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Posted on 12/01/2003 3:25:12 PM PST by hapc
Sylvester Croom became the first black football coach in the history of the Southestern Football Conference, accepting an offer Monday to take over Mississippi State.
The school announced Croom's decision in a release posted on its website. A news conference will be held Tuesday to introduce him.
Croom came close to landing the Alabama head football coaching job after Mike Price was abruptly dismissed in May.
The Crimson Tide were crizicized by some, including civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, for hiring Mike Shula, who is white, over Croom, who has more experience.
Every other Major Bowl Championship conference has had at least one black coach, but the shortcoming is not exclusive to the Southeastern Conference. There were only four black head football coaches among the 117 Division 1-A football schools this season.
The SEC has been trying to help its members to be more inclusive in the hiring process by providing lists of potential minority candidates to its athletic directors.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbs.sportsline.com ...
Croom, 48, born and raised in Tuscaloosa and the son of an influential minister, arrived on campus in 1971, a year after Wilbur Jackson became the first black football player to accept a scholarship to Alabama. Croom became an All-America center, helped the Tide win the 1973 national title, earned two degrees and then coached linebackers at Alabama for 10 years under Bryant and Ray Perkins. He has spent the last 17 years in the NFL as an assistant.
Croom also has a bachelor's degree in history from Alabama in 1975 and a master's degree in educational administration from Alabama in 1977. ... The Tide went 22-2 in his two years as starting center (1973-74) and were national champions in 1973. He was an All-American in 1974. ... One of the player honors given out after spring practice at Alabama is the Sylvester Croom Commitment to Excellence Award. The 2003 winner was guard Justin Smiley.
Currently running backs coach for Green Bay Packers, the team for which he's worked since 2001. Also graduate assistant at University of Alabama, 1976; linebackers coach at Alabama, 1976-86; Tampa Bay Buccaneers running backs coach, 1987-90; Indianapolis Colts running backs coach, 1991; San Diego Chargers running backs coach 1992-96; Detroit Lions offensive coordinator, 1997-2000.
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Go Dawgs Mutts! Arf! Arf! (Woof! Woof! and Growl! may have to wait a while.)
Croom almost got Bama job
Events left him wiser rather than bitter
By Frank Schwab
Post-Crescent staff writer
GREEN BAY, Wisc. — This May, not even 35 years since the University of Alabama fielded all-white football teams, a black man named Sylvester Croom Jr. was one of three men interviewed for the highest-profile job in Alabama.
Editor's note
This story was first published on June 30, 2003, in the Post-Crescent, a Gannett newspaper in Appleton, Wis., that covers the Green Bay Packers.
Croom was a finalist for his alma mater's head coaching job. Not the finalist, but a finalist.
"The head football coach gets more ink than the governor probably ever will," said the Rev. Kelvin Croom, Sylvester's brother.
One of the university's first black football players in 1971 and now the running backs coach of the Green Bay Packers, Croom lost that coaching race to Mike Shula, a white former Alabama quarterback and the son of NFL coaching legend Don Shula.
"An African-American will probably never be hired at Alabama, because nobody there has the guts to pull the trigger," said John Mitchell, the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive line coach and a black teammate of Croom's on the 1971 Alabama team. "For years, they have told African-American players and coaches to get experience and get a resume ...
"I know Mike Shula, but Mike Shula's resume shouldn't be in the same room with Sylvester Croom's."
Croom won't speculate if race played a role in the hiring process. He said that the support of former Crimson Tide teammates and players was a reward in itself. He said Alabama athletics director Mal Moore heard many players, most of them white, offer their support of him during the interview process.
"Regardless of what's happened in the past, regardless of what happened in this coaching process, my home's in Alabama," Croom said, beginning to quote the song My Home's in Alabama.
"Southern born, Southern bred, no matter where I lay my head, that's where my home is, and always will be."
The Rev. Jesse Jackson publicly criticized Alabama after Shula's hiring. But after a lifetime of learning life's lessons, sometimes the hard way, Croom sees it differently.
"If 99 people of the same race mistreat me badly, No. 100 may be the guy that makes a change in my life," he said. "But I don't know who No. 100 is, so you have to be fair to everybody."
Croom would have been the first black head football coach in Southeastern Conference history. Although disappointed, he talks about the positives to come out of his interview.
"I'm happy to have been considered, and things have changed," he said. "Not fast enough in all areas, but there's no questions that a lot of people's attitudes have changed.
"Even since the process of the head-coaching search, they have looked at my qualifications and will continue to look at minorities, not only in coaching, but in all businesses."
Croom knows, perhaps better than anyone, that a generation ago even considering him for the job would have been unthinkable. It is progress, and after what he has lived through, progress is appreciated.
"My father, when he was growing up in the late '30s, was almost lynched," said Croom. "He and my uncles had gone rabbit hunting, and had blood on their clothes, and a white girl had been raped.
"They were coming back from hunting in the woods, and she said, 'Black guys did it,' and they were the first black guys they saw. They put them in jail and the crowd was coming to lynch them."
Sylvester Croom Sr. survived that incident when a local minister convinced the authorities they had the wrong people, and they were hustled out of town to Birmingham. Later, their names were cleared.
Sylvester Croom Jr. was born in 1954. He said while growing up he never found himself in the kind of physical danger that his father faced. But living in the Deep South during the civil rights battles wasn't easy.
His life, for all practical purposes, was segregated until he was in ninth grade, which turned out to be the most memorable and, at times, difficult, year of his youth.
Until then, almost everything was segregated. Whites and blacks had separate churches, schools, restaurants, hospital waiting rooms and movie theaters, among other things.
