SJS’s Lynn Vidali, who made the Olympic team at 16 in 1968, also competed in the 1972 Olympics. Vidali, who grew up in San Francisco, discusses her travels into the South, saying that once she saw a water fountain marked colored, but drank out of it, anyway.  Someone came up from behind her screaming and shouting that she couldn’t drink out of the fountain.  She told them it was O.K. The water wasn’t colored, it was clear.

Members of SJSC’s distance team running against Stanford, circa 1962.

“The (Civil Rights) movement was really laid out in the fifties by the work and challenges that the Black athletes faced, and the stands they were willing to take.”

– Ben Tucker, San José State’s cross-country team, 1960-1964

During the sixties, the tone and tenor of Black/White relations had begun to shift radically. By this time, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s campaign for Black equality had grown in strength, and Black/White relations were increasingly strained.  A new generation of Black runners had come on the scene at San Jose State: Ron Davis in 1959, and Ben Tucker and Horace Whitehead in 1960.  Whereas Norton and Poynter had faced segregation and indifference, this new generation was openly subjected to the racial hostilities that the Civil Rights Movement engendered in many people. Tucker vividly recalls these times.  Tucker, along with Davis and Whitehead, were members of the Spartans cross country team that won the National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in 1962.  Their effort was significant in that American Blacks – not Africans – were considered sprinters during that time, not distance runners.

During their athletic careers at SJSC, Tucker said that people would shout racial epithets from their windows, cars would swerve around them, narrowly missing them, and other people would hurl bottles at them as they took training runs through the streets and hills of San José.

When preparing for competition, Tucker said, spectators and even other athletes would often ask, “Are you sure you are at the right event?”

“The level of racism was blatant,” Tucker said.  “We lived there and we trained there, but we were not of the community.” As a result of the racial hostilities they encountered, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead formed a pact. “We realized we were considered an oddity,” said Tucker, who also was a member of the ’63 national championship team.  Rarely, if ever, were the three taken seriously on the cross-country course “because no one felt that an African-American could be a (distance) runner.”

But once the trio became recognized at the national level, other runners took note and inquired, “Oh, you guys must be from Africa. What African country are you from?”

In capturing the national title in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1962, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead placed fifth, fourteenth and twenty-fourth, respectively.  Teammates Danny Murphy and Jeff Fishback, who are white, finished third and thirteenth, respectively.  The Spartans defeated Villanova 58-69.

During the fall of that year, James Meridith would grab national attention while attempting to transfer from Jackson State College, a predominately Black institution, to the all-white University of Mississippi at Oxford.  A federal district court ordered Ole Miss to admit Meridith on September 3, 1962.  Later that month, President John F. Kennedy ordered several hundred U.S. Marshals to escort Meridith to his classes. Meanwhile, Davis, Tucker and Whitehead quietly fought another battle in California.

“The sixties for an incoming freshman athlete at San José State were a very interesting period because America was going through some very, very troubling times,” Tucker said.  “As athletes, we were pretty much coached not to think about the struggles that were going on in the South with Martin Luther King, and the marches, and the demonstrations and the boycotts, but stuff entered our lives.”

Between 1962 and ’64, several key people spoke at San José State, including Ralph Bunche, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and political activist Dick Gregory.  The Bay Area, where the Black Panthers would soon be born, would rapidly become a focal point of the Black Power Movement and that energy could already be felt on the San José State campus.

In describing the feelings of Spartan runners of the time, Tucker noted “(w)e felt that by competing on the track to the best of our ability, by developing our potential, and by getting our education, we were making two statements:  That we had our minds and our bodies moving in the right direction, but at the same time we knew we had to make some kind of significant contribution to the struggle.”

They also started making demands on Coach Winter, according to Tucker, “in terms of our meals, where we ate, that we ate consistently, that we had decent clothes to wear, and that we were given the kind of support academically that we needed . . . ”

By 1964, the Black Power Movement was firmly established, and its effect on the Black athlete was inevitable. Harry Edwards, a discus thrower for the Spartan team while attending SJS who later would become a well-known and controversial observer and educator on race in sport, writes: “The revolt of the Black athlete was as inevitable as the rising of the sun.”

