The airing of the upcoming PBS documentary
Nobody Knows: The Untold Story of Black Mormons, will bring new attention to a protest event against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints that raised important questions about free speech, the rights of student athletes, and the state of the Civil Rights Movement in the Mormon Church.
On October 17, 1969, 14 football players at the
University of Wyoming were suspended for threatening to wear black armbands onto the field in an upcoming game against Brigham Young University. The squad members, who were known as the "Black 14," were protesting the the Mormon Church's
exclusion of people of African descent from the priesthood.
Other student athletes whose teams were members of the Western Athletic Conference had refused to compete against Brigham Young that year, including eight Black track team members at the University of Texas, El Paso. Others, including
athletes at San Jose State, would protest in support of the Black 14; protest later extended to the University of Washington.
This was not the earliest anti-LDS student-athlete protest, nor were athlete boycotts a totally new general protest tactic; in 1968, Black student athletes participated in 130 protest actions. But this case was one of the best-known, in part because of the civil lawsuit
Williams v. Eaton, which alleged an infringement of the students' First Amendment Rights.
At Wyoming, the Black Student Alliance first publicized the idea of a boycott and protest of BYU on October 15; the group urged students and players to protest a matchup scheduled for three days later. Despite the warning of
Coach Lloyd Eaton to each of the 14 that team rules prohibited participating in demonstrations or protests, they together decided to wear armbands as a sign of protests. In a meeting with Eaton on October 17, the day before the game, the coach berated them publicly, revoking their scholarships and suspending them. Eaton
remembered the event as "simply a matter of discipline. Black or white, it didn't matter to me. They broke the rule and I told them they were no longer members of the team."
Yet Eaton, almost in the same breath, evoked conspiracy theory: "Why haven't we had a demonstration before? . . . we've had Negro players here since 1960. I'll tell you why. This is the first year the Black Student Alliance has been on campus. Now they're organized and ready to act. The WAC was picked because of Brigham Young. And we were picked as the trigger because of our rule against demonstrations. It all fits." And
other accounts allege that Eaton told them to "shut up," and that without his team "they would be out on the streets hustling."
Game-day student protests (archival footage), a
17-1 vote in the student senate to support the players, and
faculty support, which extended as far as 7 faculty members threatening resignation, were not strong enough to drown out Eaton's supporters, which included the University trustees and leadership. The 14, with the help of the NAACP, became plaintiffs in
Williams v Eaton, a $1.1. million civil suit filed on October 29, 1969. The Federal District court, upheld on appeal, ruled against the players, arguing in support of Eaton's no-protest policy. A subsequent appeals decision, in 1972, ruled that their free speech rights had not been violated when Eaton and the University Trustees forbade armbands.
Eaton resigned in 1971, after the protests were accompanied by a
wave of losses (and a worse season the following year). Ten of the 14 players graduated from college, and players
Tony McGee was the best known of the four who went on to play football professionally.
The LDS Church would not allow blacks to ascend to priesthood until
a 1978 Revelation received by President Kimball Spencer Kimball
apparently extended the office through God's providence.
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posted by Artw at 12:06 AM on October 16