A sports civil rights story. | dG1fLWQ1eGJKT3hzVkE
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00St. Aug and Coach Walsh and the football team are like Jackie Robinson.
00:16They were determined to show the community and the world that it could happen.
00:23It was part of the civil rights movement.
00:25You actually saw whites and blacks competing on the field.
00:30I think the social impact was bigger than the sports impact because it was the first
00:35time that an all-black school would compete in the Catholic League.
00:41Everybody in the black community rallied around St. Augustine.
00:48We had to have someone, when we go line up against an all-white team and someone calls
00:54you a racial name, you can't fight them.
00:57We felt like we were playing everybody else plus the referees.
01:01We started practicing and we started beginning to be aware.
01:05It's not first and ten for us, it's first and twenty-five.
01:08Coach Walsh was an interesting guy because he was very, very innovative.
01:12They had really a high-powered offensive scheme that they ran.
01:16A big part of that offense was the fullback running traps inside and at the same time
01:22slipping the back out of the back field into the flat.
01:24So the things that we did and the same things that were being done in San Francisco by the
01:2949ers, he was definitely ahead of his time showing that goal to me.
01:34And I made a promise to myself, one day, everybody in here is going to know the name St. Augustine
01:40because we're going to beat the living hell out of everybody we play.