Race and Football in America: The Life and Legacy of George Taliaferro - Part 1

Note: IU Athletics is partnering with IU Press to share chapters from some of their recently-published books on IU Sports. The following is a chapter from Dawn Knight's book, Race and Football in America: The Life and Legacy of George Taliaferro, published by IU Press in 2019. The rest of this chapter will appear in the coming days on IUHoosiers.com. Additional details about this book can be found here.

The drive from Gary to Bloomington is a scenic one. Just outside of Gary are miles of flat acres with the occasional white farmhouse scattered amid the countless corn and soybean fields so often associated with Indiana. As soon as Taliaferro was south of Indianapolis, however, the scenery abruptly changed, much like his life was going to. He was in the middle of southern Indiana's rolling hills. In the fall people come from all over to see the vibrant autumn shades and the covered bridges tucked away in this hilly landscape. And because this is Indiana, it isn't difficult to find basketball hoops above the doors of century-old barns.

Taliaferro was aware of the striking difference in the scenery, yet he was blissfully unaware of the many personal changes in store for him, which would begin with the upcoming football season.

This bus driver doesn't even know where Bloomington is, Taliaferro thought as he looked out the window at altogether unfamiliar scenery. In high school, he had played a game in Bloomington, but he didn't remember it looking anything like this. He was certain that the Greyhound driver's route was not the same. He looked around to see if other passengers were worried too. Since they all seemed content, he decided to keep quiet, even though he was sure they were going the wrong direction. He looked out the window again to pass the time. He didn't want to miss a thing, especially once they had gotten to those rolling hills. He had also come to Bloomington once on a recruiting trip, but it had been raining and he had been with other athletes and coaches, so he hadn't paid as much attention. This time, he couldn't take his eyes off the changing landscape, despite his worry that they were lost.

"That's how naive I was," he said, remembering how surprised he had been to discover that the game he had played in Bloomington was in Illinois, not Indiana. That wasn't the only shock his arrival at Indiana University would bring.

The self-assurance he had displayed in his interview with Norman S. Werry was shaken when Taliaferro arrived in Bloomington in June 1945. The Greyhound bus finally came to a stop at Tenth and Walnut, where he disembarked and stretched his lean frame. Then he collected his things and got a taxi, not realizing that the home where he would be staying was just a few blocks away, at Eighth and Dunn. Taliaferro had graduated from Gary Roosevelt just a week earlier, on June 14. His early arrival in Bloomington was due to an invitation from Coach McMillin, who wanted to help ease the transition from high school to college for his young players. Arriving early gave the players the chance to learn, prior to the start of classes, the location on Indiana University's sprawling campus of the classroom buildings, practice fields, and dining areas. That way, they could devote their full attention to football when it was time to start the season. The transition to college life, however, would prove more difficult for McMillin's black players. For them, it was not just a matter of figuring out where their classes were. They also had to adjust to life on a segregated campus, to the invisible line that ran like a thick, ugly wall through Bloomington, cutting it in half, making much of it inaccessible to IU's black students. Taliaferro wouldn't take long to discover that he was in unfamiliar territory.

Soon after he arrived on campus, he reported to the football stadium, where he was ushered into a line of freshman players picking up football gear. To his surprise, he was the shortest and lightest person in the line of would-be players. Standing five foot eleven and weighing 195 pounds, he found himself in line in front of Pat Kane, who stood six foot three and weighed 210 pounds, and Tom Schwartz, a six-foot-five 215-pounder. Directly in front of Taliaferro was future football team captain John Goldsberry, who was six foot one and weighed 230 pounds. Their size difference, while apparent to everyone, seemed magnified to Taliaferro.

Suddenly he wasn't the confident athlete he had been as one of Gary Roosevelt's stars. He couldn't even fake self-assurance.

Should I really be here? he wondered. They are taller and bigger than any football players I know. Will I fit in here? He had to voice his doubts aloud.

