They were opponents when NC State and Pittsburgh first played each other in two games of importance during the integration of college football. They were teammates who helped save the NFL’s New York Giants at a time one of the league’s premier franchises was faltering.
And they left lasting legacies, one as a decorated player and beloved football coach, the other as an engineer who interrupted his NFL career to serve in the U.S. Army Reserve and later in the Corps of Engineers.
NC State’s Alex Webster and Pittsburgh’s Bobby Epps likely had no idea they might be remembered for what happened in those two games played at the Panthers’ Pitt Stadium, a pair of blowout victories in 1952 and ’53, but in retrospect they are quite historically significant.
Integration came slow to college football. Before World War II, there were only a few teams that had even one Black player, much less multiple. Especially for schools from the Jim Crow South, some teams wouldn’t play integrated squads or, if they did, they would require opposing teams to bench or leave behind their Black players. Most avoided such games at all by playing only regional opponents, the main reason why in the South college football was much more popular than professional sports.
That changed slightly in the 1930s, when NC State played four consecutive games against integrated college football power Manhattan College in New York City from 1935-38. The games were arranged shortly after former Notre Dame player and head coach Hunk Anderson moved from South Bend, Ind., to NC State in 1934. Manhattan College, a highly progressive institution that had integrated teams dating back to just after World War I, was New York’s biggest Catholic school and its athletics had strong ties to Notre Dame, so Anderson was familiar with school officials.
North Carolina followed in 1936 by playing three straight years against integrated New York University in the city. There’s no written evidence that either team demanded the games be played under the unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” of the time. Frank Porter Graham, president of the consolidated UNC System that included NC State, UNC and the Women’s College in Greensboro, was an outspoken opponent of benching opposing Black players.
Duke and Maryland, both members with State and UNC in the Southern Conference, scheduled games against Syracuse in the latter half of the decade, 1937 and ’38 for Maryland, and ‘38 for Duke. However, controversy surrounded those contests because Syracuse quarterback Wilmeth Sidat-Singh was Black, not Indian-American as his adopted surname suggested. When the two teams played in Baltimore in 1937, Maryland forced Syracuse to bench Sidat-Singh and won 13-0. When Syracuse hosted Maryland in 1938, the Terps relented to face Syracuse’s full roster. Sidat-Singh led his team to sweet revenge in a 53-0 victory.
Blue Devil coach Wallace Wade scheduled his game against the then-Orangemen because he thought his team needed a strong intersectional opponent in order to be eligible for the Rose Bowl. Wallace chose not to protest Sidat-Singh’s participation because he felt it might diminish his team’s value to the Rose Bowl committee if they didn’t face Syracuse’s full squad. Duke won 21-0 and received its first invitation to participate in the nation’s oldest bowl game.
Schools mostly stopped intersectional games in the 1940s, not necessarily because of Jim Crow laws but because of travel restrictions implemented during and after World War II. In 1947, Harvard brought a team with one Black player to face Virginia, breaking the unwritten code of the time among Southern colleges. The game, thought to be the first contest that included a Black player at a Southern school, was played without incident, though the stands were segregated, and some fans waved Confederate battle flags while others shouted racial slurs at the Harvard players.
On Sept. 30, 1950, Duke made headlines for inviting Pittsburgh to Durham. It was a time that Pitt was trying to re-emerge from the university’s decision to de-emphasize athletics and was working through a slew of coaching changes. Duke placed no restrictions on allowing Pitt’s lone Black player, senior reserve tackle Flint Greene, to participate in the contest, though he was not allowed to stay with his teammates at the Washington Duke Inn. The Blue Devils won without incident, 28-14. The two teams met again the following season in Pittsburgh, in the first of seven broadcasts in college football’s first national television package.
It wasn’t until 1952, however, when Kearny, N.J., native Webster and his Wolfpack teammates, under the direction of Horace Hendrickson, went north of the Mason-Dixon Line to Pitt Stadium that a Southern team faced a Northern one with a significant number of Black players. Pitt had four African-Americans, with Epps joined in the backfield by quarterback Henry Ford, halfback Chester Rice and end Bill Adams. In the era of one-platoon football, a quartet of Black players was a significant step forward on a roster of just 39 players.
Epps, who had taken over as the starting fullback midway through the season, helped establish Pitt’s early dominance, driving the opening kickoff straight down the field, with Epps scoring on a 19-yard touchdown run. He also tallied the final score of the day in the 48-6 Pittsburgh victory with a six-yard touchdown.
The following year, the Wolfpack returned to the Steel City, where Pitt again ran wild in a 40-6 victory. Joe Grier, a sophomore Black running back who had only seen action in one previous game, was one of 15 players who carried the ball against the Wolfpack defense. He gained 198 yards on 13 attempts, including an 87-yard touchdown run in the third quarter. It still ranks among the biggest rushing days by a Wolfpack opponent.
Those two games — played while the landmark Supreme Court case “Brown vs. the Board of Education” was being debated and decided — cracked the door for opening racial relations, not only for NC State but also for college football. Grier was at the center of college football’s biggest integration incident of the 1950s, when Pitt was invited to play segregated Georgia Tech in the 1956 Sugar Bowl in segregated New Orleans.
The only trouble was, the Sugar Bowl officials who extended the invitation to the Panthers didn’t know it had an integrated roster, because Grier was injured and did not suit up when the representatives who came to see the team play extended their invitation, only two days before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white rider on a Montgomery, Ala., city bus.
Georgia Tech was not integrated at the time, and there were serious concerns that the Ramblin’ Wreck would not play against an integrated team, especially after Georgia’s newly elected governor Marvin Griffin said: “The South stands at Armageddon. The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concession to the enemy in this dark and lamentable hour of struggle. There is no more difference in compromising integrity of race on the playing field than in doing so in the classrooms. One break in the dike and the relentless enemy will rush in and destroy us.”
(Griffin was mostly posturing to his base. He wanted Georgia Tech to play in the game, if only because his youngest son was a sophomore member of the squad. Such were the times in Georgia.)
Fans from Georgia Tech and Georgia, in a rare show of rivalry unity, stormed the state capitol, hung the governor in effigy and demanded the Yellow Jackets be allowed to play in the first integrated Sugar Bowl. In the end, with a nation watching what might happen, the game was played without a hitch in front of a crowd that included both Black and white spectators.
But on the game’s decisive play, Grier was called for a pass interference penalty in the end zone and Georgia Tech won 7-0. Grier was the contest’s top rusher with 51 yards.
As for Webster and Epps, they reunited in New York in 1955. Webster had played two years in Canada after leaving NC State and Epps was a 14th-round draft pick from Pitt. They played in the same backfield with Frank Gifford for two seasons, and in both 1955 and 1957 the trio finished as the team’s top three rushers.
Epps sat out the 1956 season — in which the Giants won their first-ever NFL championship, thanks to a pair of touchdowns by Webster in the title game against the Chicago Bears — while serving with the U.S. Army Reserves. He returned in 1957, but did not see significant playing time and eventually gave up his professional football career to join the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Webster, of course, spent 11 seasons with the Giants and eventually became the head coach of his former team.
Webster died in 2012, Epps in 2014, both legends to the schools they represented in the earliest days of college football’s slow fight for racial equality.
Tim Peeler is a regular contributor to The Wolfpacker and can be reached at tmpeeler@ncsu.edu.
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