Nearly as important as was the rising of the sun, at least in terms of its impact on Speed City, was the arrival of John Carlos and Tommie Smith.

Dudley DeGroot

SJSC Head Football Coach | 1932 to 1939

Dr. Dudley S. DeGroot might best be remembered for leading the Washington Redskins to the National Football League championship in 1945, but his most notable contribution was made in the collegiate ranks.

While coaching at SJSC between 1933 and 1939, DeGroot began recruiting Hawaiians and Black Americans to play football for the Spartans. DeGroot’s trend would continue through his protégés, DeWitt Portal (boxing) and Bob Bronzan (football).

Before his death in 1970, DeGroot was recognized as one of the foremost oologists (study of birds’ eggs) and orithologists (study of birds) in the country.  A protégé of Glen “Pop” Warner, his college coach while at Stanford, he was a member of the U.S. Olympic rugby team that won a gold medal in 1924.

DeWitt Portal supervises "bout"

In photo: Coach DeWitt Portal supervises a “bout” between his son, Ronnie, and Julius Menendez in front of the Men’s Physical Education building, circa 1946. The building has since been renamed in honor of judo coach Yoshihiro Uchida. Menendez would take over the boxing program after Portal’s death, and lead the Spartans to NCAA championship titles in 1958, ’59, and ’60.

DeWitt Portal played football and served as a member of the State Teachers College at San José cheering squad in the years leading up to the Great Depression. Following graduation he went to Stanford, where he completed his master’s thesis on the art and instruction of fisticuffs.

Portal, who at one point also served as the campus’s student body president, was persuaded to return to San José to instruct boxing in 1934. The Teachers College had become San José State College during his absence, and President Thomas Macquarrie was convinced that a boxing program would help re-establish the college’s reputation from that of a “sissy school”.

Though only 23 students signed up for the initial boxing classes offered through the Physical Education Department, by winter quarter the roster grew to 69. An additional 50 would take daily boxing workouts under Portal’s supervision.

In preparing to build a competitive collegiate boxing team, Portal organized an annual Novice Tournament – in which males competed dressed in costume – and an All-College Tournament. The All-College Tourney was held two weeks after the Novice Tournament, and winners became team members. Both annual tournaments became so popular that eventually the events were moved from campus to the City of San José’s Civic Arena.

DeWitt Portal served in Athens, Georgia, when training Naval pilots to stay fit using boxing techniques, circa 1944.

Portal also worked to make collegiate boxing a safer sport throughout his tenure as coach in San José. The NCAA would require protective headgear, and increase the ropes around the boxing ring from three to four following his suggestion. (In earlier years, boxers often found themselves slipping through the ropes surrounding the ring.)

As a Naval officer during World War II, Portal trained pilots to stay physically fit using boxing techniques in Athens, Georgia. During that time, he encountered East St. Louis Golden Glover Julius Menendez. Following the war, Portal would persuade Menendez to go to college in San José.

Throughout Portal’s 30-year reign, his boxers earned five individual NCAA titles, two Amateur Athletic Union crowns, and an Olympic gold medal. He also made significant changes

According to Julius’s wife, Doris, Portal wanted to become the first boxing coach to hold a Ph.D. His daughter, Nancy Portal Carson, said her father took a sabbatical from SJSC during the 1952- ’53 academic year so that he could complete his doctoral coursework at Stanford. (In years past, he had worked on his doctorate by taking courses in the summer.) Portal died in an accident on his camp grounds during the fall of 1953.

DeWitt Portal and his wife, Helen, escorted the Spartans’ boxing team to Japan during the fall of 1939. Interestingly enough, the Japanese had begun to train their military pilots as boxers in the years preceding the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s entrance into World War II.

