A cautionary tale

They'll wear a 44 on their sleeves this Saturday against Iowa, and around Bloomington flags will fly at half-staff on the Indiana University campus.

George Taliaferro will be remembered, in other words. And for more than just football.

A lot of the fathers of IU's current football players weren't born when George did his thing, but there are moments in America now when the long corridor of years between his time and now seems the shortest of walks. Jim Crow is dead, but the instincts that drove it keep resurfacing. If we are not who we were when George Taliaferro was a big but largely invisible man on campus, there are powerful forces who still aren't comfortable with the idea of people of color being on an equal footing. Especially in the voting booth.

And so those forces push back. On the most fraudulent of pretexts, they put up roadblocks to the franchise that erode the spirit, if not the letter, of the Voting Rights Act. And they are sometimes startlingly blatant about it in a nation that's supposed to be beyond all that.

George Taliaferro would have recognized such shenanigans. He'd seen them, and worse, before.

When he died this week at 91, all the old stories came out, and they were exactly the sort of cautionary tales we need to hear in this time of civil rights backsliding. A football player of uncommon gifts, Taliaferro was a groundbreaker on the field, leading Indiana to the only unbeaten season in its history as a three-time All-American running back. Then he became the first African-American drafted by an NFL team when the Chicago Bears took him in the 13th round of the 1949 draft.

Though he played later for four different NFL teams, he never played for the Bears. That's because he'd already given his word to the Los Angeles Dons of the All-America Football Conference, and he wouldn't go back on it.

That was perfectly in character for Taliaferro, who knew full well what it was like to live in a country that hadn't kept its word to him. As it was in so many places, segregation was in full force in Bloomington then; while Taliaferro starred on the football field for IU, he couldn't eat in Bloomington's restaurants until IU president Herman Wells threatened one of them by saying he'd make it off-limits to all IU students if it didn't relent. And if George Taliaferro wanted to go to the movies?

Well, he had to sit in the balcony, where a small metal sign reminded him of his place.

It read "Colored."

Taliaferro still had that sign when he died. As Indianapolis Star columnist Gregg Doyel put it in his profile of Taliaferro in 2015, he integrated the theater with a screwdriver, taking the sign down one afternoon when he was a senior. When he left that day, the sign went with him.

Every so often he'd pull it out, just to remind us all how it was in America then. And now that he is gone?

On Saturday, that "44" on the sleeves, and those flags at half-staff, will remind us again.