Only One Black Player From An HBCU Selected In NFL Draft
In Nine Recent Years, None Were Selected
One April day during my senior year in college, I was lying in bed watching television when someone knocked on the door and said a scout from the San Francisco 49ers was at the football field and wanted to see me. I was surprised because, though I had played high school football, I was a college basketball player and hadn't played football in four years. Unless you count, touch football on the lawn in front of Cravath Hall, where I was a star.
I put on some sneakers and jogged over to the football field, which was the equivalent of three long city blocks away. When I got there, I found that a scout was working out some Fisk football players; somehow, my name came up, and the scout wanted to see me. I had the size to play football, being 6'6" and about 225. I had played wide receiver in high school, but the scout considered me a tight end. The scout asked me a few questions, including whether I thought I could gain weight, and I was confident that wouldn't be a problem.
Fisk University is an HBCU with a student population of about 2,000. Fisk was known as an academic school and considered a part of the unofficial Black Ivy League. The ratio of women to men was about 8:1, and of the men, about 10% were athletes. The football and…