"Are they all the same age as me?" he asked Coach McMillin.

McMillin nodded in reply.

For the first time, the former Gary Roosevelt star wasn't the picture of cool confidence. "I am in the wrong place," he finally said to Coach McMillin. All of them were right, Taliaferro thought, reminding himself of the Gary fans who had doubted his decision to attend, who had vocalized doubts the moment they heard that Indiana was recruiting him. He remembered Werry's question too, and his confident reply that he would get along just fine.

It was to be the first of many times that Coach Bo McMillin would reassure Taliaferro, both on and off the football field.

"You were thoroughly scouted," he assured the shaken Taliaferro.

"There is a place for you on Indiana University's football team." It wasn't just an empty statement to appease him. It reassured Taliaferro because he could hear the sincerity as McMillin told him that he looked forward to the role Taliaferro would play on his football team. There was a reason McMillin had dispatched Rooster Coffee to recruit him. McMillin knew football and had made it a point to pursue Taliaferro. He knew Taliaferro belonged on Indiana's football team. This reassurance wasn't enough to completely alleviate Taliaferro's anxiety, though.

He had only been there one week when he asked McMillin, "When are we going to move into the dormitory?" McMillin explained that he wouldn't be moving into the dorm, that they weren't open to black students. Taliaferro, who understood that an education was more than reading books, became upset. He would be deprived of the experience of meeting people from all over the world and learning about their cultures because he wouldn't be living with them in the dorms. He called his father and told him he wanted to go home.

"Can you tell me why?" Robert Taliaferro asked.

Taliaferro explained. He couldn't go to the theater, swim in the pools, eat in the restaurants, live in the dorms, or sit in the front of the classrooms. He couldn't attend movies except on weekends, and at the commons, there was only one table, marked "colored," where he was permitted to sit. The table had ten spaces, so "if there were eleven blacks, one of them could not eat in that place," he explained.

His father asked, "Can I ask you one question? Is there another reason you are at Indiana University?" Then he hung up the phone. Robert Taliaferro, who smoked Chesterfield cigarettes or King Edward cigars and spoke very little, was his son's hero. He had raised five children on twenty-two dollars a week and was the first African American foreman at the steel mill because of his work ethic. Taliaferro thought that if anyone would have understood, it would have been his father. He cried for hours after his father hung up on him. It hurt more than anything he had experienced, Taliaferro explained, "because I thought of all the people on the planet Earth who would understand what it felt like to be discriminated against, it would be my father." Knowing that his father's life as an adolescent in Tennessee had been fraught with racism, he had been sure he would sympathize.

At some point Taliaferro must have finally fallen asleep. When he woke, he had more clarity regarding his situation. It was precisely because of the discrimination his father had faced that he was so insistent on Taliaferro remaining at Indiana. What his father had been trying to tell him, he realized, was that his football scholarship would enable him to get a college degree, something that would present opportunities for him later, keeping him from a life at the steel mill. "All I had to do was to apply myself and be educated," he decided. The rest, he would just have to deal with.

At least for the moment.

While he may not have felt that he belonged on campus, any lingering doubts about whether he belonged on the football team were taken care of a short time later. At the first practice of the season, Taliaferro was asked to run one of McMillin's favorite plays. The T formation is just what it sounds like: a football formation that lines the players up in the shape of a T. At the bottom of the T is the quarterback, and three running backs are placed at the top of the T: one on each end and one in the middle. This formation, Taliaferro said, had revolutionized football. It featured the use of a forward pass and put enormous pressure on the defense by spreading the offense's ability to use the entire field in a short amount of time. According to him, it also made the game more enjoyable to the fans, who could more easily follow the ball and who saw more scoring with the T formation.

Once everyone was doing the new T formation, Coach McMillin, known for his innovative style, had to change it to make it unique and interesting again. So he modified it. Instead of placing one running back on each end and one in the middle, McMillin would run a different version, his own Cockeyed T. For the Cockeyed T, he did not space the running backs evenly. Instead, he used an unbalanced line, shifting the quarterback right behind the guard and moving the right halfback to the outside end. The fullback was spotted behind the quarterback, and the left halfback was four yards behind the center. It seemed to work.

