In 1971, 5 African-American football players changed the course of history at the University of Georgia, becoming the first black athletes to receive full football scholarships. Today, they relive some of the struggles of arriving on campus, what it meant to be “the first,” and how the university received them.
I’m most proud of what the processes that we went through to grow and develop into the people that we are today. What a lot of people don’t realize is that as a group, we made the decision that we would hold each of us accountable for behaving a certain way so that we represented great role models, and that it would be easy for Georgia to go out and recruit other African-American players because we wanted to set a positive tone.
And so, you go back and look over that four-year period of time, and you’ll never see an instance where we were caught speeding. You’ll never see an instance where we were in a DUI. You’d never see instances where we were in fights and things of that nature, and so we held ourselves to pretty high standards because we knew for sure that people were watching, and we just wanted to be a good role models.
– Chuck Kennebrew
Original 5 Georgia Bulldogs teammates Chuck Kennebrew (L) and Horace King (R).
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