A Football Martyr - SBNation. The young man sits alone in a hotel room, the last rays of sunlight leaking through the windows. Facing a single sheet of hotel stationery, he grips a fountain pen. It's the eve of the biggest game he'll ever play. He thinks that because it's his first real varsity game, and that there will be many more to follow . So much is swirling through him as the day shifts from late afternoon to early evening, the autumn night fast approaching, that he has to release them. So he writes in a burst of legible but hurried cursive: . In Honor of Sol Gordon, Ph.D. Discover unexpected relationships between famous figures when you explore our group of famous people born in Illinois. Before Emmett Till, Johnny Bright and Medgar Evers, Jack Trice became a gridiron martyr. And was promptly forgotten. This tale was written for Queen Mary, wife of King George V. When the Queen's Dolls' House was created in 1923, as a demonstration of British ingenuity and. The Ten Commandments is a 1923 American silent epic film produced and directed by Cecil B. Written by Jeanie MacPherson, the film is divided into two parts. Deep beneath the turquoise caverns of a Yankee Stadium that was set to open within one week, a miniature ball of energy named Miller Huggins, the Yankees manager. Berry Greenwood Benson was born on February 9, 1843, in Hamburg, South Carolina, the son of Nancy Harmon and Abraham M. In 1849 Abraham Benson tried his luck. Until many years later, when someone remembered. The river of his life, which had ebbed to a trickle gradually swelled over the course of 4. This, then, is how that legend took shape.* * *October 5, 1. John Trice, whom everyone but his mother calls . Jack may sense, but cannot know for certain, what hatred may take shape in the approaching shadows. He has conditioned himself to tread cautiously, even more so in new situations, so that he may gauge the environment, read the cues, and play his part. Trice is African- American, what the newspaper and many others then called . My American Wife is a 1922 silent American drama film directed by Sam Wood and starring Gloria Swanson. The film was produced by Famous Players-Lasky and distributed. MG 285 RARITAN BAY UNION AND EAGLESWOOD MILITARY ACADEMY Collection, 1809-1973. A collection of letters, documents, and printed matter concerning the. Yet the fact of his skin color emasculates him before lesser men, who can deny him a room, a meal at a restaurant, a place on the field. Who can strip him of his dignity just like that. Trice is the only black player on the Iowa State football team, the first black varsity athlete at Iowa State College (as Iowa State University was then known) one of only a few black football players in the country at the time playing against white opponents. He will be the only black player on Northrop Field tomorrow. Some schools simply refused to let African- Americans in; others refused to let them play varsity sports. When Trice arrived, Iowa State only had about 2. His teammates had welcomed him best they could without knowing, really, what it was like to be a marked man, forever suspect for his pigmentation. There were even schools in Iowa State's own league, the Missouri Valley Conference, which refused to play against teams with a black player on the roster. That coming week, the University of Missouri athletic director would send a letter to Dean S. Beyer at Iowa State reminding the latter . That was their gentleman's agreement. Minneapolis may be a Northern city, but that does not mean racism did not reside at that latitude. Just three years before Trice arrived, a white mob in Duluth, 1. Minneapolis, lynched three black men who had come to town with the traveling circus, accused of raping a white woman. The scene was familiar in Southern states but it was the first mob lynching in Minnesota. The Great Migration of Southern, rural African- Americans had not yet inflated Minneapolis' black population the way it had other Northern industrial cities, but the Ku Klux Klan had nevertheless targeted Minnesota for expansion, swelling its ranks to 3. Earlier in 1. 92. Klan had smeared the Minneapolis mayor with accusations of drunkenness and lechery because he had the temerity to prevent police officers from joining the secret society and had investigated the Klan's activities at the University of Minnesota. Though a jury convicted five Klan members, including its Exalted Cyclops Roy Miner, the Klan's openly endorsed candidate in that summer's mayoral election nearly succeeded in defeating the incumbent. His popularity was no doubt boosted by his platform to clear out the city's primary vices of gambling and prostitution, but may also have reflected fear and suspicion of the 4,0. African- Americans who accounted for 1 percent of the city's population. The Klan had risen to such popularity on the University of Minnesota campus that it entered a float in that fall's homecoming parade. In the cross burnings, parades and outdoor socials that proliferated around the state, the Klan saw itself as a political power as well as a social movement, intent on moral cleansing. The Klan had risen to such popularity and prominence on the University of Minnesota campus that it entered a float in that fall's homecoming parade. Indeed, the very weekend that Trice and his Cyclone teammates came to town, 2. Klan members attended the first state convention across the river in St. Paul. The vitality of the Ku Klux Klan in the Twin Cities did not render every white citizen a bigot, of course, but it did reflect sympathy among a segment of the population. Trice may very well have heard some of the stories of its activity and could only wonder if these influences might infiltrate Saturday's game.