Michigan State and Jimmy Raye changed history together, in ways that went beyond football

EAST LANSING, Mich. — The lobby of the Wharton Center for Performing Arts is buzzing on this late-September evening. Cameras are flickering in the near background. Chatter is building with each passing minute. In a few short hours, a full-circle moment over 50 years in the making will finally arrive.

Jimmy Raye II, the man of the hour, is here. He is stationed at a round table in the center of the room, dressed for the occasion in a gray suit, a mauve button-down shirt and a violet tie to match. All the significant figures in his life are here to celebrate with him. But before the night’s festivities truly begin, he is asked to meet with a group of local reporters born long after his initial introduction to this university, there to ask one of college football’s true pioneers about the career that preceded this well-deserved moment. He happily obliges.

Raye begins to sort through 72 years worth of anecdotes and memories stored over time, dipping into his expansive vault of life experiences like a librarian searching for a specific book in a heavily coded system. His career has taken him from Fayetteville to San Francisco, with plenty of stops along the way. He recounts stories both uplifting and disheartening, words that also summarize the series of events and opportunities that is his life in football.

But on this night — the night he joins a long list of decorated athletes as a member of Michigan State’s Hall of Fame — none of that matters. Jimmy Raye II is back where it all started.

“I think I’m a recipient of everything because of the opportunity I had here at Michigan State,” Raye says, gently.

Raye before his Michigan State Hall of Fame induction. (Michigan State Athletics Communication)

Anyone who followed Raye’s career at Michigan State shouldn’t have been surprised to learn of his induction. He is the first black quarterback from the South to win a national championship. He was an All-Big Ten-caliber talent and a proven winner during an era when few African-Americans were given a chance to play the position. His athletic résumé speaks for itself.

But you see, Raye is more than an athlete. He is equally deserving for changing the way African-Americans across all levels are viewed in this sport. He is a living, breathing history lesson, who is now able to appreciate his own career in football — which didn’t come without challenges — because he’s seen the game transform for the better over time. And to this day, his work is not over.

But his original platform — the one Raye has so often used to inspire change — was given to him 55 years ago, here in East Lansing.

The streets of Fayetteville, North Carolina, were segregated and unsettling for African-Americans during the 1940s and ’50s — like most southern towns. Racism was blatant and rampant. Jim Crow laws ruled the area. This was the world Jimmy Raye was born into. And for a while, it was the only world he knew.

There were two places that shaped Raye’s life, long before he traveled to Michigan State. The first was Seabrook Park, a multisport recreational facility that bordered his backyard. He grew up on these fields, influenced by the mentors that ran programs and taught the value of sportsmanship.

The second was his high school. In the early 1960s, Raye attended Ezekiel Ezra Smith High, a segregated but advanced school in Fayetteville. Teachers held students accountable. They encouraged them to become doctors, lawyers, educators and whatever else they wanted to be. With the foundation laid at Seabrook and E.E. Smith, Raye excelled.

In high school, Raye developed into a talented, three-sport athlete — baseball, basketball and, of course, football, which quickly became his best sport. As a quarterback, Raye was blessed with a high IQ for the game, calling plays for the team his junior and senior seasons. He was a gifted runner, but also had a rocket arm. He led his team to a 21-3-4 record over three years as a starter and was a two-time all-state quarterback. He was a star in the area.

In a more recent era, Raye would’ve been a highly sought-after recruit with plenty of schools to choose from. But policies prevented major programs in the South from offering scholarships to black athletes, hindering opportunities for talented players like Raye and so many others.

“Oh, I was good enough, there ain’t no question about that,” Raye says sharply, thinking back on the opportunities he was denied out of high school. “I was good enough to play at North Carolina, (N.C.) State or Duke or Clemson. It’s just that it was against the law to give black athletes a scholarship. But I think if I was in that arena today, my skills were of such that I would’ve been recruited to one of those schools, definitely.”