"McMillin's Cockeyed T just baffled defenses," Taliaferro said.

Wanting to see what Taliaferro could do, McMillin put him in the formation. Taliaferro, who lined up as a tailback, handled the ball like the quarterback in the Cockeyed T. The ball was snapped to him, and he could pass it, hand it off, or run with it, depending on the play. The first time Taliaferro ran a play in the Cockeyed T, he kept the ball and ran with it, running eighty yards for a touchdown. McMillin called for the same play again, wanting to see if it was just a fluke. Again, Taliaferro ran eighty yards for a touchdown.

"Turn a little to the right, George," McMillin said after watching the two successive eighty-yard runs.

"But, Coach, how was it for distance?" Taliaferro replied, laughing. His execution of the play was, needless to say, a pleasant surprise for McMillin, and it promptly became McMillin's favorite play for him. "Let George do it," McMillin would yell when he called for the Cockeyed T. Despite his comparatively small stature, Taliaferro had earned a starting position for the Indiana Hurryin' Hoosiers, the Cream and Crimson.

While McMillin encouraged Taliaferro on the field, he also made a lasting impression on him in other ways. Coach McMillin's character affected Taliaferro, who noticed that his coach, among other things, refused to arrange class attendance, as other coaches were rumored to do. "My coach believed in winning, but never at all costs," Taliaferro said. McMillin's positive attitude also kept his players grounded. He pushed them on the football field, but he also pushed them to get an education.

In fact, McMillin pushed Taliaferro harder in school than his own mother and father, his parents who said to him every day, "We love you. You must be educated," because they understood that education provided a way to avoid a long life of working in the steel mills. Taliaferro wondered if McMillin pushed so hard because the coach himself had left school without getting a degree, though he went back to finish it later. Or perhaps McMillin did not want people to perceive Taliaferro as just some "black dumb jock." Whatever his reason, the coach profoundly affected Taliaferro. "Bo McMillin changed my life," Taliaferro stated of the impact their relationship ultimately had on him.

There were many facets to Alvin "Bo" McMillin, a man who, biographer Bob Cook wrote, did not know his own age and had no birth certificate. The 175-pound McMillin was a fairly small man, in his forties, with a full head of gray hair. He had a button nose, big ears, and a Texas drawl. His childhood in Texas had been a struggle. His was a life of poverty, and he had to work hard at a young age to help his family. It may have been this childhood that forged in him a strong desire to champion the underdog— because, McMillin said, the underdog's "got something to fight for." As quarterback for Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, Bo McMillin was legendary. In 1921, his thirty-yard touchdown run was the only score of the game against a Harvard team that had been unbeaten for five years. The win by the Centre College Prayin' Colonels over Harvard is still considered one of the greatest upsets in college football, and McMillin's sole touchdown had earned him a ride on his team's shoulders. To sweeten the victory, McMillin, who didn't smoke or drink but who was known to gamble (the rumor was that he did it to help pay his college tuition), had even placed a winning bet on the upset. According to an article by Valarie Ziegler, his touchdown was the most famous one in Centre College football history, and during McMillin's entire five-year career at Centre, the team was only beaten three times.

His fame continued as a coach when he brought success to other underdogs. He had managed to bring winning seasons to Centenary College in Louisiana, Geneva College in Pennsylvania, and Kansas State University. A fourteen-year stint at Indiana University before he moved on to professional football would be no different. His first four seasons at Indiana also brought the first winning seasons the Hoosiers had seen in years. With success, though, McMillin also brought a strong sense of humor. Cook wrote that when the coach came to Indiana, knowing the state's fascination with basketball, he had said: "Oh, I love basketball too. I played it in high school. And I coached it. Like Bob Zuppke [Illinois coach] always said, 'It's a great recreational sport and something to do between the end of football and the beginning of spring practice.'" According to Taliaferro, McMillin could play any sport, including golf, pool, and even table tennis. The coach rarely cussed, but the players could tell if he was really upset when he would say, "Go piss in a lake!" Each year his ability to keep the Old Oaken Bucket at Indiana University earned McMillin more respect from Hoosier fans.

