NY Times: Super Bowl catches up to Orange Blossom Classic

Decades before Super Bowl XLI, with its history-making confrontation between African-American head coaches, similar encounters took place every year. The setting was the Orange Blossom Classic, the unofficial but de facto championship game for the all-black colleges of the segregated South.

From its inauguration in 1933 to the full integration of college football, the Orange Blossom Classic provided the showcase for such coaches as Eddie Robinson of Grambling, Jake Gaither of Florida A&M, John Merritt of Tennessee State and Earl Banks of Morgan State.

Regularly drawing crowds of more than 40,000 to the Orange Bowl stadium in Miami, the game was a key element in the parallel universe of black college football, a game with its own black coaches, stars, publicists, parades, bands, radio stations and sports journalists. In one of the paradoxes of race in America, segregation afforded opportunities in sports, as well as business, academia and the ministry, for a black middle-class to develop and operate its own institutions.

continue reading: Jake Gaither