* * *If you believe in destiny, you would say that the arc of Trice's life had delivered him to this moment. He was born May 1. Hiram, a small town in rural Ohio about 4. Cleveland, the only child of Anna and Green Trice. Both Anna's parents and Green's parents had been slaves. His father, who had fought American Indians as what the tribal people referred to as a . Army, died when Jack was 7 years old. His mother, who washed white people's laundry, sent Jack to Cleveland at age 1. East Technical High School. She wanted him to be . Trice anchored the line, laying out opposing ball carriers with his signature flying tackle and blocking for the Behm brothers, Johnny and Norton, East Tech's slippery running backs. Their sophomore season, they lost only once. The next year, the defense did not allow a point through the first nine games. They didn't lose until their 1. Everett, Wash., after a three- day train ride, falling to Everett, 1. In his senior year, Trice and his teammates did not lose. The big lineman with the gentle demeanor, one of only two African- Americans on the team, was named All- State and left East Tech tagged in the high school yearbook as . Knute Rockne invited Johnny and Norton Behm to play for him at Notre Dame. Willaman landed the head coach job at Iowa State. But not so for black kids. Trice took a job on a road construction crew. Then Willaman came calling later that summer. He talked the Behm brothers and two other Cleveland prep stars into playing for him at Iowa State. He also invited Trice. In the years immediately following the Great War, college football enjoyed a Golden Age. He also cherished the opportunity to further his education. Just one problem. Jack had tumbled into love. Leaving for the Iowa State campus in Ames meant leaving his girl, Cora Mae, behind. In late July, the star- crossed lovers eloped temporarily, taking a train across the Michigan border, where they told the clerk Cora Mae was 1. Colorado. She returned with her secret to her parents' home in Youngstown to finish high school, and Jack headed to Ames, satisfied, content.* * *If it wasn't destiny that had delivered Trice to the Curtis Hotel on the eve of his first real college football game, then it was pure determination. Back then, schools did not offer athletic scholarships, and college had not been in the Trice family budget. Jack worked two custodial jobs, one in a downtown building, the other in State Gym to pay for tuition, books, meals and lodging . Jack's mother helped out by mortgaging her house. Black students could not live on campus, so he found an upstairs room in the Masonic Temple building downtown, two miles from campus. The East Tech curriculum had not satisfied all of Iowa State's prerequisites and he had to make up the extra work, but still earned a 9. Jack worked two custodial jobs to pay for tuition, books, meals and lodging . Enrolled in the animal husbandry program, he hoped to work with black farmers in the South, teaching them modern methods to cultivate their crops and support their families. He planned to put his education at their service in the spirit of Iowa State's famous black alumnus, the scientist, botanist and inventor George Washington Carver. Intercollegiate rules kept first- year students from playing varsity, so Trice worked out with the freshmen team, which played no games other than scrimmages against the varsity. Trice may have been big and strong, but the high school standout still had a lot to learn. The line coach, George Hauser, who had been an All- American and now moonlighted for the Chicago Bears on Sundays, recognized the potential in Trice and schooled him in one- on- one workouts daily after practice. Soon the younger, smaller pupil had become the mentor's equal, and Hauser predicted that Trice would one day become the best tackle in the country, better even than the black All- American from the University of Iowa, Duke Slater. The freshman lineman made an impression on his future teammates, too. In a scrimmage against the varsity, he hit one upperclassman so forcefully, the older player, Harry Schmidt, recalled in an oral history that, . He knew the place of the black man in white society, even north of the Mason- Dixon Line. He was friendly, but deferent, he spoke when spoken to and did not presume to enter his boss's office without an invitation. He cleaned his fellow students' muddy boots, sharpened their pencils and assisted them into their bulky winter coats, always wearing a wide smile that pushed up his cheeks, but did not expose his teeth. That endeared him to others. Yet he remained unmistakably a black man in a white man's world. As another student astutely later observed in the Iowa Agriculturist, . It is only the truth to say that he lived alone and apart. Every night he was sequestered 7. Classes, practice, work. But he did it day after day until summer washed up and he was able to return to the familiar, to Ohio, to his mother and Cora Mae. And then, come autumn, he returned to Ames, only this time with his wife. She moved into his third floor room of the Masonic building downtown, enrolled in Iowa State's home economics department, and soothed his isolation. Jack wore his wedding ring everywhere, even on the football field. One night he snuck her into State Gym with the key he had from his custodial job. She was nervous they could get caught.
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