“I think within the first 24 hours we realized how big this thing was going to become,” John Griffin told an audience of UW students and community members yesterday afternoon.
This “thing” Griffin referred to was one of the most prominent civil rights battles the U.S. had ever seen.
Griffin was one of five panelists to speak at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Days of Dialogue event called “The Black 14 and the Dream Today.” Of the five, only he was a member of the group known today as the Black 14.
Who were the Black 14? They were UW students. They were football players. They had something they wanted to say, and their coach dismissed them from the team for it in 1969.
The story began with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS). Prior to 1978, the LDS church forbade African Americans from becoming priests. The Cowboys had an upcoming game against Brigham Young University at which the 14 wanted to express their protest of this policy. When they approached their coach, Lloyd Eaton, about the possibility of wearing black armbands with the number 14 on them, they left the encounter as students, not athletes.
Griffin recalled the 14’s infamous meeting with then-head coach Eaton was as short as it was direct.
“[He said] ‘Gentlemen, you are no longer Wyoming Cowboys.’ It took less than five minutes.”
Those five minutes drastically changed the lives of the 14 students.
“All these 14 athletes, their academic careers were going to be cut short,” said Ed Pollard, founding member of the Black Student Alliance (BSA). The BSA soon found itself heavily involved in the Black 14 story.
“We were Black football players who wanted to do something in sympathy with the Black Student Alliance,” Griffin said.
When the 14 approached the BSA with their protest idea, nobody expected the events to unfold as they did.
“We certainly could not imagine they would lose their place on the team,” said James Tyler, another key BSA member during 1969. He was surprised by the actions that he said would ultimately “jeopardize the whole [football] program.”
Word travelled quickly about the 14 no longer being on the Cowboys team. However, the details had not all been relayed accurately.
“The spin was we had boycotted and quit the team,” Griffin said.
But the 14 had performed a single act of defiance, and only after being dismissed from the team. The 14 simply emptied their lockers and piled their gear into the middle of the room before leaving calmly.
“We never lost our cool,” Griffin said. “We were always respectful human beings.”
“Those 14 African American young men,” Pollard added, “they weren’t the dumb jocks… they were students first.”
“We took our education very seriously,” Griffin said.
Prior to the dismissal, the Black 14 anticipated successful football careers, with six of the 14 expected to go pro, said Griffin.
“I think we’d have gone on and been very successful,” he added. “The Sugar Bowl community at that time were considering the University of Wyoming.”
But the Cowboys did not attend the Sugar Bowl that year or any subsequent year.
Eaton justified his decision to end the 14’s student athlete career with a rule that prohibited his players from making public political declarations.
“The presumptive rule the students violated was participating in any protest anywhere,” said Weston Reeves. “Which is obviously unconstitutional.”
Reeves is a 1969 graduate of the UW College of Law. He was one of the representatives for the Black 14 in the case of Williams v. Eaton.
Reeves, then a Cheyenne attorney, and Charles E. Graves defended the Black 14’s first amendment rights in the trial. Reeves’ case was build on the fact that “race was inextricably woven into the whole situation.”
“The court is naïve to say there is no racial prejudice in Wyoming,” Reeves told the judge who interrupted his closing statements to say Eaton had never expressed any racial prejudice.
“A lot of things came out of this on a national scale,” Pollard said.
The incident led to widespread disapproval of BYU.
“After this, the protests against BYU went to stratospheric levels,” said Phil White, who was the editor of the Branding Iron at the time. White has been documenting the entire history of the Black 14. His writings can be found at wyohistory.org.
BSA member Tyler believes the organization could have focused on other projects had Eaton simply allowed the players to wear the armbands. One project he said was put on hold by the Black 14 situation was a center honoring Native Americans, African Americans and other people of color.
“I think as a whole, the university has suffered,” he said.
However, the panelists also believed the situation had positive outcomes as well.
“You guys here have benefitted from the Black Student Alliance, but also from the Black 14,” Pollard said, citing the counseling and English as a Second Language services as programs the BSA and Black 14 incident helped to establish at UW.
But the university had already done irreparable damage to its reputation by backing Eaton’s decision. Moreover, it had done damage to the reputations of the Black 14.
“By virtue of being part of the Black 14, we were blackballed from the NFL,” Griffin said.
And the 14 did not remain a tightly knit group of men.
“There were only five of us who stayed here,” Griffin who was among those five, said. “I had no choice.”
Wyoming had been Griffin’s first choice, however. He attended the university despite being offered scholarships to other, more prestigious schools.
“This is the place that had a sense of community for me.”
That sense of community would inevitably fade after his and his teammates’ dismissal from the team. He personally lost comradeship with those members of the team who had not been a part of the Black 14.
“Those good friendships that had been established were gone,” Griffin said, describing a scene in which one of those former teammates approached him with tears in his eyes because he knew their friendship was over. “The tragedy of that moment divided two really good friends.”
The Black 14 had an undeniable impact on the United States. Griffin summed up the historical impact of these events when he simply stated:
“Nothing was bigger than the strength… of the 14.”
