Free at Last (1960-1964)

“The (Civil Rights) movement was really laid out in the fifties by the work and challenges that the Black athletes faced, and the stands they were willing to take.”
Ben Tucker, San José State’s cross-country team, 1960-1964

During the sixties, the tone and tenor of Black/white relations had begun to shift radically.

By this time, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign for Black equality had grown in strength, and
Black/white relations were increasingly strained.  A new generation of Black runners had come on the scene at San Jose State: Ron Davis in 1959, and Ben Tucker and Horace Whitehead in 1960.  Whereas Norton and Poynter had faced segregation and indifference, this new generation was openly subjected to the racial hostilities that the Civil Rights Movement engendered in many people.

Tucker vividly recalls these times.  Tucker, along with Davis and Whitehead, were members of the Spartans cross-country team that won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in 1962.  Their effort was significant in that American Blacks – not Africans – were considered sprinters, not distance runners. During their athletic careers at San Jose State, Tucker said that people would shout racial epithets from their windows, cars would swerve around them, narrowly missing them, and other people would hurl bottles at them as they took training runs through the streets and hills of San Jose.  When they were preparing for competition, spectators and even other athletes would often ask, “Are you sure you are at the right event?” “The level of racism was blatant,” Tucker said.  “ . . . We lived there ( San Jose) and we trained there, but we were not of the community.”
 
As a result of the racial hostilities they encountered, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead formed a
pact. “We realized we were considered an oddity,” said Tucker, who also was a member of the ’63 national championship team.  Rarely, if ever, were the three taken seriously on the cross-country course “because no one felt that an African-American could be a (distance) runner.”
But once the trio became recognized at the national level, other runners took note and inquired, “Oh, you guys must be from Africa. What African country are you from?”  In capturing the national title in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1962, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead placed fifth, fourteenth and twenty-fourth, respectively.  Teammates Danny Murphy and Jeff Fishback, who are white, finished third and thirteenth, respectively.  The Spartans defeated Villanova 58-69.
 
During the fall of that year, James Meridith would grab national attention while attempting to transfer from Jackson State College, a predominately Black institution, to the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford.  A federal district court ordered Ole Miss to admit Meridith on September 3, 1962.  Later that month, President John F. Kennedy ordered several hundred U.S. Marshals to escort Meridith to his classes. Meanwhile, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead quietly fought another battle in California.
 
“The sixties for an incoming freshman athlete at San Jose State were a very interesting period
because America was going through some very, very troubling times,” Tucker said.  “As athletes, we were pretty much coached not to think about the struggles that were going on in the South with Martin Luther King, and the marches, and the demonstrations and the boycotts, but stuff entered our lives.”

Between 1962 and ’64 several key people spoke at San Jose State, including Ralph Bunche, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and political activist Dick Gregory.  The Bay Area, where the Black Panthers would soon be born, would rapidly become a focal point of the Black Power Movement and that energy could already be felt on the San Jose State campus.  In describing the feelings of Spartan runners of the time, Tucker noted “(w)e felt that by competing on the track to the best of our ability, by developing our potential, and by getting our education, we were making two statements:  That we had our minds and our bodies moving in the right direction, but at the same time we knew we had to make some kind of significant contribution to the struggle.”
 
They also started making demands on Coach Winter, according to Tucker, “in terms of our meals, where we ate, that we ate consistently, that we had decent clothes to wear, and that we were given the kind of support academically that we needed . . . ”
 
By 1964, the Black Power Movement was firmly established, and its effect on the Black athlete was inevitable. Harry Edwards, a discus thrower for the Spartan team while attending SJS who later would become a well-known and controversial observer and educator on race in sport, writes: “The revolt of the Black athlete was as inevitable as the rising of the sun.”

Nearly as important as was the rising of the sun, at least in terms of its impact on Speed City, was the arrival of Carlos and Smith. Back to Top