“What happened with Grambling is like the canary in the coal mine.” How the financial crisis facing historically black colleges sent one of the proudest football programs in the country into chaos.
Joel Anderson / BuzzFeed
PINE BLUFF, Ark. — Long after the final whistle of the game, long after Grambling State University's football team trudged back to the visitor's locker room following another defeat, and not so long after the marching band played its last amped-up R&B tune of the evening, Doug Williams was waiting outside of the stadium gates.
Darkness had already descended upon south central Arkansas, and there was a chill in the autumn air. In a thick maroon hoodie and jeans, Williams distractedly mingled with a few old friends and former classmates and teammates from better days as the football team — a team he coached as recently as two months prior — marched to the buses idling in the nearby parking lot.
Williams, the former Grambling football hero and the first black quarterback to win a Super Bowl, was almost certainly the most famous person in this dreary little town of 47,000 — if not the entire state and a couple of surrounding ones. He still cuts an imposing figure, at 6 feet 4 inches and broad-shouldered with hands the size of catcher's mitts.
But here, from the outside looking in, Williams had the look of an estranged family member.
Williams made no attempt to alert anyone to his presence, never raising his voice. No university officials greeted him. Still, all but a handful of football players acknowledged him on their way off the field to the locker room or the buses.
Despite the figurative distance, Williams remains the symbol of both the school's gilded legacy and its precipitous decline. His career has made Grambling and north Louisiana proud, but today he stands for the division and descent of one of the nation's most storied football programs.
Three weeks before this Saturday in early November, the school had begrudgingly been thrust into the national spotlight when its football team refused to board buses for a game at Jackson State University. The player-led protest capped two turbulent months for the school's program, which began with the surprising dismissal of Williams on Sept. 9.
"The kids did what the grown-ups couldn't do," said Henry Dyer, a former president of the Grambling Legends alumni group who played in the NFL in the late 1960s. "Somebody had to come forward."
Courtesy Grambling State University
Probably the best way to get to Grambling State University is to catch a flight into Shreveport, take the ramp onto Interstate 20, drive about 65 miles east, and then exit onto Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones Drive. Take the two-lane highway for about two miles — just follow the curve of the road — and you will find yourself on the campus of a school founded in 1901 to educate blacks (many of them the children of farmers) in the rural northern part of the state.
Near the entrance to the campus, alongside the administration building, is the Eddie G. Robinson Museum. This is the palatial red-brick monument to the late Robinson, who retired in 1997 as the winningest football coach in NCAA Division I history and built Grambling State into a powerhouse during a time when black players were prohibited from playing for major college programs.
Robinson spent 56 years on the sideline, compiling a record of 408-165-15. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame immediately upon his retirement. When he died in April 2007, his funeral was the first event in the school's 7,000-seat Assembly Center, which sits only a few dozen yards from the football stadium that also bears his name.
"He was all of ours' coach," Rev. Jesse Jackson told the audience of roughly 5,000 during Robinson's funeral. "He made the world come to Grambling."
The world hadn't been back much since that day. Not until mid-October, when word first started to leak that the football team was considering a boycott of its upcoming game at Jackson State.
The players met with school administrators on Oct. 15, a meeting they'd sought since Williams' termination on Sept. 9. Many on campus held the belief — repeated later in more than a dozen interviews with BuzzFeed — that Williams had been fired because of a power struggle with the school president, Frank Pogue.
At the meeting with Pogue and Athletic Director Aaron James, the players detailed their frustration with the state of the program: 17 straight losses, the poor condition of the athletic facilities, lengthy bus rides to places like Kansas City (1,200 miles round-trip) and Indianapolis (1,500). Increasingly dissatisfied with Pogue's responses, the players stormed out of the meeting.
"Things are rough, and we understand our players' frustration," Grambling spokesman Will Sutton said in a statement following the walkout. "The president is frustrated, the AD is frustrated, the students are frustrated, the alumni are frustrated, so we fully understand our players' frustration."
Later that week, on the afternoon of Oct. 18, only 22 of Grambling's 80 players reported to the two charter buses waiting in the athletic department's parking lot. Soon enough, everyone would fully understand their frustration: Grambling was forced to forfeit, denying Jackson State what was supposed to be their homecoming game.
Williams, who had been previously silent about the protest, sent a text message to USA Today: "I'm proud of them boys. They took a stance."
Suddenly, the world had a renewed interest in Grambling State. Lots had changed since their last visit.