At this time, Raye began to map out a more realistic plan for his future. He began to settle into the idea of becoming a gym teacher at E.E Smith. He always had a passion for teaching and figured that — after earning an education degree from a historically black college in the South — he could return home and help guide kids, the way that his mentors at Seabrook and within the school guided him. It’s a life he would’ve happily lived, but ultimately not one that was meant for him.

In 1963, when Raye was a senior, he was invited to participate in the East-West All-Star Game, a showcase for the top football players in North Carolina. Here, Raye’s talents caught the eye of Cal Stoll, a Michigan State assistant who was in town to observe players. They struck up a relationship.

“I really didn’t know anything about Michigan State until I played” in the East-West game, Raye said. “That was my first contact with Michigan State.”

Raye impressed in the game. He threw for two touchdowns, leading his team to four scoring drives and the victory. Stoll, who recruited the state of North Carolina for MSU, named him the game’s most valuable player. It was his performance in this event that set everything in motion.

Stoll acted as an extension of his boss, Duffy Daugherty, Michigan State’s progressive head coach who was ahead of his time when it came to integrating the sport. In the 1950s and ’60s, Daugherty built real and genuine relationships with black high school coaches in the South. He offered private coaching clinics to those who were denied access to regular clinics because of their skin color. This created a level of trust between the two parties.

When these coaches had talented players who otherwise would’ve been denied an opportunity at their home-state school, they reached out to Duffy and his staff, knowing he would give them a fair evaluation and a fresh start in an integrated environment. It was a well-oiled machine that’s now referred to as the “Underground Railroad of College Football.”

“Nobody had a network like Duffy did,” said Tom Shanahan, author of the book “Raye of Light,” which chronicles the rise of Raye and other black Michigan State players who hailed from southern states. “That’s why black coaches trusted him with their players.”

Bringing in players of color when few schools did is what separated Michigan State from other northern programs. Daugherty was an assistant at Michigan State in 1949 under Clarence “Biggie” Munn when the school accepted Willie Thrower, its first black quarterback — and the first black quarterback to appear in a Big Ten game. When Daugherty was named Michigan State’s head coach in December 1953, he continued these efforts with the goal of bringing in the best talent — white or black.

Michigan State was a winning program, which helped the school gain national attention and spread the word of Daugherty’s philosophy to black athletes watching from afar. It also helped that Daugherty received internal support from school president John Hannah, who had a strong background in racial integration as the first chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights. It was the perfect system for this setup to thrive.

During his recruitment, Raye remembered Thrower at Michigan State. He caught wind of how Daugherty cared for the black players he brought into his program. Knowing he’d be playing for a coach who was dedicated to change made the 750-mile trek from Fayetteville to East Lansing an easy one. He was Michigan State-bound.

“I’m very thankful for the courage, the conviction and the foresight of John Hannah and Duffy Daugherty,” Raye said in his hall of fame speech. “I owe them a debt of gratitude for their vision of a better future for America. They gave men who couldn’t go to school in their state a chance to go to Michigan State.”

It took time for Raye to adjust to a new life in the Midwest. On his visit to Michigan State, the first plane ride of his life, a flight attendant offered Raye a complimentary bag of peanuts. He declined because he assumed it would cost money that he didn’t have. When he arrived in town, reservations were made for him to stay at Kellogg Center, a hotel on Michigan State’s campus. He entered the hotel restaurant looking to grab something to eat, but with a segregated culture still on his mind, he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to be there.

“I looked around and didn’t know if I should sit down or not,” Raye recalls in Shanahan’s book. “When I did sit down, I kept looking around to see if someone would tell me to get up.”

It was a natural question for black athletes from the South who were adjusting to an integrated life for the very first time. It helped, Raye says, that freshmen were ineligible to play, meaning he could take his time and learn his surroundings his first season on campus. It also helped that he had teammates who knew what he was going through.

