CHARLOTTE, NC — In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, college football programs across the South began to slowly integrate. It’s a shift that’s often remembered as part of the country’s broader push toward equality — but on the field, the reasons weren’t always that simple.
In his 2025 study, “Remembering the (College Football) Titans: Integrating College Football in the South,” published in the Journal of Sports Economics, Dr. Benjamin Posmanick takes a closer look at how that change actually unfolded.
His research suggests that integration wasn’t driven by social progress alone. In many cases, it came down to something more immediate — the need to compete.
“Worse-performing teams tended to integrate sooner,” Posmanick said.
A different lens on integration
Posmanick, an associate professor of finance at St. Bonaventure University, took a closer look at college football programs across the South in the 1960s and 1970s to better understand how integration actually unfolded.
What he found complicates the usual narrative. While the Civil Rights Movement helped open the door, it didn’t always determine when — or why — teams chose to walk through it.
Instead, performance often played a decisive role.
“If you’re excluding talented players, you’re essentially making your team worse,” Posmanick said. “It doesn’t mean social progress wasn’t happening,” Posmanick said. “But economics and competition played a significant role.”
Teams that were losing had more reason to change. Bringing in better players could mean turning things around. For programs that were already winning, there wasn’t the same urgency to do things differently.
A region slow to change
College football in the American South was deeply tied to regional identity, tradition and segregation. Even after federal law mandated desegregation, many programs resisted integrating their teams.
The process was uneven. Schools in Border States integrated earlier, while programs deeper in the South lagged behind, shaped by cultural resistance and community pressure.
Balancing winning and public pressure
For coaches and athletic programs, the decision to integrate came with risk.
“Even if a coach wants to recruit the best players, there may be pressure from fans, boosters or the broader community,” Posmanick said.
That tension created a difficult balance. Integrating could improve performance, but it could also bring backlash from fans and stakeholders who were not ready for change.
Programs were often forced to weigh those competing realities — success on the field versus acceptance off it.
When opportunity met performance
While Posmanick’s research focuses on college programs, the effects of integration were felt across all levels of football — including high schools.
In 1971, T.C. Williams High School — later depicted in the Disney film Remember the Titans — fielded its first integrated football team.
Among those on the team was Al Bethune, now a Career and Technical Education teacher at East Mecklenburg High School.
“Walking into that school, you could feel the tension right away,” Bethune said. “Everything had changed overnight — new faces, new expectations — but not everybody was ready for it. I knew back then I was stepping into something bigger than just school or football.”
Integration extended far beyond the football field.
“The classroom was just as much a part of the experience as the field,” Bethune said. “You were learning your lessons, but you were also learning how to exist in a space that hadn’t always been open to you. Every day was about proving you belonged.”
At first, unity did not come easily — even within the team.
“At first, the team was divided just like everything else,” Bethune said. “But football has a way of bringing people together. When you’re out there competing, you have to trust the person next to you. Over time, that started to matter more than anything else.”
As the season progressed, success began to shift perception.
“Winning changed the conversation,” Bethune said. “Once we started having success, people couldn’t ignore what we were doing. It forced folks to look past race and focus on performance.”
A legacy that still resonates
Decades later, the connection between performance and opportunity continues to shape sports.
“The idea that organizations respond to incentives — whether financial or competitive — still holds,” Posmanick said.
While today’s game is far removed from the segregated fields of the 1960s, the underlying dynamic remains familiar: performance drives opportunity.
As a coach, that connection is still visible. Players earn opportunities based on what they can do on the field — but history shows those opportunities have not always been equally available.
More than a story of progress
Looking back, Bethune sees his experience as part of something larger than a single season.
“Looking back, we didn’t always realize it at the time, but we were part of something bigger than ourselves,” Bethune said. “We were helping change how people saw each other — on the field, in the classroom and in the community.”
The integration of college football is often remembered as a triumph of social change. And it was.
But it was also shaped by competition, incentives and the realities of the game itself.
“Integration in college football wasn’t just a story of social progress,” Posmanick said. “It was also a story of competition and economic incentives pushing teams to change.”
In the end, the game didn’t just reflect society — it helped push it forward.