Thread: Jesse Jackson Wrong aboout Boise State Football History

http://www.idahostatesman.com/164/story/68477.html

Historians fault Jackson's BSU remark
College had black athletes as far back as 1940s; professor says comment reflects unfair stereotype
By Anne Wallace Allen - Idaho Statesman

The Rev. Jesse Jackson's remarks to a Boise State University audience Friday that black football players weren't welcome in the 1950s and 1960s prompted a flurry of questioning by local historians.

Boise State has had black athletes since as far back as the 1940s, said Alan Virta the university archivist, who called former football coach Lyle Smith over the weekend to get some details.

Smith, who coached in the 1940s and 1950s, told Virta that BSU — then Boise Junior College — had no policy denying black athletes the right to play. Virta cited Aurelius Buckner, a student from 1944 to 1946, who played on the college's six-man football team and was the high scorer on the school's basketball team in the winter of 1944 and 1945.

Buckner was one of just a few non-white athletes at the junior college, Virta said.

"There were always people from the local area who happened to be non-white, be they black or Asian-American, who attended Boise Junior College," Virta said. "It's just that there wasn't a very big minority population to draw on."

Jackson, a civil rights activist, said Wednesday to reporters — and then to a crowd at Taco Bell Arena — that the multiracial BSU Bronco football team that won the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl would have looked very different before the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Jackson was at BSU for events marking the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

Jackson said neither Boise State nor its Fiesta Bowl opponent, the University of Oklahoma, allowed black students to play on their athletic teams in 1955.

Not so, Virta said. He doesn't know about Oklahoma but said old Boise Junior College yearbooks document the presence of black athletes on campus.

"A number of people took umbrage at what Jesse Jackson said," Virta said Monday. "A number of offices at campus got e-mails saying, ‘This isn't right.'"

A call to Jackson at the office of his nonprofit activist group the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition in Chicago was not immediately returned Monday.

But Jackson's error made a larger point, said historian Todd Shallat, the director of the Center for Idaho History and Politics at BSU.

"A civil rights leader looks at the past and sees triumph over discrimination," Shallat said. "A Boisean hears Jackson's remarks as an attempt to stereotype Boise with loose regard for the facts.

Gosh, Jesse Jackson wrong about something.
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No surprise in that at all. Theres always something to be talked about.

Big shock.
Jesse Jacka$$ talking out his ass again

What a big windbag, if soneone will listen he'll say anything.

Yeah he's a dumba$$. He will say anything to make alot of people mad and strike argument.

His credibility is so damaged these days.
Does anybody even take his comments seriously anymore?

I wish he would try to run for president just so I can see him fail horribly.
He is such an idiot.

"RK." wrote:

Gosh, Jesse Jackson wrong about something.
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Tell Jesse it must be nice to be always right.
I wish I was.... :

What I don't get is why?

Boise State won and now hes up in Idaho trying to rain on their parade...

Doesn't make sense. What is his problem?

He's always part of the problem, never the solution.