Animals: Bison Strike

A happyland for white-collared U. S. Negroes is a collection of buildings grouped around a grassy campus on the northwest outskirts of Washington, D. C. Howard University has many white friends as well: the Julius Rosenwald Fund and the General Education Board; Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gave it nearly $5,000,000 in PWA grants for buildings and turned up last October to dedicate its new chemistry building; Eleanor Roosevelt, who has dropped in at Howard faculty meetings. Last week Howard’s friends were shocked to hear that its 1,950blackamoor students were to a man out on strike.

Howard’s football team was the root of the difficulty. The black Bisons used to be the best team in the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association, but since scholarly President Mordecai Wyatt Johnson came in 1926 the administration has paid less attention to athletics. President Johnson thriftily abolished football training table, shaved the athletic budget to $10,000, hired progressively cheaper coaches until this year he got black Harry Payne, a onetime Howard quarterback, to work part-time for $900. Under Coach Payne the Bisons proceeded to lose every game, were held scoreless in four of them. Fortnight ago 3,000 spectators were waiting in the stands to see Howard play Virginia Union when an announcer ran breathless onto the field with the news that the Bisons had quietly walked out on the game.

Found at a local Negro theatre enjoying the cinema Down the Stretch, the team announced that they would not go back to work without better food and morefinancial consideration. Some of them said they had been training on wieners. Howard’s students marched out of their classrooms on a sympathy strike. Thereupon Howard canceled the annual Big Game of Negro football, Howard v. Lincoln University (Chester Co., Pa.), scheduled to be played in Washington on Thanksgiving Day.

Back last week from a Y. M. C. A. meeting in Indianapolis sped harried President Mordecai Johnson, persuaded the strikers to call a truce while he considered their demands: 1) better football equipment, 2) jobs for the team payable in board, 3) a football training table and dietitian, 4) an experienced full-time coach, 5) a team physician and trainer. Said a football spokesman, called upon to explain the Virginia Union desertion: “We were too hungry to get in there and battle those big country boys full of ham and kale. . . . Now this Lincoln team, they got a training table and eat good. … All the fellows want to play in this game. It’s a big traditional game, but dawgone, we can’t play if we don’t get something to eat.” At week’s end the sympathetic strikers were back in class but Mordecai Johnson and the Bisons remained in deadlock.