CR Roberts, a Black running back at the University of Southern California, feared what would happen when his integrated Trojans football team traveled to the Jim Crow South to play the all-white University of Texas Longhorns in Austin in 1956.
There were death threats before the game. He wondered: Would the shotgun blast from the stands at Memorial Stadium kill him?
“Tensions are high,” he said in a 2018 documentary, “Breaking Barriers: The CR Roberts Story,” directed by Jeremy Sadowski. “We heard the epithets coming from the crowd when you were near the sideline.”
Despite the possibility of violence, Roberts turned in a shocking performance, leading the Trojans to a 44-20 victory. In the second quarter, he ran for a 73-yard touchdown and another that covered 50 yards.
In the third quarter, on his last carry, he scored again on a 74-yard drive. In all, he gained 251 yards, a single-game rushing record that stood at USC for 19 years. The Los Angeles Times called him an “explosive bolt of searing speed.”
But Roberts, who is one of three Black players on the USC team, said that with the crowd chanting the N-word, Coach Jess Hill pulled him from the game shortly after he scored his last goal. touchdown.
“The atmosphere in the stadium was very negative to a Black person,” Roberts said in “Breaking Barriers.”
The Trojans’ victory occurred early in the civil rights movement, when Black citizens boycotted segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., and the game stands today as an important racial breakthrough. at that time.
In 1966, Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), became the first team with an all-Black starting five to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship, defeating the all-white University of Kentucky team.
And in 1970, Sam Cunningham, part of USC’s all-Black backfield, gained 135 yards and scored two touchdowns in a 42-21 victory over an all-white University of Alabama squad. Although the Crimson Tide had one Black player on its new team, the game was credited with giving Alabama coach Paul (Bear) Bryant the green light from higher ups to actively recruit players. which is Black.
Roberts died Tuesday at a nursing facility in Norwalk, Conn., his daughter Cathy Creasia said. He is 87 years old.
Cornelius R. Roberts was born on Feb. 29, 1936, in Tupelo, Miss. His father, also named Cornelius, was a cotton picker and a steel railroad driver. His mother, Audra Mae (Dabbs) Roberts, was a homemaker.
His mother, as Roberts recalls, felt the family needed to leave racist Mississippi.
“Get our son out of Mississippi or they’ll kill him,” he was quoted as saying to his father, in a interview on a USC website in 2015.
In the third grade, Roberts recalled, as his family returned by train from a vacation in Oceanside, Calif., he was playing with a white boy in an integrated car when the train entered the segregated South. . At that moment his mother pulled him away from the child; the family had to switch to another coach.
“When you cross the Mason-Dixon line going south,” he said in “Breaking Down Barriers,” “Blacks have to go back to their cars and segregate again. I don’t understand.”
The family later moved to Oceanside, where Roberts became a star at Oceanside-Carlsbad High School, scoring an incredible 65 touchdowns. In the vernacular of the time, a local newspaper in 1954 hailed him as the “all-American Negro flash.”
As the drill-team leader of the ROTC unit in high school, Roberts aspired to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. “I could have been there if I was smarter at math,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2012.
In Southern California, he finished second in rushing to Jon Arnett in 1955; he would lead the team in that category in 1956, his junior year, thanks in part to his thrilling game against Texas.
But he barely made it there. USC coaches initially suggested that he not travel to Austin with the team because of the race issue. He replied that he would rather leave the team than stay at home. His teammates stood by him, refusing to go to Texas if the team’s Black players — among them Louis Byrd and Hillard Hill — were not.
The University of Texas, for its part, was not welcoming, although it played against Washington State University, which had a Black player, two years ago. USC was told to leave three Black players off the team.
“Texas called us about a week before the game and said we couldn’t play any colors, that the races couldn’t compete at the same time,” Roberts told The Austin American-Statesman in 2005.
After some negotiations, the whole team traveled to Austin. But the hotel where the team planned to stay would not allow Roberts, Byrd and Hill as guests, and it arranged for them to stay at a YMCA. The team refused and went to another hotel that, despite its segregation policy and after with some persuasion, let them in. Employees of the black hotel and local citizens gathered to meet the three players.
Roberts did not play in 1957, his senior year, after the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-12) imposed sanctions against USC and other schools for providing prohibited financial aid to players. .
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in business administration from USC in 1957, Roberts played two seasons for the Toronto Argonauts in the Canadian Football League. He then moved to the NFL, where he gained 637 yards on 155 carries in four seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.
He soon taught typing and business skills in high school and college and opened a travel agency and tax consulting service.
In addition to his daughter Cathy, he is survived by another daughter, Chandra Roberts; a son, Craig; and four grandchildren. His marriages to Joyce Moss and Yvonne Barton ended in divorce.
For all his football exploits, the Texas game – and the emotions it evoked – remain vivid in Roberts’ memory. On the day of the game, he recalled in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, “I didn’t care who we played.”
“We beat them,” he said. “Everybody has a chip on their shoulder. We played our best game.”