The “underground railroad” Duffy orchestrated brought in 44 black players from the South between 1959 and 1972. Wide receiver Gene Washington, defensive end Bubba Smith, linebacker George Webster and running back Clinton Jones arrived a year prior to Raye and highlighted the group. They all went on to become a few of the all-time greats to play for the school. But as the quarterback, Raye stood out among his peers.

In his first eligible season in 1965, Raye backed up MSU’s starting quarterback and team MVP Steve Juday. Daugherty’s Spartans were viewed as the best team in the nation, but lost the Rose Bowl against UCLA, finishing with a record of 10-1. Still, Michigan State was named co-national champions along with Alabama and was set to return most of its talented core in 1966. Except for Juday.

An open competition took place the following season, and Daugherty told Raye to prepare himself. He was destined to emerge as the starter on a team that was talented enough to compete with any program in the country. It placed both Raye and Michigan State in the spotlight.

The newly minted title of starting quarterback was sure to bring challenges. Defensive and offensive skill positions had become more integrated, but the quarterback position lagged behind. In 1966, Raye was set to become the only black quarterback at a major university. He knew he’d have to play twice as well as his white counterparts to earn the respect of those who weren’t fully sold on the idea of a black quarterback. None of that bothered him, though.

“I had enough ability,” Raye said. “That would speak for itself. It was just a matter of opportunity.”

Raye was given his first in 1966, when he quarterbacked the most integrated team in college football. There were 20 black players and 11 black starters, unprecedented numbers for a major program at the time, even up north. Of the black players on the roster, three were All-Americans and six were All-Big Ten honorees. Four of them —  Smith, Jones, Webster and Washington — would go on to become top-10 NFL Draft picks. In the same draft class.

As one would imagine, this Michigan State team was quite good. Daugherty’s Spartans were 9-0 and ranked No. 2 in the country, entering a de facto national championship game in East Lansing against No. 1 Notre Dame.

Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty and Raye in a game against Purdue in East Lansing on Oct. 22, 1966. (Associated Press)

It would be Michigan State’s final game of the season. The Rose Bowl was the only bowl game Big Ten teams could qualify for, and because of a rule preventing the same team from playing in the Rose Bowl in back-to-back years, Michigan State’s season would end against Notre Dame.

Given the circumstances, the stage was set for the big game on Nov. 19, 1966. Both teams were undefeated. Hall of Fame coaches led each program. More than 80,000 fans in attendance and another 30 million people watched (on tape delay) a matchup that was dubbed “the game of the century.”

It was a heated battle throughout, with Michigan State taking an early 10-0 lead before Notre Dame answered with 10 points of its own. With 1:10 left to play, tied at 10, Notre Dame had the ball at its own 30-yard line. The offense needed 40 yards to give placekicker Joe Azzaro a chance to win the game. But fearing a turnover and a potential loss, Notre Dame head coach Ara Parseghian opted to run the clock out and preserve the score in place. The game ended in an anticlimatic 10-10 tie.

Michigan State players were upset with the decision to milk the clock. But they now appreciate how evenly matched both teams were. It’s fitting this way.

“I think if either team had won, it would be just another trivia question,” Raye said. “But now, it’s a classic. The most highly publicized game in the history of college football, more media than credentials passed out for the first time in history and the atmosphere was spectacular. It was all you’d ever want as an athlete, to perform in front of a crowd that size.”

Notre Dame and Michigan State were named co-champions in 1966, but the game went on to become more significant than that individual season. Raye became the first black quarterback from the South to win a national championship, and it meant back-to-back titles for a heavily integrated Michigan State team.

For comparison, Minnesota’s championship team in 1960 — which featured Sandy Stephens, the first black quarterback to win a national championship — had only five black players on its roster. The Notre Dame team that Michigan State tied in 1966 had just one, Alan Page. USC’s title-winning team a year later, in 1967, had only seven black players. And Hall of Fame coach Bear Bryant won three of his six championships at Alabama before the school accepted its first black player.

