WHAT SPURRED SPARTAN'S COACH?

By Frank Fear, MSU professor emeritus

Michigan State football was dedicated to integration, long before many other universities followed suit. There are a number of reasons why, but here's one reason many people don’t know. It’s a story about a quarterback who played in the 1930s for Syracuse University. Duffy Daugherty was his teammate.

During the 1937 season the University of Maryland refused to play Syracuse in light of suspicions the school had about an Orange player, a quarterback named Wilmeth Sidat-Singh.

SU claimed he was “a Hindu from India,” but Maryland thought differently: the Terps thought he was Black.

The Terrapins had exclusionary policies in place. It would be years (the early ’50s) before the first students of color would arrive in College Park, and the school’s first athlete of color didn’t compete for the Terps until the ’60s.

Well, Maryland was right about one thing: Sidat-Singh was no “Hindu from India.” His birth name wasn’t even Sidat-Singh: it was Webb. Wilmeth, of African-American lineage, was born in Washington, D.C.

He took his stepfather’s surname after his mother remarried. “Negro to Play U. of Maryland” a headline read in The Washington Tribune.

Maryland threatened to cancel the game unless Webb was benched.

SU complied. Sidat-Singh–who died a few years later in WWII–was benched.

The response troubled Duffy Daugherty, so the story goes. He decided to walk a different path–and he did–as the Spartan's football coach. He would not discriminate or exclude. He would welcome and include Black athletes instead.”