimination is being practiced in the awarding of
athletic scholarships by universities that have agreed to comply with Title VI of the
Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that therefore their federal aid should be shut off.
General Counsel Howard Glickstein of the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights says that if this is the case the schools are indeed in violation of the act and federal funds can be and should be stopped.
Peter Libassi, special assistant on civil rights to the
Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, says his department is in the final stages of drafting a compliance report form. "We had planned to ask general questions about the availability of scholarship funds without regard to race and color," he replied to one SEC instructor who had written him. "However, in the light of your document we are exploring the notion of asking about
athletic scholarships in particular."
Galphin has disclosed, among other things, that although Georgia Tech was going as far afield as Ohio to find football players, it did not travel the 10 miles from Atlanta to Decatur, Ga. to recruit a Negro high school senior named Jack Pitts, whom Duffy Daugherty, the Michigan State coach, called "the finest quarterback prospect we've seen on film."
Actually, Tech, as well as Georgia, would like to get its hands on some Negro ballplayers. If it's a choice between being white and winning, they'll take winning, but the State
Board of Regents, a semipolitical body, will not stand for it.
Caught between the coaches' realism and the law of the land, the southern schools cannot hold out much longer. (
Ole Miss, for example, got at least $6 million from the U.S. last year.) Indeed, anticipating the inevitable, there's hardly an athletic department in Dixie that doesn't have an assistant coach scouting Negro high school games.
Clarence Scott also played for that Trinity team. He signed with Kansas State University and made All-American his senior year. He was the 14th player selected in the 1971 NFL draft that featured Jim Plunkett, John Riggins, Archie Manning, Jack Youngblood and Jack Tatum. He played 186 games, (178 straight) over 13 seasons at defensive back for the Cleveland Browns, making all-pro several of those seasons. He had 39 career interceptions, which is third best in franchise history. He was inducted into the Cleveland Brown’s Legends program in 2012 honoring players who had a major impact on the organization
.