The Oaken Bucket game was created out of the high-spirited rivalry between two major Indiana universities, Indiana and Purdue. The two teams had been playing each other for more than thirty years, since 1891, when in 1925 a joint committee of the two schools decided to further the rivalry and excitement of the annual game. To do so, they decided that there should be a traditional trophy to go to the winner of the annual match between the two rival football teams. The committee decided on a well bucket as the trophy because it was something typically Hoosier, something everyone could associate with Indiana.

Each year, possession of the wooden well bucket would go to the winner of the match. A link of either a block letter I or block letter P to represent the winning school would be attached to the trophy. The block letter links would easily enable the schools and their respective fans to determine who had held possession of the bucket most often, another way to sweeten the victory and intensify the rivalry. The first Oaken Bucket game was played at the dedication of the original Memorial Stadium on Indiana University's Bloomington campus. It ended in a 0–0 tie. Until McMillin came along, Purdue had managed to add more block letters to the trophy than Indiana. With McMillin at the helm, though, the Hoosiers began to catch up. Under McMillin's tutelage, the "po li'l boys," as McMillin called his team, earned more Is for the bucket than Purdue did Ps. It was even rumored that his contract was ripped up after each Oaken Bucket game win and a new contract offering him more money would be signed. In jest, McMillin even began referring to the Old Oaken Bucket as his "meal ticket," according to Cook.

The football field was not the only place McMillin was assertive.

McMillin was also ahead of his time when it came to civil rights. At a time when Big Ten basketball had a gentleman's agreement not to recruit black players, and while some other Big Ten football teams were without black players altogether, McMillin was not afraid to be different. It was not just black players he was willing to defend but anyone McMillin saw treated unfairly.

In the McMillin biography, Cook recounts one incident involving Indiana's head trainer, Dwayne "Spike" Dixon, who had a noticeable limp. Dixon's first time on the field during a football game later brought complaints from a fan who called to voice his opinion about having a "crippled" trainer. Cook wrote that the assistant coaches took the phone away from McMillin after he yelled into the phone, "You object to what? His limp? I hadn't noticed it, does he limp? Look, that limp is a result of a bout with Polio . . ." And even when most schools, like other major Indiana universities Purdue and Notre Dame, did not have black players on the roster, "Bo didn't just accept them. Early on, he sought them just as actively as he did other prospects," Cook wrote. McMillin's pursuit of George Taliaferro was just one example. Cook also recounted an incident at an away game in Kentucky, in which McMillin changed the team's hotel because his black players were not permitted to stay there. This was often the case when teams from the North played teams in the South. Most of the time, the team ended up staying in two different hotels, one for the black players and one for the other members of the team, or the black players would stay in private residences. Although many people just accepted it as the way things were, McMillin wasn't like most people. He used his position to facilitate change, to fight for his players. When he was told that his black players couldn't stay in the hotel, he responded, "Then forget them. Find a hotel that wants us. That's a thing of the past," Cook recounted. Taliaferro recalled that he and his IU teammates, unlike most teams, were never split into different hotels on road trips. That would not be the case later in his career, when he would play for the army, and even later in professional football.

Despite McMillin's unfailing support of his black players, Taliaferro still had to face the color barriers that were drawn across Bloomington, Indiana, in the 1940s. After living in Gary, he experienced quite a culture shock. Racial tension was prevalent, even on his own football team. Taliaferro remembered a conversation he had with one teammate, an All-State football player out of Muncie, who asked him if he was All-State as well.

