Nov 26, 2017 3 min read

In 1941, Eddie Robinson, aged 22, was working at a feed mill and driving a truck when he learned that Grambling State, an all-black college near Shreveport, La., was looking for a head football coach. He applied and got the job, in part because he was black, came cheap and was willing to do whatever it took to field a competitive team.

“Whatever it took” at an all-black college in the Deep South in 1941 meant Robinson coached both offense and defense – Grambling couldn’t afford assistant coaches – mowed the football field, painted the lines, mended his players’ injuries, and fixed his players sandwiches for away games because they couldn’t eat in the segregated restaurants along the highways of Louisiana and other Southern states. One year, when his star running back couldn’t play in the championship game because he had to pick cotton, Robinson sent the entire team out to the cotton fields to finish the job before game day, and they won the championship.

His first season as coach, Grambling went 3-5, but the next year, having weeded out the slackers and recruited new players, Grambling not only had a perfect 9-0 record, it wasn’t once scored upon.

By the 1960s, Robinson had built Grambling into a powerhouse team that was attracting national notice, and the notice of the National Football League, which began drafting Grambling’s players. Indeed, during Robinson’s tenure, 220 Grambling players played in the NFL, and four went to the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Doug Williams, who quarterbacked Grambling’s team in 1977, later became the first black quarterback to play in the Super Bowl, leading the Washington Redskins to a 42 – 10 rout of the Denver Broncos, and being named MVP.

Grambling’s fortunes began to decline in the late 1960s, in part because of its past success. As the civil rights movement gathered steam, and as football coaches at Southern universities began to realize that black athletes could more than hold their own on the football field, they began recruiting black players who had once been the exclusive province of Grambling, and after three consecutive losing seasons in the mid-1990s, there was pressure for Robinson to retire.

Still, when he did retire after coaching his last game this week in 1997, he had coached Grambling for 55 years, and had amassed a record of 408-165-15 that included 17 Southwestern Athletic Conference championships and nine black college football championships. He also retired as the second winningest coach in college football history.

Robinson died in 2007 after suffering from Alzheimer’s, but he lives on in the memories of black athletes everywhere, including Doug Williams, who succeeded him as Grambling’s coach.