fielding yost

Thing discussed: The university’s report and recommendation that Fielding Yost’s name be removed from Yost Ice Arena, and the history of racism at the University of Michigan.

• Panel: Mostly fine with renaming the building, think it’s a small gesture and the story is much larger, involving most of those in power at the University of Michigan and other institutions around the country before, during, and after Yost’s life.
• Seth: Racism is quiet. It’s not about smoking guns and bad actors—it’s a culture that puts the feelings of racists over equality and a system of keep things “pleasant.”
• The “Moral Map” standard versus the reality that of Michigan’s 103 building names, all but one—the William Trotter Multicultural Center—are named for white people. Trotter’s lesson: You have to agitate.
• Craig: We should be celebrating Black athletes of Michigan's past. They were great, and ignored. 
• Seth: 13.5% of my graduating class in 2002 was African-American; the last class was 4.4%.
• Report issues: Didn’t talk to the experts like John Behee whose information was used. Craig: It read less like a history and more like a legal brief, and he was really bothered that it made Gerald Ford out to be a hero. Willis Ward does not support that story.
• Seth: Michigan was different from other schools because they had protesters against sitting their Black player. Yost hired Pinkertons, who found three leaders of the protesters whom President Ruthven dismissed.
• Brian: Doesn’t that disqualify him from having a building named for him? Seth: Sure, but it’s a small part of a much greater system that’s still in force today.
• Sam: Highlight the student response. Highlight history. Discusses historical events of attacks on Black communities, and their resonance in events today.
• Seth: Example of Belford Lawson Jr. (read the article here). Same movements we have today. Same reactions we have today.
• Sam/Seth: History of Ocoee Massacre on Election Day 1920 in response to Black registration to vote, and how these stories are not told, kept quiet, specifically because they resonate with the same issues today.
• Michigan must teach this part of their history—name of a building is such a small part.You have an opportunity here to apply some function by teaching people, and open up the conversation again to real changes. Do more than being symbolic.
• Seth: Story doesn’t end with Yost. Crisler’s Quota system is visible in the team photos.
• How far does it go? Seth: If we just draw the line to people who had major campus protests against them you're fine.
• Example of resonance: Tulsa Massacre was about Black community having money. Today this happens.
• Sam: It's not about individuals--it's about how these events resonate with what happens today.

[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]

In 1946, Penn State was scheduled to play the University of Miami, which like most Southern teams of the time still refused to play integrated Northern teams unless they sat their Black players. At the time Penn State had two, and of them only Wally Triplett was a regular. By a team vote, PSU canceled the 1946 Miami game, an act that Triplett credits for the origins of its great 1947 campaign, when Penn State swept its regular season opponents and earned an invite to the Cotton Bowl.

The Cotton was one of four bowl games in existence, and one of three, the Rose excepted, with standing rules against Black players participating. Responding to rumors that administrators were talking to SMU about sitting Triplett, PSU captain Steve Suhey told the press “We play all or none, there will be no meetings.” Triplett played, and scored the game-tying touchdown. Though the school’s claim that this event and the “We Are…” cheer are connected is completely apocryphal, the moment is a special point of pride for the Nittany Lions.

Michigan could have had that moment a dozen years earlier, when Georgia Tech came to Ann Arbor in 1934, and over vocal opposition from campus protestors and the greater Michigan community, Fielding Yost agreed to sit star end Willis Ward. The details of this event have been covered many times, first as dug up by Dr. John Behee in his first book Hail to the Victors! Black Athletes at the University of Michigan (1974), then in the Black and Blue documentary based on his findings, and most recently and thoroughly by the President’s Advisory Committee Report on the Fielding H. Yost Name on the Yost Ice Arena Historical Analysis.

Yesterday this committee tasked with looking at whether Michigan should rename its buildings issued its unanimous recommendation to President Schlissel that Fielding Yost’s name should be removed from Yost Ice Arena. The report is 36 pages, and informs the committee’s six-page unanimous recommendation.

As someone who talks Yost history often, most recently in an interview on the history of the Big House that aired on student television, I hope to provide some context on the committee’s findings. I will refrain from adding my opinion on the building’s name until the end because next to the facts and the opinions of those more directly affected I don’t believe my feelings, colored as they are by my history of covering Yost, should carry much weight.