When Taliaferro told him that he wasn't, the player wanted to know how he had managed to get a scholarship without that honor. During the conversation, the teammate had also made it clear that he wasn't accustomed to working with black players.

Taliaferro decided not to argue but to let his ability speak for him. He just looked at his teammate and said, "I'll see you on the field."…There were some players who, Taliaferro said, "just didn't want to be bothered with me. They treated me like I was nobody, nobody." There was one player who was more vocal than others about his attitude toward the black players, Taliaferro said, but for the most part, the racism involved pretending that the black players simply did not exist. To Taliaferro, that was worse.

A racial etiquette that reinforced the idea that African Americans were second-class citizens continued to exist into the 1940s.

This informal set of rules included things like refusing to shake hands, a symbol of equality, with a black person. Although it was different from the legal discrimination that existed with segregation, it could be just as devastating if not more so. It was this code of behavior that affected Taliaferro the most. The idea of being treated as if he didn't exist at all was worse to him than the more deliberate racism that included racial slurs and "separate but equal" facilities, because with those, at least he existed. It was for this reason that it was so notable when Carl Biesecker had crossed the football field to shake his hand after that high school game—it made him feel like he was somebody.

Although the subtle forms of racism were difficult, the blatant forms of racism were hard on Taliaferro and his teammates too.

The black players on the team, Taliaferro said, knew one assistant coach as the coach who would not recommend them for positions on the team. They understood that no matter how talented they were or how hard they worked, they would never do well enough to please him. His apparent prejudice was evident when classes started at Indiana University in August 1945, just a couple of weeks after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The first day that Taliaferro had to juggle his class schedule with football practice, he was twenty minutes late to the football field. A required class was only available at a time that conflicted with football. It ended at three o'clock, the same time practice started. Although Taliaferro had tried to get into a different section, they were all closed.

He had no choice but to be late to practice, as his education was his main priority. When Taliaferro showed up at 3:20 p.m., he was reprimanded by this particular assistant coach. Taliaferro tried to explain why he was late, but the coach would not listen. "He just kept yelling," Taliaferro said.

Hearing about the dispute, McMillin came over to see what was going on, and unlike the assistant coach, McMillin actually listened. Taliaferro said, "I explained the situation, and McMillin looked at the assistant coach and told him to get me registered in a different section of the class and to get on with practice." Taliaferro was somehow transferred into a different section of the class that he had been told was closed. With the incident behind him, Taliaferro decided to move on. He knew that dwelling on the matter wouldn't do him any good. The assistant coach continued to say and do things to try to get to Taliaferro and his black teammates, but Taliaferro ignored them. He was determined not to let the assistant coach bother him, not to give him the satisfaction of having accomplished that. "I learned [football] from the guy, and that was, after all, why I was there," Taliaferro said.

Incidents like that became motivation for him. Every time something like that happened, he resolved to succeed. He wanted to be the best athlete he could be. As an athlete, he had the opportunity to do what he couldn't do anywhere else. It was his chance "to go against the white guy," he said. It was the only way he could physically demonstrate his anger against discrimination without getting in trouble. Taliaferro fought racism the only way he could: with his performance on the athletic field. At Indiana University, he experienced both forms of racism, the form that existed in the unwritten etiquette that prevailed in race relations, and the system of segregation that existed in Bloomington, Indiana, at the time. The optimistic outlook with which Taliaferro approached life was evident in his reaction to racism in whatever form. "This was a problem they had, not a problem I had," he said. "We have more things in common than we do not," Taliaferro continued.

"Fingers, toes, we wear clothes," he said, demonstrating the fact that, when it comes down to it, we're all just members of the human race.

While those like the one assistant coach made life more difficult for black players, there were also people who made going to Indiana University worthwhile for Taliaferro. One such person, of course, was Coach McMillin. "Bo McMillin's interest in my welfare motivated me to stay despite all the crap," Taliaferro explained. His support system went beyond the coach, though.

