Linfield’s 1965 football team and coach Paul Durham stood on principle and against racism
By Ken Goe, Oregonian, posted 6/6/2020, appeared in print in Sunday 6/7/2020, updated 6/8/2020
Odis Avritt had concerns, which is why he went to Linfield College football coach Paul Durham’s office late in the fall of 1965.
Linfield had rallied to beat Sul Ross State
and advance to the NAIA championship game against St. John’s of Minnesota.
Avritt was a Linfield running back.
The title game was in Augusta, Georgia,
home of the famed Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament. It was
deep in what then was the segregated South. Avritt is black.
“I never had been that far south in my
life,” Avritt says. “I’d read and heard about teams going down there, and
teammates being split up. I wanted to know what was going to happen.”
Durham heard him out before answering.
“Coach Durham said we’re going there as a
team and we will be staying together,” Avritt remembers. “That was the end of
it.”
The Wildcats went to Augusta and all stayed
in a hotel hosting the teams and NAIA officials. They lost the game and went
back to get ready for an NAIA banquet and hall of fame induction ceremony in
the hotel that night.
After Linfield’s traveling party filed into
the banquet room, some players noticed Durham talking to a hotel official and
then making several trips into the kitchen.
“I wondered what in the world he was
doing?” defensive lineman Bob Ferguson says. “What’s coach doing in the
kitchen?”
When the food came out, it was served to
everyone but the Linfield players, coaches and boosters.
Linfield had a 33-player traveling squad
that included several black and Hawaiian players. Everybody was hungry, and a
little taken aback.
Ferguson, Avritt and other Linfield players
pieced it together later from those who overheard some uncomfortable conversations
between Durham and the hotel staff.
“As Coach Durham was escorting our team
into the banquet hotel, he was approached by the manager of the banquet area,”
Avritt says. “He said, ‘Your black and brown players will have to eat in the
kitchen.’
“I can’t really say how that conversation
transpired, other than Coach Durham’s response was: ‘Well, if those players
have to eat in the kitchen, our whole team will eat in the kitchen.’ Coach was
informed: No, they couldn’t serve the whole team in the kitchen. So, Coach
Durham said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to serve our whole team in the banquet
area, then don’t serve us.’”
The hungry players didn’t hear it from
Durham. He simply gathered them together after the banquet, pulled out his
wallet, handed each one $5 and told them to find something to eat.
People on the hotel staff told Linfield’s
black and Hawaiian players of a restaurant that would allow them inside. Avritt
went with mixed feelings.
“I felt bad,” says Avritt, who is retired
and lives in Portland. “I guess I knew somewhere along the line something
wasn’t going to work out. I had that feeling.
“But I think Coach Durham lived up to his
word to me. We were there as a team. That was reflected in his actions.”
Ferguson, who is white, concedes he didn’t
think much about it at the time. In his mind, that was the South. That was how
things were there then.
Over time, he says he has come to a greater
understanding about how dehumanizing the experience had been for some of his
teammates. He has come to believe Durham not only was backing his non-white
players, he was teaching something to the entire team by standing on principle
and living up to his word.
“It was later in life, we realized how much
guts that took for him to do something like that,” Ferguson says. “But it was
so in his character.”
Durham coached football at Linfield from
1948 to 1967 and started a streak of consecutive winning seasons that now
stands at 64 years. He left for the University of Hawaii to be athletic
director. He died in 2007.
As the years passed, a number of his
players wanted to ensure he didn’t fade into history. They organized and raised
money to have a monument of Durham put up on the Linfield campus. Details of
his 1965 stand against racism are inscribed on the monument.