Bear Bryant and the Integration of the Crimson Tide

Paul Bryant went by Bear because at thirteen years old, growing up in rural Arkansas, he agreed to wrestle a carnival bear for a dollar a minute. The bear bit him, the promoter left town without paying, and Bryant kept the name. He arrived in Tuscaloosa in nineteen fifty-eight, returning to the university where he had played as an end in the nineteen thirties, and what he built there over the next twenty-five years remains one of the sustained achievements in the history of American football.

Six national championships. Thirteen conference titles. Three hundred twenty-three wins, a record that stood as the most in collegiate football history at the time of his retirement in nineteen eighty-two.

He died in Tuscaloosa in January nineteen eighty-three, twenty-eight days after coaching his final game. The integration of the Alabama football program happened slowly and against resistance from the political climate surrounding Wallace's governorship. Bryant had tried to integrate teams at Kentucky and Texas A and M before coming to Alabama and had been blocked both times.

Wilbur Jackson was recruited to Alabama in nineteen sixty-nine and signed in the spring of nineteen seventy, becoming the program's first Black scholarship player. Junior college transfer John Mitchell joined the team in nineteen seventy-one as the first Black player to actually take the field for Alabama, because freshmen were ineligible that year. By nineteen seventy-three, one-third of the team's starters were Black.

Mitchell became the Tide's first Black assistant coach that same season. Bryant-Denny Stadium on the university campus, expanded repeatedly over the decades, now holds more than a hundred thousand people on game days. The Paul W.

Bryant Museum sits a few blocks away, open to the public, dedicated to a man who coached more than four hundred games across nearly four decades and returned, always, to Tuscaloosa.