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Jim Stingl, Milwaukee JOURNAL SENTINELUW football bravely battled racism in 1956
Posted: Sep. 26, 2008
It’s a story that occurred in my lifetime, but one I never heard until now.
The Wisconsin Badgers football team canceled its games against Louisiana State University in 1957 and 1958 because the state of Louisiana in 1956 formally outlawed social events and athletic contests that mixed black people with whites.
Yes, slavery ended a long time ago, but shocking segregation like this dragged on well into the 20th century.
“It makes the University of Wisconsin athletic department look awfully good. They did the right thing,” said Richard Carlton Haney.
He wrote the cover story, “Canceled Due to Racism,” in the autumn edition of the Wisconsin Magazine of History, published by the Wisconsin Historical Society.
Haney has a PhD in history from UW-Madison. He is an emeritus professor of history at UW-Whitewater and author of “When Is Daddy Coming Home? An American Family During World War II,” a 2005 book about his father’s death in the war and how it affected his family.
“I grew up in Madison, in the shadow of Camp Randall, literally,” Haney told me. “My grandparents were friends of Milt and Helen Bruhn, who (Milt) was coach at the time.”
This episode didn’t leave much of a footprint in Milwaukee, at least from my review of Journal and Sentinel archives. We probably were distracted by our winning Braves in the summer of 1956, while in Louisiana the Legislature was voting unanimously to keep whites and blacks apart,
despite opposition from LSU’s equivalent of the board of regents.
Haney’s article says these southern lawmakers were alarmed by the presence of one black player from the University of Pittsburgh on the field at the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans in 1956. Even the admission tickets to the Sugar Bowl back then said they were to be used by Caucasians only.
“Since Wisconsin was the only northern team with black players on LSU’s future schedules, the new bills were clearly designed primarily to exclude Wisconsin’s black players from the coming UW-LSU games, and to insure that future Sugar Bowl games played in Louisiana would be by all-white teams,” he writes.
Wisconsin would have none of it. Athletic director and former football coach Ivan Williamson led the charge to tell LSU no thanks. The athletic department issued a statement on July 19, 1956, saying it would not play LSU at home in 1957 or in Baton Rouge in 1958. Other universities followed suit.
“I didn’t find any trace of anybody in Madison who objected to the idea of pulling out. When the Louisiana Legislature passed this ridiculous law, it was, ‘well of course we’re not going to leave our black players home,’ ” Haney said.
Some of the Badger stars in those years were African-American, the article says, including halfback Danny Lewis, end Earl Hill and Sidney Williams, the first black starting quarterback in the history of Big Ten football.
The Badgers found other teams to plug into their schedule. So did LSU, which went undefeated and won the national championship in 1958, though Coach Bruhn later said he believed Wisconsin would have defeated LSU both years.
In 1959, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Louisiana’s sports segregation law was unconstitutional. The civil rights movement was gaining strength, and football fields nationwide were opening to the best players rather than just the whitest.
Call Jim Stingl at (414) 224-2017 or e-mail jstingl@journalsentinel.com.