A Fair Shot? Black Student-Athletes and the Limits of Dartmouth's "Equal Opportunity"

For the majority of Dartmouth's history, a Black student on campus was a rarity. The College had graduated its first Black student in 1828, but by 1968 the College had only 130 Black alumni. Then, in the span of six years, the on-campus Black population increased a whopping 500%, from 14 students in the Class of 1968 to 85 in the Class of 1974. The Class of 1973 alone brought 82 Black students, nearly triple the class before it. The Trustees' Committee on Equal Opportunity's 1968 report, commonly known as the McLane Report, recorded Black matriculants climbing class by class, and within a few years the Black applicant pool had grown from 94 for the Class of 1972 into the hundreds. On paper, it looked like a college remaking itself.

Before this, for a sizeable portion of the Black men who arrived at Dartmouth, the door in was football. Black students had been athletes at Dartmouth since Matthew Bullock, Dartmouth's first Black football player, in 1904. Beyond this, the recruiting surge of the late 1960s meant the team was one of the largest pipelines onto campus. The McLane Report itself urged coaches to recruit harder in Black communities, while adding: "Care must be taken... not to exploit an applicant's athletic ability."

However, getting to Hanover was not the same as being treated as an equal once here. In 1974, three Black students, Eileen Cave '76, Judi Redding '76, and Monica Hargrove '76, wrote "Institutional Racism and Student Life at Dartmouth College." This report, which came to be known as the Redding Report, aired grievances of the community that had been communicated at the 1972 Black Alumni Conference. These included the lack of a Black quarterback in the program's history. Black men recruited as high-school quarterbacks were switched to other positions, and most of those who got playing time played defense. Complaints weren't easy to communicate, as they could bring "covert retaliation by the coaches."

The oral history of Wesley Pugh '73 puts this into perspective. He was an all-Ivy safety, ranked among the nation's leaders in interceptions; however, he was benched until games became close, and the coaches offered to keep him on the field only if he switched positions. After a coach screamed at him during a home game against Yale, he threw down his helmet and quit the team. He had likened the arrangement to a "plantation", though he highlighted the problem as the coaching, not his white teammates, whom he counted as friends.

The College eventually admitted much of this itself. Its 1975 Trustees' report, released in January 1976, confirmed a years-long "preponderance" of Black players on the defensive squad that the community read as discriminatory, and noted that just two of sixty-four athletic department staff members were Black.
Despite this report and formal recognition of its own shortcomings, the pattern continued. In December 1979, the Valley News ran the headline "Dartmouth Blacks Charge Racism On Football Team." The complaints were nearly identical: players moved off their positions, a teammate who quit after a coach threw a cup of water in his face during a racist "joke." Tellingly, the players did not all agree. Co-captain Cody Press, the only Black captain in the Ivy League that year, said he had "always been given a fair shot," while others said the opposite. Coach Joe Yukica also maintained that he saw no color on the field, only football players. Even among themselves, Black athletes were still arguing over whether the field was fair.

Across a decade, Dartmouth could point to a rising number of Black students as evidence of progress, but the football program and Redding Report pointed to a lack of progress in many other areas of student life. The reality of enrollment numbers of the Black population at school was starkly contrasted with being treated as unequal, both on the field and off it.

To view the Redding Report, you can request the Minorities vertical file, and to see the Trustees' reports, request DA-1, Box 5416.

Posted for Israel Allen '28, recipient of a Historical Accountability Student Research Fellowship for the 2026 winter term. The Historical Accountability Student Research Program provides funding for Dartmouth students to conduct research with primary sources on a topic related to issues of inclusivity and diversity in Dartmouth's past. For more information, visit the program's website.