Bobby Grier, who integrated the Sugar Bowl in 1956, dies at 91

Bobby Grier, a University of Pittsburgh fullback who in 1956 became the first Black football player to take the field in the postseason Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, despite the opposition of Georgia’s segregationist governor, who sought to bar Georgia Tech, Pitt’s opponent, from playing in the game, died June 30 in Warren, Ohio. He was 91.

His son, Robert Grier Jr., confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation facility.

The noisy run-up to Grier’s playing in the Sugar Bowl, a cherished annual tradition for the Deep South, played out early in the civil rights movement. Weeks before the game, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, igniting a 13-month bus boycott by African Americans there to protest segregation and fueling the cause of racial justice nationwide.

The next day, Georgia Gov. Marvin Griffin — outraged by the prospect of Georgia Tech’s facing Grier and Pitt in the Sugar Bowl — sent a telegram to Georgia’s Board of Regents. He demanded that teams in the state’s university system not participate in events in which the races mixed on the fields or in the stands.

“The South stands at Armageddon,” Griffin wrote. “The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concession to the enemy in this dark and lamentable hour of struggle.”

In 2006, Grier remembered how he had felt about Griffin’s attempt to scuttle the game. “Stupid,” he told The New York Times. “Why did the governor need to jump into sports?”

Although the governor was supported by a segregationist group, the States’ Rights Council, about 2,000 Georgia Tech students — at a school that did not integrate until 1961 — responded to Griffin’s telegram by protesting on campus. They burned at least one effigy of him, clashed with police and state troopers, and marched on the governor’s mansion in downtown Atlanta.

The day before the Board of Regents was to rule, Grier said he was sorry that his race had become an issue. He had the full support of his teammates, his university and Sugar Bowl officials, who had approved integrating the game, following the example of the Cotton Bowl, in Texas, and the Orange Bowl, in Florida.

“I never ran into this kind of thing before, either at home or on the team,” Grier told the International News Service as the controversy swirled. Asked by The Pittsburgh Press whether he would stay home if it would make it easier for his teammates, he choked up before responding.

“I really don’t know,” he said. “Naturally, I’d like to play because I’m a senior and won’t get another chance at a bowl game. I just can’t say what I would do if it came down to that.”

On Dec. 5, the Board of Regents voted 14-1 to reject Griffin’s attempt to keep Georgia Tech from playing in the Sugar Bowl. But it resolved that games held in Georgia “must be under segregation laws and traditions” and praised the governor’s “inspiring leadership in protecting inviolate the sacred institutions of our people.”

The Sugar Bowl was less than a month away, with Grier prepared to take the field on his 23rd birthday, at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

Robert Warren Grier was born Jan. 2, 1933, in Massillon, Ohio, south of Akron. His mother, Mary Grier, raised Bobby and his siblings Fred, Ray and Betty on her own as a seamstress and housekeeper. His father, John Henry Lowry, who wasn’t married to his mother and died a few months after Bobby’s birth, was a wealthy businessperson.

Lowry “left a lot of resources to take care of his sons, and that was swindled away from my grandmother Mary,” Rob Grier Jr. said in a text message.

Bobby played fullback at Massillon High School (where Paul Brown, founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, coached from 1932 to 1940), leading the Tigers to a 9-1 record and a state championship in 1951.

Grier had a modest career at Pitt leading up to the Sugar Bowl. Running on a balky knee, he finished seventh on the team in rushing yards, with 169, in the 1955 season.

Although Grier stayed on the Tulane campus with his teammates, he was welcomed at several parties at Dillard University, a historically Black school in New Orleans.

In the bowl game against Georgia Tech, Grier led both teams’ running backs with 51 yards on six carries, one of which went for 26 yards. But the game turned on a disputed penalty in the first quarter that put Grier in a different kind of spotlight.

Playing linebacker on defense, Grier was flagged for pass interference, putting Georgia Tech on Pitt’s 2-yard line and leading to the only score of the game. Georgia Tech won, 7-0.

On the penalty, the referee said Grier had shoved right end Don Ellis on a pass play. But Grier later disputed the call, saying tearfully after the game that he had been shoved by Ellis and fell down.

“If he’s behind me, how could I push him?” he told the Times a half-century later.

Grier was initially banned from a postgame party at the segregated St. Charles Hotel in New Orleans. But coaches from both sides got him into the event, and Grier “received the loudest ovation of any of the Sugar Bowl participants when he walked into the banquet hall,” according to an obituary on a University of Pittsburgh website.

He was elected to the Sugar Bowl Hall of Fame in 2018.

In addition to his son, Grier is survived by a daughter, Cassandra, and a granddaughter. His wife, Dorothy (Pridgen) Grier, died in 2016.

Grier graduated from Pitt in 1957 with a bachelor’s degree in business administration. After enlisting in the Air Force, he was a radar and missile supervisor.

He retired as a captain, then worked as a supervisor at U.S. Steel and as an administrator at the Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania.

Rob Grier Jr. said his father had understood that the pro-segregation stand taken by Griffin had cast his father as something of a civil rights figure.

“Before the game, as the news came out about the governor, he got a lot of telegrams and letters from people, mainly positive, so it started to dawn on him that this was bigger than a bowl game,” Rob Grier Jr. said by telephone. “And as I grew up, so many people would come up to him and ask for his autograph, some of them Negro Leaguers in Pittsburgh and elsewhere, who’d say, ‘I played with Satchel Paige, and it’s an honor to meet you.’”

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