Prior to UGA's "Pioneers"

I distinctly recall it was during the 1981 season, my first attending Georgia football games. I believe the Bulldogs were hosting Temple when I scanned down the home sideline from my seat in Sanford Stadium and piped up, “Daddy, why doesn’t Georgia have any black [assistant] coaches?”

My father answered by indicating it actually hadn't been that long before when African Americans didn't even play football for Georgia.

At six years old, I envisioned a team without the likes of black Bulldog players at the time—my idols, such as Lindsay Scott, Eddie "Meat Cleaver" Weaver, Jimmy Payne, Freddie Gilbert, Clarence Kay and, of course, Herschel Walker. My father, a Sociology professor at UGA beginning in the 1960s, had been on campus when the first black athletes arrived at the school. Now he dolefully added, "Pat, unfortunately, that's how it was back then."

I struggled to visualize "it"—no African Americans playing football for Georgia—and particularly since "back then" had only been a decade before.

In December of 1970, Horace King, Chuck Kinnebrew, Clarence Pope, Larry West, and Richard Appleby signed with Georgia. Eventually they became the first black Bulldog football players to play at the varsity level. These young men were promptly regarded as “pioneers”—and the rest, as they say, is history.

Unfortunately, most of what has been publicized regarding such a historical movement omits—a bit conveniently—the actual difficulties and hardships these players encountered with their arrival at UGA. In addition, generally omitted is mention of the African-American individuals who, although never seeing varsity action for the Bulldogs, were certainly part of—albeit briefly—the Georgia football program prior to the five “pioneers.”

In the fall of 1972, Georgia was among the last of three SEC schools (along with Ole Miss and LSU) to feature black players on its varsity football team. However, when Harry Sims and James Hurley were members of the Bulldogs' track team in 1968, Georgia became one of the first in the conference, along with Kentucky (football), Tennessee (track & field), and Vanderbilt (basketball), to feature black athletes of any varsity sport

Hurley, from Atlanta, had walked-on Georgia's football team earlier that year in the fall of 1967, just months after eventual Athens lawyer Kenneth Dious went out for the squad in the spring. Dious, the first black player to don a Georgia uniform, left the program soon thereafter. On the other hand, Hurley made the freshman squad, and would start at defensive end for the Bullpups. The following season, he was awarded the Bill Mundy Award for having the highest academic average on the entire team.

Still, Hurley was never given a spot on the Bulldogs' varsity because "the competition was too keen," according to then-freshman coach John Donaldson. Georgia’s first black player to see game action soon transferred to Vanderbilt, where he was awarded a scholarship and lettered for the Commodores in 1970.

That same year, fullback-linebacker John King of Toney, Ala., became the initial African American to receive a football scholarship from Georgia. However, just prior to the start of fall practice, King suddenly informed the Bulldog coaching staff he'd decided to transfer to the University of Minnesota. Subsequently, as a member of the Golden Gophers, he rushed for nearly 1,200 yards as a junior in 1972, when he was named the team's MVP.

When the first group of black freshmen finally appeared on a gridiron for Georgia, the question was raised why it took the school so long to recruit African-American athletes. The football coaching staff indicated that it had been trying to do so for years; however, according to The Red and Black, the coaches "just couldn't find any that could get in school."

"It's not that black athletes haven't been approached before," Donaldson said. "They have, but most of them couldn't make the team for academic reasons."

However, around the same time as the coach's reasoning, athletics director Joel Eaves curiously explained, "I think [UGA was] just cautious. We were just not sure how it would work out." Eaves added that the athletic department had been especially cautious about "the mixing [of races] and the fact that we're in a section [of the country] that was slow in integrating."

In 1957, a state bill had been proposed to ban integrated athletics and other social activities. The proposal was even endorsed by Georgia Governor Marvin Griffin, explaining that he was against "Negroes and white folks playing any type of sport together." Notably, columnist Jim Minter of the Atlanta Journal openly attacked the governor and the bill.

Nevertheless, by the 1980 football season, nearly half of Georgia's football team was made up of African Americans. Influential in the Bulldogs' run to a national championship that year were all the aforementioned black football heroes of mine as a child, especially the legendary Herschel Walker.

In 1981, just after the Bulldogs won what remains the program’s lone undisputed national title, the same Atlanta writer, Minter, again shared his feelings on integrated athletics in the state. Referring to the Warren Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling while celebrating Georgia's championship, Minter declared, "Thank God for Earl Warren."

Since then, I’ve gone from a confused child who didn't understand why black players, at any point in time, couldn't play with whites, to understanding, as difficult as it may be, that the slow integration of southern college athletics mirrored the social life of the South at the time.

And, as my father once informed me, unfortunately, that’s how it was back then.