The Cavalier daily :: Friday February 23, 1968 :: University of Virginia Library

Clemson, South Carolina...and
the University of Virginia. An
elite subgroup of Atlantic Coast
Conference institutions, lumped
together as the only three schools
which have yet to award grants-in-aid
to Negro athletes. Clemson,
South Carolina, and Virginia.

The University of Maryland,
northern bastion of the ACC, has
long been the prime haven for
Negro athletes in the conference.
At the present time, partly due to
fact that Maryland awards more
scholarships than anyone else,
twenty Negroes attend the school
in College Park on athletic grants-in-aid.

Darryl Hill was the first Negro
to be awarded a grant-in-aid. He
played for the Terrapin football
team from 1959 through 1963.
At present, another Negro scholarship
recipient, Billy Jones, co-captains
the basketball team. The
Maryland track team has had
several Negro stars, among them
ACC champs Jim Lee and Roland
Merritt.

Wake To The Fore

South of Charlottesville, in
Winston-Salem, Wake Forest
University has begun to take considerable
advantage of the talents
of Negro athletes. Starting in 1964,
Wake has recruited nine Negroes
for their football and basketball
squads.

Among them have been two
All-Conference football players,
Butch Henry and Freddie Summers.
Norwood Todmann currently
averages 12 points a game
for the Deacons on the court,
and their outstanding freshman
team is led by Charlie Davis
and Gil McGregor.

Wake Forest recruiters sought
other black athletes before the
first one agreed to play, all of
whom they lost to Northern
schools. But they have found that
as soon as the pioneers were accepted,
others showed fewer
qualms about playing in Winston-Salem.

State Has Several Negroes

In Raleigh, North Carolina State
has had Negro athletes for many
years. In 1960, Irving Holmes
captained the Wolfpack tennis team
in his fourth year of competition.
Black athletes dot the rosters of
State's football, basketball, and
track squads as well.

Duke Lost Signee

Duke University signed its first
colored football player in 1966,
but the boy flunked out after one
year.

That same year, C. B. Claiborne
matriculated at Duke on an
academic scholarship. Claiborne
came out for basketball and has
been a capable reserve for Coach
Vic Bubas. Recently, Duke recruiters
signed two Negroes for the
coming football season, the first
grants to Negroes since the first
boy flunked out two years ago.

Charlie Scott, whose story is
detailed elsewhere on this page,
became the first black athlete to
receive a scholarship from the
University of North Carolina in
1966.

Gamecocks Nondiscriminatory

According to Athletic Director
Paul Dietzel, the University of
South Carolina does not discriminate
against the black athlete, although
South Carolina has never
signed one.

The school which accepted Mike
Grosso, and which uses nine
players from New York and New
Jersey on its basketball team, maintains
that it has not found a
colored boy who measured up to
its scholastic and athletic standards.

Approximately the same situation
exists at Clemson. Athletic
Department officials state that they
have attempted to recruit qualified
Negroes, in particular the aforementioned
Gil McGregor of Wake
Forest. But Clemson too, has never
signed a black athlete.

Integration in athletics has
come fairly late to most of the
ACC. But the talents, scholastic
and athletic, of the Negro athlete
are becoming harder and harder
to deny. In the words of Clemson
Sports Publicist Bob Bradley:
"If they're any good, they just
get whiter and whiter."