C.R. Roberts, a Black operating again for the University of Southern California, was afraid of what may occur when his built-in Trojans soccer crew traveled to the Jim Crow South to play the all-white University of Texas Longhorns in Austin in 1956.
There have been dying threats earlier than the sport. He questioned: Would a shotgun blast from the stands at Memorial Stadium kill him?
“Tension was high,” he mentioned in a 2018 documentary, “Breaking Down Barriers: The C.R. Roberts Story,” directed by Jeremy Sadowski. “We could hear the epithets coming out of the crowd when you were near the sideline.”
Despite the opportunity of violence, Roberts turned in a sensational efficiency, main the Trojans to a 44-20 victory. In the second quarter, he raced for a 73-yard landing and for one more that lined 50 yards.
In the third quarter, on his closing carry, he scored once more on a 74-yard jaunt. In all, he gained 251 yards, a single-game speeding file that stood at U.S.C. for 19 years. The Los Angeles Times known as him an “explosive bolt of searing speed.”
But Roberts, who was considered one of three Black gamers on the united statesC. crew, mentioned that with spectators shouting the N-word, Coach Jess Hill pulled him from the sport quickly after he scored his closing landing.
“The atmosphere in that stadium was very negative toward a Black person,” Roberts mentioned in “Breaking Down Barriers.”
The Trojans’ victory occurred early in the civil rights motion, when Black residents have been boycotting segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., and the sport stands immediately as an vital racial breakthrough of that period.
In 1966, Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), grew to become the primary crew with an all-Black beginning 5 to win the N.C.A.A. males’s basketball championship, beating an all-white University of Kentucky crew.
And in 1970, Sam Cunningham, a part of U.S.C.’s all-Black backfield, gained 135 yards and scored two touchdowns in a 42-21 win over an all-white University of Alabama squad. Although the Crimson Tide had a Black participant on its freshman crew, the sport is credited with giving the Alabama coach, Paul (Bear) (*87*), the inexperienced gentle from higher-ups to actively recruit Black gamers.
Roberts died on Tuesday at a care facility in Norwalk, Conn., his daughter Cathy Creasia mentioned. He was 87.
Cornelius R. Roberts was born on Feb. 29, 1936, in Tupelo, Miss. His father, additionally named Cornelius, picked cotton and was a railroad metal driver. His mom, Audra Mae (Dabbs) Roberts, was a homemaker.
His mom, as Roberts recalled, felt that the household needed to go away racist Mississippi.
“Get our son out of Mississippi or they’re going to kill him,” he quoted her as telling his father, in an interview on a U.S.C. web site in 2015.
In the third grade, Roberts recalled, as his household was returning by prepare from Oceanside, Calif., he was enjoying with a white boy in an built-in automobile when the prepare reached the Mason-Dixon line. At that time his mom pulled him away from the boy; the household needed to transfer to a segregated coach.
“When you crossed the Mason-Dixon line going south,” he mentioned in “Breaking Down Barriers,” “the Blacks had to go back to their car and be segregated again. I didn’t understand.”
The household later moved to Oceanside, the place Roberts grew to become a star at Oceanside-Carlsbad High School, scoring a exceptional 65 touchdowns. In the vernacular of the time, one native newspaper in 1954 extolled him because the “all-American Negro flash.”
As the drill-team chief of the R.O.T.C. unit in highschool, Roberts aspired to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. “I’d have made it there if I was smarter in math,” he instructed The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2012.
At Southern California, he completed second in speeding to Jon Arnett in 1955; he would lead the crew in that class in 1956, his junior 12 months, thanks in half to his scintillating recreation in opposition to Texas.
But he nearly didn’t make it there. U.S.C.’s coaches initially steered that he not journey to Austin with the crew due to the race concern. He replied that he would quite give up the crew than keep residence. His teammates stood by him, refusing to go to Texas if the crew’s Black gamers — the others have been Louis Byrd and Hillard Hill — didn’t.
The University of Texas, for its half, was not welcoming, though it had performed in opposition to Washington State University, which had a Black participant, two years earlier. U.S.C. was instructed to depart the crew’s three Black gamers behind.
“Texas called us about a week before the game and said we couldn’t play any coloreds, that the races couldn’t compete at the same time,” Roberts instructed The Austin American-Statesman in 2005.
After some negotiations, the complete crew traveled to Austin. But the resort that the crew deliberate to remain in wouldn’t permit Roberts, Byrd and Hill as company, and it organized for them to remain in a Y.M.C.A. The crew refused and went to a different resort that, regardless of its segregation coverage and after some persuasion, allow them to in. Black resort staff and native residents gathered to fulfill the three gamers.
Roberts didn’t play in 1957, his senior 12 months, after the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-12) imposed penalties in opposition to U.S.C. and different faculties for offering illicit monetary help to gamers.
After receiving a bachelor’s diploma in enterprise administration from U.S.C. in 1957, Roberts performed two seasons for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. Then he moved to the N.F.L., the place he gained 637 yards on 155 carries throughout 4 seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.
He later taught typing and enterprise expertise in highschool and faculty and opened a journey company and a tax consulting service.
In addition to his daughter Cathy, he’s survived by one other daughter, Chandra Roberts; a son, Craig; and 4 grandchildren. His marriages to Joyce Moss and Yvonne Barton ended in divorce.
For all his soccer exploits, the Texas recreation — and the feelings it stirred up — remained vivid in Roberts’s reminiscence. On the day of the sport, he recalled in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, “I didn’t give a damn who we played.”
“We were going to beat them,” he mentioned. “Everybody had a chip on their shoulder. We played our best game.”
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