"The one thing that aggravates me, and always did, was going to bathrooms that had 'Men, Women, Colored,' " Croom said. "That stands out more than anything else. Because to me, what that said was I was less than human. That bothered me, and it does to this day."
When Croom was growing up, Robert Shelton, the imperial wizard of the largest Ku Klux Klan organization in the country, lived in Tuscaloosa. The Klan's presence in Alabama was evident.
As a ninth-grader, Sylvester Croom was the only black student in his Spanish class. When it was time to do a group project, other students wouldn't let him in their group.
He got a passing grade from a compassionate teacher who knew why he did the project himself.
Croom would rather dwell on the uplifting stories from ninth grade. A few of those memorable incidents still make him emotional.
After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, black students were brought into the school's auditorium and told they could not miss school to observe Dr. King's funeral, even if they had their parents' permission. Classwork from that day could not be made up, they were told.
"The thing I always laugh about is if they hadn't told us we couldn't go, we probably all would have been there (at school)," Croom said. "But when they said we couldn't go, it was on. Nobody showed up to school that day."
Croom said his grade in algebra dropped from an A to a C because he missed a test the day of Dr. King's funeral, but he still appreciates his teacher's comments on the issue.
"When she announced the grades, she made reference and said, 'You don't deserve this, it's not right, but I have to do it,' " Croom said. "I told her then that I understand. But I appreciated the fact she had the guts enough to say it was wrong."
Then there was Stan Bradford and his mother. Croom said his fellow ninth-grade teammates had to go to the high school for spring football practice, three miles away. The first day, the black students walked.
"The white players had parents pick them up," Croom said. "Our parents worked. We didn't know anything about the idea of a stay-at-home mom."
The second day, during the long walk, a car pulled over. Bradford, a white quarterback on Croom's ninth-grade team, popped out and asked his black teammates if they wanted a ride.
They piled into the car, two or three in the front, a few more in the back, while Bradford's mother drove.
"We were hesitant to actually go, because one of the things in that society was, a black man couldn't ride in the front seat with a white woman," Croom said. "That couldn't happen. And I know there was no way she didn't get criticized for that.
"And they took us to practice every day the rest of that spring. I have never met her since that time, but she doesn't know how much that meant to me. Because I know she took on that one. That was hard. You appreciate that."
The University of Alabama was a centerpiece in the fight for civil rights. On June 11, 1963, Gov. George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse doors, trying to keep two black students from enrolling at the then all-white school and defending his credo: "Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever."
It wasn't until President John F. Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and deployed them to the university that Wallace stepped aside and let the two students in.
Croom was almost 9 years old, watching the confrontation on television. His house was only a 10-minute drive from the campus, but the university wasn't a welcomed place for blacks.
"You just drove through the campus. You didn't walk around on it. You didn't hang out there in any way," Croom said.
He laughed at the memory of his freshman year at Alabama, when teammates from out of town would ask him where certain buildings on campus were, knowing he was from Tuscaloosa. He had no better idea than any of them.
"I might as well have been going to Southern Cal," Croom said. "That's how far it was from my neighborhood. Even though it was only 10 miles away, it might as well have been going to the moon. It was that far away. That's how separated and segregated it was."
It was open when Croom was ready to go to college. In the 1960s, almost every young boy in Alabama, black or white, dreamed of the same thing.
"Any kid that grew up in the state of Alabama wanted to go play at Alabama," said John Mitchell, one of the first two black players to play for Alabama in 1971. "I was no different than any other white kid. I watched them on TV and listened to them on radio."
They all wanted to taste the success the Crimson Tide was having under legendary coach Paul "Bear" Bryant.
"When we were initially growing up, we told people we would play one day for Coach Bryant," Kelvin Croom said. "Realistically, in the back of our minds, it was Alabama A&M (where their father had played) where we were going to be playing."
Wilbur Jackson, in 1970, was the first black player recruited to Alabama. Mitchell transferred from junior college the following spring. Croom was a high school junior before he considered it a realistic goal to play football at Alabama. He was one of three black players in the 1971 recruiting class.
Freshmen were ineligible to play when Croom got to Alabama, but he earned three letters. Like Mitchell and Jackson in their senior seasons, Croom's teammates elected him captain for the 1974 season.
"You look back, and from the number of black guys on the team, there weren't many," said Rick Davis, Croom's fellow 1974 Alabama captain, and now his agent and close friend. "So the white guys were voting for them. And it was based on respect, the guys that your teammates respected and felt like they were a leader, and Sly was."
Croom became an all-American center. Today, the Crimson Tide awards the "Sylvester Croom Commitment to Excellence Award" to one of its players every year.
What a change from 40 years ago, when Gov. Wallace preached segregation and physically tried to bar black students from entering.
"I'll never forget when I went out there to register the first time, we used to register in that auditorium," Croom said. "I went right there and stood in that door. I said to myself, 'George, not forever.' "
Croom refuses to be bitter.
That attitude comes from his late father, one of the 40 civil-rights pioneers recently honored by the University of Alabama during the ceremony for the 40th anniversary of Wallace's stand. Sylvester Croom Sr., who for years was Alabama's team chaplain, always fought for change.
When then-Alabama defensive coordinator Ken Donahue came to the Croom house to recruit Sylvester, Croom said his dad told the coach: "I don't want you to give him anything because he's black, but I don't want you taking anything away from him because he's black."
He was tough, but fair, said Croom.
"(Sylvester Sr.) gave me a vision of a man of physical strength, a strength of character, and a man with a tender heart that loved people," Croom said. "He was a tough man, but he had a good heart."
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