"Sport" vs Freedom

Remarks about visiting negro athletes are indicative of the divided attitude to negroes on the campus. At the Oregon-Long Island University Basketball game some weeks ago I heard vile insults directed at negro members of the visiting team. These were not just ordinary expressions of excitement and school spirit. One of these negro players was refused service at a Eugene restaurant, I do not hesitate to mention, on the other hand, that many of the student spectators paid complimemts to the negro players.

To a negro student at Oregon the Cotton Bowl was a test of racial equality as well as football talent. In accepting the invitation to the Cotton Bowl, the University had a chance to show its regard towards its negro athletes but unlike Pennsylvania State the previous year which ruled that athletes of both races should eat and sleep together Oregon agreed to segregate its Play ers in accordance with Texan notions of civilisation and democracy.

Coach Jim Aiken and the athletic department secured the consent of the three Oregon negro players to submit to segregation slickly enough to rouse the envy of any big-time commercial operator. Between December 18. when Christmas vacation started, and December 24. when the team embarked for Dallas, the players were permitted to go where they liked. The three negroes went to Portland. Coach Aikin telephoned each of them separately. He in formed them that the athletic department had been unable to procure mixed accommodation for the white and negro team members. "It's up to vou to decide whether or not the team will go under the circumstances," he told them.

With the game only 10 days away, with 110.000 dollars and the schools' athletic prestige at stake, and with a "Bowl-crazed" student body to face, the negro players had no alternative but to agree to segregation.

The University administrators, of course, had no intention of putting civil rights before cash or the bigots of the State. And the coach and athletic department did not dare to present the no-discrimination or no-Bowj issue to an open meeting of the team.

Oregon poured democracy down the drain, where it is most of the time in America anyhow, and opened a new bottle of Jimerow you All, the American Century speciaL Oregon's 110,000-dollar cut of the gate receipts demonstrates that ideals rate high in the country, because ideals and dollars are identical.