November 11, 1916: The football team at Rutgers College stands up for their best player -- a month after cowardly refusing to do so.
On October 14, Rutgers were hosting Washington & Lee University at Neilson Field in New Brunswick, New Jersey. Washington & Lee is in Lexington, Virginia, and is named for George Washington and Robert E. Lee. Lee was the leading General of the Confederate States of America. Virginia was still a Southern State. And it had only been 51 years since the end of the American Civil War.
And Paul Robeson was a sophomore offensive lineman, tackle and guard, for Rutgers. And he was really good. And he was black. And the Washington & Lee players refused to play against him, because of his race.
So Rutgers head coach George Sanford benched Robeson. A friend of him called it "a wound that never healed." The game ended in a 13-13 tie.
A month later, West Virginia University sent its team to play Rutgers. West Virginia had seceded from Virginia and rejoined the Union in 1863. And their campus is further north than one-quarter of Rutgers' home State of New Jersey. Nevertheless, the Mountaineer players also insisted that Robeson not play.
This time, Sanford stood up for Robeson, saying that if the Mountaineers didn't want to play against a black man, they could go home. They didn't want to forfeit either the game, or the money their school would make by playing, so they played, and Robeson made a game-saving tackle near the goal line to preserve a 0-0 tie. Afterward, the WVU players lined up to shake his hand.
In 1917 and 1918, Robeson was considered by many observers to be the best player in the country. In 1920, making his all-time All-American team, Walter Camp, the legendary Yale player and coach who invented the "All-American team" concept, named Robeson the best defensive end he'd ever seen.
Robeson's pro career was brief, but he did play for the 1st champions of the league that became the NFL, the Akron Pros, led by black coach and back Fritz Pollard. Robeson went on to bigger things in the law, music, acting and social activism.
Rutgers' original name, in use from 1766 to 1825, was Queens College. Their administration building, opening in 1825, it still known as Old Queens. And so, when they began intercollegiate sports, their teams became known as the Queensmen.
In 1925, the name was changed to the Chanticleers. A chanticleer is a rooster, a fighting cock. There was precedent: The University of South Carolina calls their teams the Gamecocks -- although calling them the Cocks for short is a bit problematic. New Brunswick's radio station, and the carrier for Rutgers' football games, at 1450 on the AM dial, named their call letters after the ChanTiCleers: WCTC.
But too many people associated "Chanticleer" with "chicken," and thus with cowardice. So, in 1955, a student vote was held, and the name chosen the most was "Scarlet Knights." And so they have been ever since.
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November 11, 1916 was a Saturday. These other noteworthy college football games were played that day:
* Harvard beat Princeton, 3-0 at Harvard Stadium in Boston.
* Army beat Maine, 17-3 on The Plain in West Point, New York.
* Cornell beat Michigan, 23-20 at Schoellkopf Field in Ithaca, New York.
* Dartmouth and Pennsylvania played to a 7-7 tie at the original Franklin Field in Philadelphia.
* Navy beat North Carolina State, 50-0 at Worden Field in Annapolis, Maryland.
* Georgia Tech, 5 weeks after beating Cumberland College 222-0, took it relatively easy on Alabama, beating them 16-0 at Grant Field in Atlanta. Tech went 8-0-1, and were retroactively named National Champions by the Billingsley Report in 1996.
* Rivalry: Tennessee beat Vanderbilt, 10-6 at Waite Field in Knoxville, Tennessee.
* The University of Pittsburgh made Washington & Jefferson continue to pay for their racism, beating them, 37-0 at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Pitt went 8-0, and were retroactively named National Champions by most sources other than Billingsley.
* Notre Dame beat South Dakota, 21-0 in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
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