EDITOR’S NOTE: Every day until Aug. 29, Creg Stephenson is counting down significant numbers in Alabama football history, both in the lead-up to the 2025 football season and in commemoration of the Crimson Tide’s first national championship 100 years ago. The number could be attached to a year, a uniform number or even a football-specific statistic. We hope you enjoy.
There have been many notable days in the history of Alabama football, but perhaps none was more significant than Dec. 13, 1969.
That’s the day when Wilbur Jackson of Ozark — who wore No. 80 — put pen to paper and became the Crimson Tide’s first Black scholarship football player. He played in his first game at Alabama in 1971, and was an All-American by the time he graduated.
“I’m not sure I fully understood how big a thing it was,” Jackson told author Keith Dunnavant for Coach, his 1996 biography of coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. “I just wanted to go to college, get an education and play football. I didn’t want to be Jackie Robinson.”
Bryant had been easing his way toward integrating his team for several years, including when he allowed five Black students to try out for the team as walk-ons in the spring of 1967. Defensive tackle Dock Rone was informed after spring practice he’d made the roster, but left school over the summer for family reasons and never played for the Crimson Tide.
By 1968, George Wallace — the most infamous of the state’s series of segregationist governors — was out of office and running for President. Bryant gave his coaching staff the go-ahead to begin recruiting Black athletes and to offer them scholarships.
Jackson committed to Alabama in late November of 1969, and signed his Letter of Intent three weeks later. He was listed as a split end in contemporary reports, with an Associated Press story noting that he possessed “blazing speed.”
(Many people might be unaware that Jackson was actually one of two Black players to sign with Alabama on that day. Fullback Bo Matthews of Huntsville also signed grant-in-aid paperwork with the Crimson Tide, but failed to meet academic requirements in order to enroll at the university. Matthews walked on at Colorado and later played eight years in the NFL, mostly with the San Diego Chargers.)
Freshmen were not eligible to play varsity football in 1970, meaning Jackson was consigned to the freshman team. He was in the stands at Legion Field for Alabama’s season-opener that year, when a USC team with an all-Black starting backfield — including Birmingham-born halfback Clarence Davis — pummeled the all-white Crimson Tide 42-21.
It has been written many times over the years that it was that game that convinced Bryant it was time to integrate his team, which is nonsense considering Jackson was already on the team. But what the dominating win by the Trojans might have done is change the minds of any holdouts who still believed the Crimson Tide could win championships without Black athletes.
Jackson was first recruited by Pat Dye, then a young Alabama assistant who had noticed him during his junior season at Ozark’s Carroll High School. Jackson first checked with Wendell Hudson, a basketball player who had become the Crimson Tide’s first Black scholarship athlete a year prior, before committing to Alabama.
“I got favorable reports,” Jackson told Bryant biographer Allen Barra for his 2005 book The Last Coach. “He was convinced that Coach Bryant wasn’t interested in token integration. The black players were in the same dorm with the white players. ‘It’s tough,’ Wendell told me, ‘but it’s changing.’”
Indeed, Bryant didn’t stop with Jackson. In January 1971, he signed African-American defensive end John Mitchell, a Mobile native who’d been an All-American at Eastern Arizona Junior College and who was able to enroll in school in time for spring practice.
News of Mitchell and Jackson’s ascension to the Alabama varsity was largely downplayed in the media, probably at Bryant’s request. Alf Van Hoose’s Birmingham News story on the day before the 1971 season-opener at USC doesn’t mention them until paragraph 11, noting that they were “two fine black athletes … making historic debuts.”
Mitchell started that game, recording three tackles in a 17-10 Alabama win in which the Crimson Tide unveiled its wishbone offense. Jackson did not see any action, however, and wouldn’t actually take the field for the first time in a game until two weeks later vs. Southern Miss.
Alabama moving to the wishbone meant that Jackson shifted from wide receiver to halfback. With All-American Johnny Musso a senior that year, Jackson saw only limited playing time as a sophomore, though he averaged 5.7 yards per carry and broke off a 67-yard touchdown run — the Crimson Tide’s longest of the season — in a 31-3 victory over Miami in November.
After Musso’s graduation, Jackson finished as Alabama’s second-leading rusher in 1972, when he ran for 566 yards and eight touchdowns while averaging 7.1 yards per attempt. He led the 1973 national championship team in yards (752), touchdowns (8) and yards per carry (7.9). (More than 50 years after he played his last game, he remains Alabama’s all-time leader in yards per carry with a minimum of 200 attempts at 7.2.)
Here’s video of Jackson running for an 80-yard touchdown vs. Tennessee in 1973:
Jackson was a first-round pick of the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers in 1974, and played nine years in the league — winning a Super Bowl with Washington in his final season. He later ran a successful commercial cleaning business in his hometown.
Now 73, Jackson only occasionally grants interviews, and when he does, exhibits a humble, unassuming air. But his impact is undeniable; he not only proved to Alabama’s white fan base a Black man could succeed with the Crimson Tide, he did so with future waves of African-American players as well.
“When Wilbur Jackson got that scholarship, along with Wendell Hudson in basketball the year before, that was a game-changer,” said Ozzie Newsome, an All-American at Alabama in 1977 who later went on to a Hall-of-Fame career with the NFL’s Cleveland Browns. “That opened it up for all the young Black athletes that was growing up in the state of Alabama, growing up in the South. Now that opportunity go to Alabama was there for us.”
