Jack Trice, Minnesota Racism

I'm not a stranger to Minnesota's racist past (or present), but today I learned about one specific story I had never heard of before.

In 1923, Jack Trice was a 21-year-old football player for Iowa State University who came to play against the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers in Minneapolis. This was three years after three Black men had been lynched in Duluth and when the Klan was on the rise nationwide and in the state, with tens of thousands of members here. The University of Minnesota had just had a Klan float in its homecoming parade, of all things.

Trice's team stayed at the Curtis Hotel in downtown Minneapolis, then the largest hotel and almost brand-new. While he was able to stay in the hotel, he was not allowed to eat dinner in the dining room with the rest of the team. 

But this was not the worst thing that happened to Trice while he was here. 

In the game the next day, Trice first had his collarbone broken. He said he was okay to continue playing. Later in the game, after tackling a player, he was on the ground and several Minnesota players stepped on him or ran over him or stomped him. Was it on purpose or accidental? 

He was taken to the University Hospital and cleared to return to Ames with the team. The trip was by train, I'm not sure how many hours away. At least four, probably more. When he arrived, having spent the trip on a straw mattress, his abdomen was rigid. He had peritonitis, with no bowel sounds. Surgery was ruled out as more likely to kill him than help him. Doctors hoped that antibiotics would begin to clear the infection, but by Monday afternoon, Trice died.

Iowa State University did not play football against the University of Minnesota again for another 66 years.

The Curtis Hotel, which was torn down in 1984, was known as a place where "the guest was king," but that clearly was not true. Searching its name (without the name Jack Trice) turns up no prominent mentions of this incident during its existence. So I guess this is not considered an important part of its history.

Lotus Delta Coffman was president of the University of Minnesota in 1923, having become president in 1920 and remaining in that role until 1938. He set the tone at the University of Minnesota for treatment like Trice received. Here's a quote from his Wikpedia page:

Coffman's watch on the university included vigorous surveillance of alleged campus "radicalism," the number of Jews admitted to the university, and determined promotion of racial segregation in the university's dormitories. Black students mistakenly placed in university dormitories at admission were forced to leave, often after just one night's residence. Coffman rejected student protests. Despite a student-led substantial report comparing the university's segregated housing with integrated housing at other universities, Coffman insisted that "the races have never lived together nor have they ever sought to live together." Coffman's administrators compiled lists of "radical leaders" and numerical counts of Jews and blacks who had been admitted to the university, practices that continued throughout Coffman's presidency. University housing was integrated in 1938 only when the historian Guy Stanton Ford succeeded Coffman as President after Coffman's death.

About five years ago, there was a major effort to get Coffman's name off the student union building, which was named for him in 1940. Through inertia and political influence within the Board of Regents, that effort failed, and the building is still named for him to this day.  

I wonder how many students at the U know about Jack Trice and their fellow students' behavior in the 1920s generally. As a person who spent about 10 years on the University of Minnesota campus in graduate school, I certainly didn't.

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Reliable accounts of what happened to Trice in the football game are somewhat hard to come by. This recounting on the Des Moines Register website, based on a book, is the most detailed. This story from the Indy Star quotes a sports historian who makes more overt claims about the purposefulness of the attack on Trice.