Committee, Report and Conclusions

The committee begins their recommendation letter with an unattributed message from a Michigan alum asking that the name be reconsidered because “In naming the Field House after Yost, the University chose to place one man's contributions to football and to athletics above the profoundly deep and negative impact he had on people of color,” and continued to do so over several opportunities to rename it.

The committee responds to this in the summary of its conclusion:

While we acknowledge that Yost had both successes and failures in his career, our historical analysis suggests to us that the benching of Ward was not an aberration but rather epitomized a long series of actions that worked against the integration of sports on campus.

The committee also lays out what it believes should be the standard for “honorific” naming of buildings, which is:

The names on our buildings constitute a “moral map” of our institution and should enshrine the values that we uphold.

By this standard they make a convincing case that Yost’s actions in the Willis Ward affair did not represent core values of the University of Michigan as they were formally stated in Yost’s time, or as they are instituted in practice today.

The committee was created in 2017 as the active arm of the university’s new review process for renaming buildings, and President Schlissel followed its first two recommendations, removing the names of noted eugenicist CC Little and crank scientist Alexander Winchell. In the future the same committee will likely be tasked with a recommendation on the honorific naming of Schembechler Hall, and the financial naming gift of the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies.

[Hit THE JUMP]

Any conversation with an Ohio State partisan is only going one way because who won most recently is the only truth in the world. What day is it?/December 10th./No it isn't./Look on a calendar!/Look at the scoreboard!

As much as recent history sucks, history is still so much in Michigan's favor that other college football fans argue it doesn't matter. I take issue with that, yes because my team won the first college football game and more than anyone else since and I'm a biased fanboy, but also because any slicing of dates to create a "modern" period is a repudiation of the process of change, and the normality of more of it.

Take the "Integration Era" since that's a popular one. George Jewett integrated college football when he joined Michigan in 1890, but in 1934 Michigan still had one Black guy, whom they sat when they played Georgia Tech. The Civil Rights Era had landmark moments: Texas Western started five Black players and won the 1966 men's tourney, Florida A&M (an HBCU) beat all-white Tampa in 1969, USC blew out Alabama in 1970, and two Black quarterbacks started the Michigan-Ohio State game in 1973. But it would be another 20 years before D-I rosters were a majority non-white, almost 40 years before Denard Robinson and Braxton Miller followed in the footsteps of Dennis Franklin and Cornelius Greene, and 2019 before Michigan ended a three-year run when not a single Big Ten head basketball coach looked like 75 percent of players have since before the coaching pool played. There is no date in there when past became modern, just an accumulation of decisions that add up to an uneven progress.

The Stone Age Game

That said, jumping from the only modern moment to when the Michigan-Ohio State series began requires some orientation. Teams around 1900 didn't have access to the forward pass, or platoons, or scholarships, or hash marks. Their touchdowns were worth five points instead of six, but their field goals were worth four, and placed at the front of the endzone, not the back. Though their training regimens differed vastly from the average student's, they were nothing like today. The players were much smaller, especially Yost's because he liked them that way. Scheduling was…well it was a lot like 2020: if you were lucky you had a conference organize a bunch of games that might be played, saving room for a surprise at the end. The Big Ten (the "Western Conference" then) was the first such organization, and only a year old when Michigan-Ohio State began.

It wasn't completely foreign. Both schools were also surprisingly modern in their football attitudes. They got up for rivalries. They had blue chip recruiting battles that went on for years. They had massive alumni networks who handled illegal payments to facilitate those recruiting battles. These fans and bagmen would get furious at their coaches when they lost big games, and schools relied so much on these people to fund and promote their school parts that they'd often capitulate, then launch searches as desperately insane as today's.

Specifically, Ohio State at the turn of the century was much more OHIO STATE than they'd like you to believe. Their resources didn't differ that much from Yost's, their fanbase was comparable to most of the schools that were in the original Big Ten, and their football team's interest in academics was as perfunctory as ever. These games counted. They count now. And if you just haven't heard about them, that can be remedied.

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