Opinion: Hair, race and football at Penn State — A new chapter in an old story
A 1960s-era Penn State alumnus recently sent a letter to a Penn State football player describing the defensive back’s dreadlocks as “disgusting” and lamenting the good old days when only “clean cut men and women” trod the hallowed grounds of “Dear Old State.” Posted on social media by Penn State players, the letter ignited a firestorm of debate about racial identity on campus and beyond.
The letter-writer is white. The player at whom he aimed his comments, which decried not only dreadlocks but tattoos, is black. Coach James Franklin and the university administration blasted the missive as intolerant. The team sported T-shirts emblazoned with “Chains, Dreadlocks, Tattoos, & ‘We Are’” to champion their position. The letter-writer claimed his remarks were not racist. That defense has not satisfied his critics. “‘Explain to me how this isn’t racist?’” one Penn State player demanded. Several insightful commentators noted letter-writer didn’t target last year’s magnificently tattooed star, Trace McSorely, who is white, but did vent his personal grooming peeves at a black player.
As historians, we think that the Penn State alumnus clearly made a racial comment. Seen in best the light it is still profoundly ignorant and insensitive. More importantly, as historians we also want to remind people that hair and hairstyles have always been profoundly racial issues in American history. Consider the tumultuous hair wars of the 1960s — the era in which the letter-writing alumnus graduated from Penn State — and the racial sensibilities that swirled around hairstyles. Had the letter-writer made a similar remark about “Afros” at “Dear Old State” in 1966 that he made about dreadlocks in 2019, more than a few members of that generation of college athletes would have the same reaction: “explain to me how this isn’t racist.”
We would like to remind the university’s legion of supporters that this is not the first time that questions about hair and race in the context of football have roiled the campus. Once upon a time, the issue was not dreadlocks but haircuts. In February of 1948, six weeks after Penn State’s football team that included two black players desegregated the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, a State College barber refused to cut the hair of African American student who was also a combat veteran of the Second World War. Segregation and racism did not exist then only in the Jim Crow South but even in “enlightened” Happy Valley.
African American students had long lived this reality, traveling to Johnstown or Harrisburg or Philadelphia or Pittsburgh to get a haircut, but the post Cotton Bowl incident caught the attention of white students. An editorial in the Daily Collegian demanded “a change of heart” in a community that cheered for black football stars Wally Triplett and Dennis Hoggard. A stalwart receiver on the field, Hoggard became a leader in a campaign to integrate State College’s barbershops. After a year of diplomacy failed to break the color lines in barbershops, Hoggard took to the steps of Old Main and implored students to man the picket lines. Graduate student Saul Isserow wrote a powerful “Appeal to Town Residents” calling on State College “townies” to join students in abandoning the “clean cut” look popular in that era and refuse to patronize barbershops until segregation ended. “You have joined with students in cheering Barney Ewell (an African American track star for Penn State in the 1940s) and Wally Triplett at New Beaver Field,” Isserow reminded his readers, challenging the community to support black students off the field as well as on it.
Happy Valley barbershops remained segregated through the mid-1960s, when the contemporary letter-writer who recently decried Nittany Lion dreadlocks matriculated at Penn State, sang the alma mater, and learned to admire the stanza “for the glory.” Things have certainly changed in some ways since then. State College barbershops are no longer segregated. Some things, however, are not radically different. Nittany Lion football players, then and now, remain at center of debates over racial sensibilities. The underlying refrain in these repeating chapters of hair, race, and football, continue to echo: “Tell me (and tell us) how this isn’t racist.” Like the verses of the alma mater, the shadows of segregated barbershops, and cranky posts from some alumni, that sentiment continues to reverberate at “Dear Old State.”