A number of people influenced his life and motivated him to stay at Indiana University, despite the racism. Another member of this support system was another assistant coach, John Kovatch.

Kovatch, a former Northwestern football player, was aware of the difficulty Taliaferro was experiencing adjusting to life at IU, so he became a source of constant and steady support.

This network of support and Taliaferro's desire to make racism his motivation for success helped. Despite this, though, there were hard days, days when he couldn't shake the effects of racism on his psyche. In those moments, Kovatch would remind Taliaferro that he was there because he was capable of contributing to the team and that he should make the best of his experience.

Teammate Howard Brown played an important role, as well. On days when he noticed that Taliaferro was having a harder time than usual, he would reassure him. It didn't take much from Brown, just a simple "Everything's going to be all right," to keep Taliaferro going.

The African American students on campus also formed a support system. Whether undergraduate or graduate students, they all stuck together. Lehman Adams, a graduate student and friend of Taliaferro, explained how these relationships formed: "How do you become friends when you're a few black students among thousands? You become friends—you're forced to!" Being a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity also provided support for Taliaferro during these times. Founded in 1911 at Indiana University, the fraternity was intended to help the few black students who not only were rejected by the white majority on campus and in town but were also dissuaded from remaining there. Kappa Alpha Psi's mission was to provide the support needed for black male students on campus to remain there and become successful, despite the many obstacles put in their way. More than three decades after its founding, this fraternity continued to help black students on campus, students like George Taliaferro who, like their predecessors, continued to face racism and segregation.

About sixty years later, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick would become a fraternity brother.

The Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity house was nothing more than a kitchen and dining area, but fraternity brothers who lived in the house actually lived in those areas because everyone ate at the home of John and Ruth Mays, the unofficial union building for black students. While Taliaferro never resided in the fraternity house, he was an active member of the organization. He needed reassurance, and he needed friends, not just because of what he was going through with teammates but also because of what he was experiencing while living in a segregated Bloomington.

The town of Bloomington was seemingly divided in half.

The east side of town, the "gown" side, was the university half of the town. The "town" side was just that, the town side. The line drawn between the two also marked the color line in Bloomington, with African Americans limited to the town side. There was a covenant in Bloomington at the time, Taliaferro said, that no black people could live on the east side of town.

All of the black football players, including Taliaferro, lived at 418 East Eighth Street, the home of John and Ruth Mays. That is where Taliaferro was sitting on the steps on August 15, the day Japan surrendered to the Allies, marking the end of World War II.

The Mayses' home, just off campus, was considered to be on the gown side of town. Because black students were not housed on campus, homes off campus, like the Mayses' home and the Lincoln House, in which black female students lived, were authorized by IU president Wells as university facilities. They had the same rules as the dorms on campus, and black students on scholarship, like Taliaferro, were given a monthly stipend to pay for their room and board, since they weren't permitted to live in the on-campus housing. The room and board of the white students on scholarship went through the bursar's office, like the money for tuition and books. Taliaferro's stipend for room and board was fifty-two dollars a month. He paid around forty dollars to Mr. and Mrs. Mays.

This left him plenty of money for his other expenses, he said.

A family home that had been converted, the Mayses' home was home to single, black male students. The diminutive house held anywhere from twelve to sixteen people, with three or four people in each small room, which could really only comfortably fit two people. It was also rumored that there were a couple of ghosts living in the basement, although Taliaferro never made the trip down the dank basement steps to verify their existence.

Also, because black students were not welcome at restaurants on campus, the Mayses' home had become the unofficial union, serving as both hangout and cafeteria, meaning that even more people were often crowded into the already-small space.

Making the living situation more interesting was Mr. Mays himself. "He was always angry, and he drank anything he could get his hands on, and he was always going to put somebody out.

He'd say, 'I'll put you out of here!'" Taliaferro said. Mrs. Mays, the reverse of her husband, "was an angel," he said. She would just shake her head when her husband started yelling. Taliaferro and the other football players learned to pay Mr. Mays little attention.

