For a few decades, brown folks, yellow folks, green folks and many other folks have been screaming bloody murder in regard to many HBCUs being left out in the desert of inclusion during the Draft and selection process of a few select professional sports. Recently, the NFL has been the target of choice for many liberal-leaning minority sports pundits. On many occasions Black colleges and universities have and are being portrayed as “victims” of exclusion because many of their star student-athletes never receive the call on draft day or night.
Before many White schools were integrated, scouts were forced to scout players of color at the schools that freely admitted them; the HBCUs.
After the “process of integration” began, the Black community stripped the shackles of segregation and replaced them with the “handcuffs” of integration. At the time that the “Jim Crow locks of exclusion” were removed many young Black athletes, their parents and oftentimes maybe even their grandparents, saw this new “road of access” as a Godsend and even compared it to being a genuine blessing from God.
Please consider the following: Tommy Tuberville was the head football coach at Auburn University from 1999 to 2008. He was also the head football coach at the University of Mississippi from 1995 to 1998, Texas Tech University from 2010 to 2012, and the University of Cincinnati from 2013 to 2016.
Tuberville parlayed his notoriety and reputation from coaching college football into the Republican nomination for the 2020 Senate election in Alabama and defeated Democratic incumbent Doug Jones by more than 20 points. He has been and continues to be a staunch and loyal ally of former President Donald Trump and he was one of the senators that attempted to overturn then President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 election. Was this man a former alumnus of the “R&R” University (Racist & Redneck)? If he wasn’t, he sure became a quick study. Tuberville is just one glaring example of how many of the descendants birthed from the culture of slavery continue to use Black youth as modern-day indentured servants long after the Emancipation Proclamation was, signed, sealed and delivered…well, not so much delivered.
For more than a quarter century Black parents placed their children into the arms of Coach Tuberville and men like him who were in all probability descendants and living disciples of the confederate and Negro enslavement doctrine and dogma.
White institutions came to the realization that the White talent pools that were completing their athletic rosters were, in many cases, inferior. It was as simple as that. As far as the HBCUs go, the methodology of White schools was not, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Their path to victory was, “If you kill the head, the body will follow,” or, “A house divided cannot stand.”
They sent representatives into the homes of many Blacks, proudly displaying the crests and schools of Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Texas, Florida and many states located below the Mason-Dixon line that remain steadfast to their anti-color ideology and where many folks continue to and realistically have never stopped flying the colors of the Confederacy above the stars and stripes of America.
They continue to drain the talent reservoir of Black communities and throwing the leftover sediment into the faces of the Black schools that sustained Black homes and communities when there was nowhere else to turn. Yet many athletes of color and their parents run and continue to make a mad dash to these places of ill will and hatred that possibly have trees dotting their landscapes that have been nurtured by the blood of those that were lynched and murdered just above their “roots of evil.”
The late MLB Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson told me: “Sports and the corporate world are very often woven into the same fabric.”
He was one-thousand percent correct. Why? If you don’t agree, would you please consider this…When it came to integration, Major League Baseball once possibly said: “you don’t have to go to that Blacks-only party, come party with us. You no longer have to drink moonshine or hooch.”
Folks ran to them, whiskey glasses poised to receive the better whiskey, not considering the fact that whatever bar that you frequent, if you drink enough alcohol you are going to end up inebriated. When you become inebriated, most of the time you may be unable to think coherently. As a race, many of us became social and economic drunkards. No race, gender, creed or color can validate, or invalidate any other race, creed or color because at the end of the day, as Popeye the Sailor Man might say, “I yam, what I yam,” and you are what you are. When we cease supporting and evaluating ourselves, no one else is going to pick up the slack. In all probability, “Tommy” Tuberville and many other college recruiters like him invaded Black homes like redneck piranhas. They can’t be blamed for accepting our kids into their hostile and unwelcome territories in order to simply use them for financial gain. We willingly sent our children into these questionable and “ethnically insensitive” places for the purpose of performing as athletes, often not truly considering that their lives could be jeopardized and forever changed as the result of something as simple as a traffic stop.
We erroneously thought that we were validating our offspring and their future. We were dead wrong, because in many cases, we fed the beast that was sent to devour our present and future generations.
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