DeWitt Portal’s family owned thousands of acres in San José during the early 1900s. His teams used to train at the family camp grounds, chopping trees, digging, and running. Here, Portal clowns around with members of the boxing team, circa 1938, in a ring he had built on the property. This photo was taken from the photo album of his athletic trainer, Lincoln Kimura.

Uchida’s Rainbow Coalition: The 1964 U.S. Olympic judo team, including George Harrison, Jim Bregman, Paul Maruyama, and Ben Campbell.

Wrestler Sam Della Maggiore coached campus police cadets in judo, and took on Yoshihiro Uchida as his assistant in 1940. Following Della Maggiore’s departure, Uchida worked with Henry Stone of the University of California to redefine judo by adding a weight classification system. In 1964, Uchida became the first U.S. Olympic coach. Here he stands with team members, including Spartans Paul Maruyama and former Colorado Senator Ben Knighthorse Campbell.

Yoshihiro Uchida came to San José State College by way of his father’s strawberry and lettuce farm.

Following graduation from Garden Grove High School in 1938, he spent a year studying at a local community college before heading back home to work the fields.  He soon, however, grew tired of waking at 6 a.m. to be on the fields by 7; and of swatting mosquitoes in the morning dew.

So when a high-school friend showed up to tell him that he soon would be heading up the coast to study in San José, Uchida quickly decided he was going, too.

Once on campus in 1940, he joined the frosh wrestling squad, and assisted varsity wrestler Mel Bruno in teaching police cadets judo.  When Bruno left SJSC to join former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney — who, like the Spartans’ boxing coach, DeWitt Portal, trained naval personnel to stay physically fit during World War II — Uchida became coach.

Over the next year, Uchida‘s cadets would begin to successfully compete against some of the very same teams he had once competed against.  Their success, however, seemed overshadowed by his own disappointment, as one of his professors suggested he quit engineering because of his Japanese descent.

The Uchida Family 1930

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese in December of 1941, Uchida’s parents were sent to an internment camp, while he was drafted into the Army.  Japanese- and Black- American troops served in segregated units, and often were assigned menial tasks such as cooking and cleaning.  Uchida served in the Midwest, where he and his peers cleaned military bases in preparation for their re-opening.  As luck would have it, a superior officer noted Uchida had taken biology courses in college, and “questioned why I was cleaning floors,” he said.

Soon, Uchida would be transferred to a hospital, where he would begin working as a medic. He also considered himself lucky in that he worked with a couple of University of North Carolina and Duke professors, who put in extra hours to train him to work in the lab.

As Bruno followed Tunney into business after the War, Uchida continued coaching.  But this time, instead of training police cadets, he began what has become known as the most successful sporting program in the history of San Jose State athletics. He also changed his major, from engineering to biology.

Over the next two decades, Uchida and Professor Henry Stone, who taught judo at the University of California, would change the way in which judo was recognized.  Once the pair instituted a weight-classification system into the self-defense method, it became recognized as an intercollegiate sport by the Amateur Athletic Union in 1953.

In 1964, Uchida coached the first U.S. Olympic Judo Team that featured SJS graduates Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a retired Colorado Senator, and Paul Maruyama, a retired Air Force colonel who coached the 1980 and 1984 U.S. Olympic Judo Teams.

Uchida purchases a medical lab in San Jose, circa 1957.

But he did not stop there:  In 1979, he organized the first U.S. Open at San José State, which helped American athletes gain recognition at the international level. The event now is known as the U.S. International Invitational Tournament, and is held at the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs.

Uchida, who at 87 remains coach of the Spartan squad, has coached SJS teams to an incredible 42 of 46 National Collegiate Judo Championships.  He, too, has been honored many times for his contributions:  In 1986, Emperor Hirohito of Japan awarded him the Order of the Sacred Treasure, and in 1997, SJS named a building in his honor.

Outside of his coaching career, Uchida, too, was a successful business owner:  The medical lab he had purchased for $3,000.00 during the early 1950s sold for $30 million in the early 1990s.