In Honoring Coach, Museum Confronts Segregation
(FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES - A STORY FOR THE AGES)

By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: February 12, 2010


BATON ROUGE, La. — When Eddie Robinson was growing up here in Louisiana’s capital city about 80 years ago, he discovered the only way a black person infatuated with football could attend a game at the state university: He showed up at 5 a.m. on Saturdays to clean the stadium.

In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, Eddie Robinson sent more than 200 players to the pros. Some of Grambling State University’s greatest players will be honored in the new museum.

To take his first job as a football coach, in 1941, Mr. Robinson had to travel several hundred miles north, to a segregated teachers’ college in an unincorporated hamlet called Grambling. Mail arrived by train, and students helped harvest peaches and sweet potatoes from the college farm.

As for the white world, it was if anything more hostile than Baton Rouge’s. Just three years before Mr. Robinson’s arrival, a black man had been raped with a hot poker, then lynched in the neighboring town of Ruston.

Yet Mr. Robinson worked and lived nowhere else for the rest of his life. In 55 years of coaching the Grambling Tigers, he amassed 408 victories and an .844 winning percentage and sent more than 200 players to the pros. He also personally oversaw their regular attendance at class and church.

And now, three years since Mr. Robinson died at age 88, the state that once subjugated him has put its money and imprimatur on a museum devoted to his life and legacy. Some 900 coaches, admirers, and former players, including the head coaches of the Pittsburgh Steelers and Notre Dame, are streaming into Grambling on for the official opening of the Eddie G. Robinson Museum on Saturday.

Should anyone get lost, billboards along Interstate 20 direct drivers toward the museum on the campus of Grambling State University. A sign being hoisted into place this week at the Grambling exit promotes the museum as part of the state’s African-American Heritage Trail.

“This would be the answer to his prayers,” Doris Robinson, the coach’s widow, said in an interview this week. “He was doing things that were lasting and he wanted the world to know.”

The impact of the museum, though, far surpasses the familial. “There has been a real effort on the part of the state to expand the history, to be more inclusive, to finally catch up,” said Petra Munro Hendry, a professor of educational history at Louisiana State University and the author of a history of black Baton Rouge (“Old South Baton Rouge: The Roots of Hope”).

While that effort ultimately involved a number of elected officials from both parties and both races, it began with one of Eddie Robinson’s coaching comrades, Wilbert Ellis. In the late 1990s, toward the end of his 43-year career leading the Grambling baseball team, Mr. Ellis paid a visit to the museum in Alabama honoring its legendary football coach, Paul W. (Bear) Bryant.

“I looked at it,” Mr. Ellis recalled the other day, “and I said to myself, ‘This is the way Eddie should be honored.’ ”

The inspiration was both appropriate and paradoxical. On the one hand, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Bryant had maintained a personal friendship and a professional respect for decades. On the other, while Mr. Robinson was confined to a black college by Jim Crow, Mr. Bryant willingly obliged segregation to field all-white football teams whose triumphs were upheld by bigots as proof of racial superiority.

The Bryant museum, which opened in 1981, also had benefited from the financial support of the state’s university system. Mr. Ellis, in contrast, started fund-raising with about a dozen longtime friends of Mr. Robinson’s. Over several years, they managed to collect $300,000 — a substantial sum for amateurs but far short of the amount needed to build, stock and staff even a modest museum.

Two state legislators from the northern Louisiana area helped by pushing through a bill to formally designate the nascent museum as a state project. They could not, however, loosen purse-strings. And meanwhile, Mr. Robinson’s Alzheimer’s disease worsened during several years before his death.

His papers and memorabilia, the future collection, landed everywhere from a storage locker outside Atlanta to the state archives in Baton Rouge. One former player rescued a batch of game films that were being tossed into the trash outside the Grambling football office.

The coach’s death did succeed in infusing the museum’s cause with a sense of urgency. The State Legislature appropriated $3.3 million for it in June 2008, and early in 2009 construction began in the original women’s gym on the Grambling campus, which by this time was being used mostly for dances and intramural activities.

“Eddie Robinson always said he only had two things,” Mr. Ellis recalled. “He had one wife and he had one job. So where else but Grambling would you want to have the museum?”

As final work proceeded at a frenetic pace before this weekend’s opening, exhibits took their places within the 18,000-square-foot building. Over the entrance to a small theater that will show a brief documentary about Mr. Robinson hung a replica of the Temple theater’s marquee.

At that black landmark in Baton Rouge, a young Mr. Robinson played basketball, boxed and watched Tom Mix westerns.

Two facing walls display photos of every Grambling player who went pro, from Glenn Alexander to Coleman Zeno. A scale model of the Cotton Bowl scoreboard captures the final score of Grambling’s victory over Alcorn State in 1985 that give Mr. Robinson his 324th victory, putting him ahead of Mr. Bryant on the career list.

Less visibly, but perhaps more important, the museum will also hold the primary-source materials of interest to scholars: oral histories, playbooks and game plans, handwritten letters from teenagers pleading for the chance to play at Grambling.

“We’re not going to see anybody else like Eddie Robinson again,” said Michael Hurd, the author “Black College Football, 1892-1992,” an authoritative history. “Not so much because of the number of wins but for where he started and for what he went through. He never made racism an issue, but it was a hurdle he had to clear. So for him to recognized is a recognition of black college football.”