Michigan State was doing something no other program was. In so many ways, Raye was the biggest beneficiary.

“Coming from a small, black, segregated high school in the South, playing a position that was off-limits to people of color and being able to not only play, but to start and win a national championship, it’s surreal,” Raye said.

Raye wasn’t the most talented player on the team. Others had flashier stats and went on to have successful NFL careers. But Shanahan argues that Raye’s position — and the impact made in the career that followed his playing days — is the reason why he is the most socially influential figure from a roster that made history in the sport.

“He broke barriers on two levels,” Shanahan said. “First as a black quarterback when there were no quarterbacks — and people don’t realize how recent that was. And second, as a coach. Both at the college level and in the NFL.”

When his Michigan State career came to an end in 1967, as well as his brief NFL playing career in 1969, Raye had no intentions of coaching. Instead, he returned to campus in hopes of earning a law degree.

That is, until a conversation with Daugherty convinced him otherwise.

Daugherty told Raye to come out to practice and help him coach Michigan State’s scout team. Raye agreed, thinking it would be a short-term stint helping the man who’d helped him in so many ways. But just one year later, defensive line coach George Perles took a job with the Pittsburgh Steelers, leaving a full-time opening on Daugherty’s staff.

The job was offered to Raye. A lifelong career in coaching followed.

“It meant a lot that he gave me an opportunity to coach,” Raye said of Daugherty. “He was very instrumental in my coaching career, the start of it, and mentoring me the early years of it. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have lasted in coaching very long.”

He spent five seasons as an assistant at Michigan State, even after Daugherty retired in 1972. From there, brief stops at Wyoming and Texas preceded his first NFL coaching stint, when he became the 49ers’ wide receivers coach in 1977.

Raye was often the only black coach on a given staff. When he entered the league, he was one of just three black assistant coaches, along with Elijah Pitts and Lionel Taylor. Six years later, in 1983, Raye became one of the first black offensive coordinators in the NFL. It was all relatively new territory. And it took place less than 40 years ago.

Longevity was one of the defining themes of Raye’s tenure in the league. His NFL coaching career spanned 37 years and parts of five decades. He coached nearly every offensive position. He was the offensive coordinator for seven different teams, coaching a number of top-10 offenses. Still, he was never given a head coaching opportunity.

“I never felt that being a head coach was a birthright,” Raye said. “I was satisfied. I would’ve liked the opportunity to have been a head coach in the National Football League, but just like when I played quarterback, I came along when that wasn’t fashionable. When I was at the height of my career, it wasn’t fashionable to hire black coaches. When I got started in the NFL, there were only three black assistants. As I grew through that process, the idea of hiring a black coach in the NFL was not something that was talked about.”

“He just came along at the wrong time,” Shanahan says.

Raye was never given a chance to run his own team, but his work today aims to make sure others in his position do. He is a member of the NFL’s Career Development Panel, a group tasked with improving the number of minority coaches, coordinators and general managers across the league. It works in unison with the Rooney Rule, which requires teams with a coaching or senior football operations vacancy to interview minority candidates.

Raye’s work extends beyond numbers, though. He was given plenty of courtesy interviews throughout his career, and knows those are often simply out of necessity these days. What he and others on the panel do instead is break candidates into tiers and provide extensive background information on each, delivering their reports to owners, team presidents and general managers when jobs come open each offseason.

“We find the qualified people that they claim don’t exist,” Raye says, pointedly.

Within the last few years, the league has also reestablished the NFL Career Development Symposium. It’s a three-day program that offers aspiring head coaches and general managers an opportunity to network with figures of authority in an inclusive environment. It’s open to anyone looking to advance his career and provides a chance to interact with the people with hiring power, so these candidates already have a prior relationship when jobs become available.

In all honesty, though, Raye’s work now isn’t all that different than what already did throughout his coaching career.