"He was so much smaller than most of us anyway," he explained.

The threats never amounted to any more than that. Despite the cramped quarters and occasional drama, Taliaferro considered himself lucky to have a room at the Mayses' home. Black men who did not get a spot there had to live on the west side of Bloomington, the town side, even farther from campus than the Mayses' home. Lehman Adams was one of the unlucky ones who did not get a spot at the Mayses' home.

Adams arrived on campus before classes started so he could find a place to live. Although he tried everywhere, he could not find an available room anywhere in the segregated town. Desperate, having already registered for classes, he went to an adviser to ask for help, which got him nowhere. The adviser explained that there were no options, since he wasn't permitted to live on campus. If there were no places on the town side for Adams to rent, he was told, he might just have to go back home. The adviser, who didn't seem too concerned with Adams's problem, said there was nothing he could do. Although angry, disappointed, and frustrated, Adams was not deterred. He was determined to attend IU and to get an education, so he spent the night at a different friend's house each night until he finally found a room to rent in the private home of an African American couple. While he was happy to have found living arrangements, living on the west side, the town side, was difficult for students like Adams. He had to walk about four miles from the 900 block on the west side of town to the 800 block on the east side of town every day, rain or snow, to get to his classes.

Equally difficult for black students at Indiana University was finding a place to eat. It was especially difficult for those who did not live in the Lincoln House or the Mayses' home. For meals, they had to either leave campus and go back to the west side of town or eat at the Mayses' home. There was no restaurant on the east side of town, the gown side, that welcomed black customers.

The Mayses' home was closer than the west side of town, but it was still a couple of miles from campus. Every meal was a hassle for Indiana University's black students. Taliaferro understood that his was a more fortunate situation than most. Still, it bothered him that he had been actively recruited by a university where he was not permitted to live in the university dorms and where he had a hard time getting his meals. It just wasn't right. He knew it, and it gnawed at him every time he ate a meal in Bloomington.

Every day at lunch, for example, Taliaferro would have to walk a couple of miles from his class at University School, across the extensive campus, to the Mayses' home, where he would have to scarf down his food. He didn't have time to talk. He barely had time to sit down. Although he shoved the food in his mouth as quickly as he could, he still had to sprint the two miles back to campus to make it to his next class on time.

Getting a haircut was no easier. The barbershop was located next to the segregated Princess Theater. Although it was owned by Mr. Shawntee, a black man, and was just a few blocks from the Mayses' home, Taliaferro was not permitted inside because it was located on the gown side of Bloomington. Instead, Taliaferro had to make an appointment to go to Mr. Shawntee's home. But his home was located on the opposite side of town from the Mayses' home, so getting a haircut meant a three-mile walk instead of the three-block walk to the barbershop.

"That was my world. Small world. Very small," Taliaferro said.

But to him, these were just inconveniences he had to put up with in order to get an education. In order to deal with his frustration so that it wouldn't consume him, he had to find something positive in the experience. Dealing with the racism and segregation that existed in Bloomington may have actually kept the black students from flunking out of the university, he decided. "We didn't have any place to go or anything to do, and therefore we studied," he explained. The black students would get together, sometimes having dances and parties at one of the private homes they lived in, but they were so confined by space and location that they simply could not do too much socializing. They could not overindulge in an activity that had been detrimental to many of the white students. "I cannot remember a black student failing at Indiana University when I was at school. Being discriminated against in Bloomington, Indiana, was a small price for me to pay to get a quality education. It has prepared me for the world," Taliaferro explained. In an article by Bob Hammel, Taliaferro says, "There were things I couldn't do and places I couldn't go.

But I didn't let anything stand between me and playing football.

Check back tomorrow for more from Race and Football in America: The Life and Legacy of George Taliaferro.

Indiana University Athletics

Race and Football in America: The Life and Legacy of George Taliaferro - Part 1

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