Ftfa:
That USC team traveled to play Alabama on Sep. 12. It was the first major college football game in Alabama that included a fully integrated team. USC won the game 42-21 over Bear Bryant's all-white Alabama team and all six of the Trojans? touchdowns were scored by Black players. That legendary game is considered one of the biggest turning points in the integration of major college football in the modern era.
Cunningham rushed for 135 yards and scored two TDs in that game. USC finished the season No. 15 in the AP Top 25. Jerry Claiborne, a former Bryant assistant who also was a head coach at three different schools, famously said that Cunningham "did more to integrate Alabama in 60 minutes than Martin Luther King did in 20 years."
I take that as a sad indictment of Americans in general and Southerners in particular.
But sometimes I'm too negative... on the bright side, in order to be afforded basic civil rights in this country, you just have to be white, wealthy, or the top 0.02% of people in terms of athletic ability...