Raye was a nurturing type of coach. He was a product of the Seabrook mentors and Daugherty. He was viewed as an excellent teacher, not only for his players, but for his fellow minority coaches. Look no further than Tony Dungy.

Dungy’s relationship with Raye is personal. He grew up in Jackson, Michigan, about 40 miles from East Lansing, watching Raye quarterback those national championship-winning MSU teams in the 1960s. He emulated Raye in his backyard, hoping to one day mirror his career.

Later in life, when Dungy himself developed into a talented quarterback prospect, he was recruited by Raye to play at Michigan State. Dungy eventually chose to play at Minnesota, following Stoll there when Daugherty retired, but his relationship with Raye continued into the NFL.

Raye was a mentor to Dungy and so many other young coaches trying to break into the league. Though Raye himself never held the head role, Dungy went on to become the first black coach to win a Super Bowl in 2007, when his Indianapolis Colts defeated Lovie Smith’s Chicago Bears.

To show his gratitude, Dungy, now a studio analyst for NBC Sports, wrote the foreword in Shanahan’s book on Raye and his MSU teammates.

“Because I grew up in Michigan, I was aware of the impact Jimmy Raye and those Spartans teams had on college football,” Dungy writes. “But the influx of African-American players in the 1960s had another effect on the game beyond impacting the speed and style of play. It changed things off the field as well. As players like Jimmy became team leaders, it opened the door for African-Americans to go into the coaching ranks.

“Jimmy became one of the pioneers when, in 1977, he became one of the very few African-American assistant coaches in the National Football League with the San Francisco 49ers. Four years later, when I started my coaching career with the Pittsburgh Steelers, there was still only a handful of minority coaches in the NFL. Jimmy was one of my role models, helping pave the way for so many young minority coaches over the next two decades.”

Here in East Lansing on this September night, awaiting his hall of fame induction, Raye is surrounded by the people who mattered most in his life.

MSU teammates Gene Washington, Clinton Jones and others have returned to campus to celebrate and share stories of those championship teams of the past. He was able to meet with head coach Mark Dantonio, and players from the current Michigan State football team. And Jimmy’s son, Jimmy Raye III, was able to make the short trip from nearby Detroit, where he serves as a senior personnel executive with the Lions. He saw what the weekend meant to his father.

“I could hear the sense of accomplishment in his voice,” Raye III told The Athletic. “It just made the struggles and all of the obstacles that he went through during that time — even with the greatness of those teams and the talent they had — it made the struggle that he went through worth it. It really did.”

MSU athletic director Bill Beekman greets Raye during a football game. (Michigan State Athletics Communication)

As he sits at the round table with reporters, Raye reflects on his life. From his humble beginnings growing up in North Carolina during the height of the civil rights movement — where he’s since returned to settle down and start a youth foundation for kids in Fayetteville — to the more recent chapters of his life, working as senior adviser still to create positive, meaningful change and a lasting legacy at age 72, Raye knows that every opportunity he was afforded can be traced back his ties in East Lansing. It’s why the news that he was going to be inducted into Michigan State’s Hall of Fame brought him to tears.

“It’s a tremendous honor,” Raye said. “I’m beholden to my parents for having the trust and the faith in Duffy Daugherty and Michigan State during a very turbulent time in this country to allow me the opportunity to come and get an education and to play athletics. And as I think back on all of that, I could never imagine that one day I would be entered into the Hall of Athletics at Michigan State University. I’m equally humbled and very appreciative of the vision of Duffy Daugherty and president John Hannah for giving blacks in the segregated South an opportunity for an education and to play athletics at a major level. Words cannot convey how deeply my gratitude goes for them, and giving me the opportunity that ended up here.”

This school helped him rise from a segregated area and allowed him to flourish. He’s now able to help advance the careers of so many others, a job he very much enjoys, because of the efforts of this university.

Raye’s story is about opportunity and, more specifically, what can come of those opportunities. It all started here.

(Top photo courtesy of Michigan State Athletics Communication)