A coaching pioneer: Willie Jeffries helped blaze trail for black coaches and players

Oh, the irony of it all. Willie Jeffries, raised by a mother who was a servant to white families in Union for more than 50 years and the product of the segregationist South, scheduled a recent lunch meeting at the Orangeburg Country Club.

When Jeffries entered South Carolina State University as a freshman in 1953, the only blacks at the Orangeburg Country Club were caddies, cooks and waiters. Even as S.C. State’s head football coach – during his first stint from 1973 through 1978 – Jeffries was not allowed to so much as dine, let alone be a member at the all-white, private club.

So, his lunch in the Club’s dining room on that steamy hot afternoon served as an example of how far race relations have advanced over the decades. The color of a person’s skin no longer is important to the Club’s membership. Dining at the adjacent table were three black women. Both waiters were white.

“I never would have dreamed this could happen,” Jeffries said as he peered through the dining hall windows toward the golf course’s 18th green. “Never would have dreamed it.”

Jeffries was a pioneer in race relations in college football. He was the first black coach of an NCAA Division I football program, serving in that capacity at Wichita State from 1979 to 1983. Those five seasons in Kansas proved to be the first real justice Jeffries experienced in race relations.

Until then, Jeffries lived in a world that was black and white, with the black community getting the short end of everything from seating at restaurants and theaters to funding in schools and athletics departments.

Jeffries assisted his mother in serving weekly Rotary Club and Lions Club lunches at the Fairforest Hotel in Union. His father died when he was 4, and when his mom wanted to build a house, he supplemented her $12-a-week salary through his work as a caddy at the local golf course so they could meet the $37 monthly loan payments.

Jeffries played football at Sims, knowing full well that his all-black high school team could hold its own against the all-white Union High team. He said the matching luggage – a pair of Piggly Wiggly grocery bags loaded with clothes – he first carried to campus at S.C. State could not compare to the Samsonite used by those students at Clemson and USC, but that did not mean the Bulldogs could not have competed with the Tigers and Gamecocks on the football field.

One of Jeffries’ teammates was Deacon Jones, who would have dearly loved to play at a white Division I program before going on to a Hall of Fame career in the NFL. Jeffries was certain many of his teammates could have been among the best athletes at the higher-level programs.

Jeffries got his coaching start at Granard, the black high school in Gaffney, and in seven seasons his teams won three state titles and posted a 64-8-2 record. He had a running back, William Powell, who scored 32 touchdowns one season and eventually played at Iowa.

Granard played its games on Thursday nights and Gaffney on Fridays in the same stadium. The same fans attended both games, and probably got an idea which team was better. Unbeknownst to the coaches at the two high schools, the two teams played pickup tackle games at a Gaffney park on Sundays.

Jeffries said the teams were evenly matched, year-in and year-out, even though Granard’s uniforms were not as shiny as Gaffney’s and Jeffries coached with one assistant and the Gaffney coach had as many as eight assistants.

Jeffries sent those Granard players on to Johnson C. Smith, Livingstone and, of course, S.C. State, where he became the head coach in 1973. Two players on that first team were Harry Carson and Donnie Shell, both of whom are members of the College Football Hall of Fame. Carson is an NFL Hall of Famer.

Over his first six seasons, Jeffries’ S.C. State teams went 35-6-3 and won five MEAC championships. The 1976 club was 10-1 with six shutouts, allowing 39 points the entire season.

Today, coaches from lower-level NCAA programs visit Division I programs during the summer months to pick up pointers on various offenses and defenses. Back then, it was not uncommon for Jim Carlen to send his USC staff to S.C. State to learn more about how Jeffries taught blocking.

“I think we could have held our own with almost any team, other than maybe some of the northern teams or the California teams that recruited blacks,” Jeffries said of his mid-70s clubs, which were not permitted to play games against the USCs and Clemsons in college football.

Southern programs were just beginning to integrate their rosters, so S.C. State was no longer securing all of the best talent in the state. Still, S.C. State went head-to-head in recruiting against the bigger programs that were giving more scholarships.

The biggest prize Jeffries landed was 6-foot-7, 320-pound lineman Mickey Sims of Lockhart High. Under the rules of the day, coaches had to show up at a prospect’s house on national signing day to get his signature on a grant-in-aid. On the morning Sims was to sign, coaches from Clemson, USC, Wisconsin, Iowa, N.C. A&T, S.C. State, and several others waited under a tree outside the residence.

At about 7 a.m., Sims’ mother appeared at the front door and invited Jeffries into the house.

“Coach, he’s going to sign with you,” Jeffries recalled the mother saying.

Then she went outside and addressed the other coaches.

“Gentlemen, thanks for your interest in Mickey, but he’s going to South Carolina State,” Jeffries recalled her saying.

Sims was a four-year starter at S.C. State and later played eight seasons in the NFL.

By the time Jeffries went to Wichita State, then returned to S.C. State as coach from 1989 to 2001, the landscape of football at historically black colleges had changed considerably. Then, as today, the top black players in the state and country, are signing with Division I programs.

S.C. State has been scheduling annual “money” games against Division I programs since 2007, collecting a nice paycheck for the athletics department but having never defeated the likes of USC, Clemson, Georgia Tech, Indiana and Arizona.

Jeffries, who is retired in Orangeburg, believes it would have been different in his playing and early coaching days at S.C. State.

This story was originally published August 23, 2014 at 9:00 PM with the headline "A coaching pioneer: Willie Jeffries helped blaze trail for black coaches and players."