DURHAM -- A little more than 25 years ago, a made-for-TV movie was released called Grambling's White Tiger. It was based on the true story of a quarterback named Jim Gregory, who was the first white player to suit up for Eddie Robinson's storied football team. In the film, Gregory faced resentment from black teammates who wouldn't accept the idea of a white on a black college football team.
And when he went shopping a few miles away near the Louisiana Tech campus, he faced resentment from white townsfolk -- who also wouldn't accept the idea of a white on a black college football team. Today, Durham's N.C.
Central University and most other public historically black colleges have white athletes. On the face of it, most at NCCU are happy to be Eagles. It's actually a rare NCCU sport that hasn't had at least one white player fill a key role in an important victory.
And the general NCCU vibe is that people aren't as concerned about black and white any more as they are about Maroon Gray. With NCCU moving to NCAA Division I next academic year, folks around the athletic department don't seem to care what skin color a student has -- as long as he or she can help the Eagles win, do well in the classroom and present a good image inside and outside the arena. The color line was broken in the NCCU athletic hall of fame in October, when veteran sports information director Kyle Serba was inducted as a contributor.
And the door to the hall likely will be open on the first try for cross country superstar Katerina Glosova, the blonde Czech who won four straight CIAA individual women's titles from 1999-2002. Currently, the most accomplished white athlete at NCCU is junior kicker Brandon Gilbert of the football team. The Graham native, named a second-team All-American in NCAA Division II, didn't miss an extra point all season and kicked a career-long 51-yard field goal at the horn to win the CIAA championship football game.
That was one year after he had kicked a shorter field goal in the closing seconds to win the 2005 CIAA championship and was named the game's MVP. But others besides Gilbert are helping NCCU teams win. Jennifer Hukill, a junior from Greensboro who transferred from Lander University, is one of three tri-captains elected by her women's basketball teammates.
Californian Ashley Stout, a senior who transferred from Fresno State, was the No. 4 singles player and on the No. 2 doubles team in men's tennis last season.
Michelle Ishida, a freshman from Pasadena, Calif., whose father is of Japanese descent, will pitch for the women's softball team in the spring. And junior Roxboro native Wesley Brown and sophomore Winston-Salem native Robert Landis are two of seven whites coach Henry White expects to suit up for the Eagles' brand-new baseball team in the spring.
I told people all along I'm not just recruiting black athletes, White said. He said Bowie State has fielded predominantly white baseball teams in the past, while the baseball teams at Elizabeth City State and Virginia State have been heavily integrated. Except for baseball players being around their teammates, the white students say they're careful not to gather.
And when they turned out for a photo, several of them didn't seem familiar with their fellow white Eagles in different sports. Most of them say they live in the dorms and spend a normal amount of time socializing with fellow students. And a couple of them just can't help being campus celebrities.
A lot of students will say hello and wave to me, Gilbert said. But the white students usually don't say anything. Added Hukill, Sometimes people I don't even know will wave and say, 'Hey Jennifer!
' when I'm walking around campus. Gilbert said he didn't even know NCCU was a historically black school when then-assistant coach Perez Boulware recruited the multi-sport athlete out of Graham High. But the coach sold him on the program, and a recruiting trip to a basketball game didn't shake the deal.
Not that many schools were looking at me, said Gilbert, a physical education major who has scored 225 career points and is within seven of the NCCU career record set by receiver Robert Clark (83-86). But I liked what Coach Boulware was saying, I like the fact I could be close to home, and I had a good time at the basketball game. Like Gilbert and Hukill, Person High graduate Brown -- who began college at preppy Lynchburg College -- was used to having plenty of black classmates.
So was Ishida, whose Marshall Fundamental Secondary School has a typical California metro demographic mixing black, white, Latino and Asian students in large doses. She said one thing she wanted to do in selecting a college was to get far away from home. When I found out NCCU was mostly black, it didn't faze me, Ishida said.
I just don't pay much attention to race. But Landis graduated from nearly all-white Woodland Baptist Christian School in Winston-Salem before attending Wilkes Community College for a year. And the biggest change probably came for Stout, who grew up on a farm outside the primarily Swedish-American town of Laton, Calif.
-- population 1,236. A lot of people here just call me 'The White Boy,' Stout said with a laugh. I'm used to it.
The white Eagles certainly aren't facing the level of disdain Gregory did, much less the outright hate the late black legend Jackie Robinson had to endure when he broke baseball's color line with the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. Price said he has heard Larry Bird out of the stands at road games. Gilbert said when the Eagles played at Lenoir-Rhyne last season, one fan looked at him and guessed correctly, You must be the kicker.
Hukill said she heard out of the stands at a road game, I bet the white girl can shoot 3-pointers. She is fitting in well with her teammates, occasionally wearing her hair in Bo Derek-style cornrows styled by fellow tri-captain Brittany McGhee. Brown said one thing that attracted him to NCCU was the opportunity to play home games at Durham Bulls Athletic Park.
Landis agreed, but said that if hometown Winston-Salem State had started its program a year earlier he would probably now be a Ram instead of an Eagle. They're all, of course, facing at least a little culture shock, although probably not as much as men's basketball coach Henry Dickerson did when he and other black students in Beckley, W.Va.
, were merged into Woodrow Wilson High in the 1960s. And not as much as Hukill's coach Joli Robinson, whose Baptist family decided to put her in a minority at Charlotte Catholic High in the late '60s to further her basketball career. Dickerson said he got the business from plenty of fellow black folks in Beckley when he decided to play for predominantly white Morris Harvey College (now the University of Charleston) instead of historically black West Virginia State.
When you pick a college, you have to do what's best for you, said Dickerson, who later spent several seasons playing in the NBA. And that's what the white Eagles are doing -- playing ball and getting financial help with a college degree.
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