CR Roberts, a Black running back for the University of Southern California, feared what might happen when his co-ed Trojans football team traveled to the Jim Crow South to play the all-white University of Texas Longhorns in Austin in 1956. .
There are death threats before the game. He wondered: Would a gunshot from the stands at Memorial Stadium kill him?
“Tensions are high,” he said in a 2018 documentary, “Breaking Down Barriers: The CR Roberts Story,” directed by Jeremy Sadowski. “We hear the epithets coming out of the crowd the closer you are to the sideline.”
Despite the possibility of violence, Roberts turned in a sensational performance, leading the Trojans to a 44-20 victory. In the second quarter, he ran for a 73-yard touchdown and another of 50 yards.
In the third quarter, on his last carry, he scored again on a 74-yard run. In all, he gained 251 yards, a single-game rushing record that stood at USC for 19 years. The Los Angeles Times called him an “explosive bolt of searing speed.”
But Roberts, who is one of three Black players on USC’s team, said that with the crowd chanting the N-word, Coach Jess Hill pulled him from the game soon after he scored his final touchdown.
“The atmosphere in that stadium was very negative to a Black person,” Roberts said in “Breaking Down Barriers.”
The Trojans’ victory occurred early in the civil rights movement, when Black citizens boycotted segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., and the game stands today as an important racial victory of the era.
In 1966, Texas Western College (now the University of Texas at El Paso), became the first team with an all-Black starting five to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship, defeating an all-white team from the University of Kentucky.
And in 1970, Sam Cunningham, part of USC’s all-Black backfield, gained 135 yards and scored two touchdowns in a 42-21 win over an all-white University of Alabama squad. Although the Crimson Tide had a Black player on its freshman team, the game is credited with giving Alabama coach Paul (Bear) Bryant, the green light from higher-ups to actively recruit Black players.
Roberts died Tuesday at a care facility in Norwalk, Conn., his daughter, Cathy Creasia, said. He is 87.
Cornelius R. Roberts was born on Feb. 29, 1936, in Tupelo, Miss. His father, named Cornelius, picked cotton and was a railroad driver. His mother, Audra Mae (Dabbs) Roberts, was a homemaker.
His mother, as Roberts recalled, felt the family had to leave racist Mississippi.
“Get our son out of Mississippi or they’ll kill him,” he was quoted as saying to his father, in a interview on a USC website in 2015.
In the third grade, Roberts recalled, as his family was returning on the train from Oceanside, Calif., he was playing with a white boy in a shared car when the train reached the Mason-Dixon line. At that point his mother pulled him away from the boy; the family had to move to a separate coach.
“When you crossed the Mason-Dixon line going south,” he said in “Breaking Down Barriers,” “Black people had to go back to their car and be segregated again. I didn’t understand.”
The family eventually moved to Oceanside, where Roberts became a star at Oceanside-Carlsbad High School, scoring an impressive 65 touchdowns. In the vernacular of the time, a local newspaper hailed him in 1954 as the “all-American Negro flash.”
As drill-team leader of the ROTC unit in high school, Roberts aspired to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. “I would have gotten there if I was smarter at math,” he told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2012.
At Southern California, he finished second in rushing to Jon Arnett in 1955; he would lead the team in that category in 1956, his junior year, thanks in part to his sparkling game against Texas.
But he barely got there. USC coaches initially suggested he not go to Austin with the team because of a race issue. He replied that he would rather leave the team than stay at home. His teammates stood by him, refusing to go to Texas if the team’s Black players — the others were Louis Byrd and Hillard Hill — didn’t.
The University of Texas, for its part, was not welcome, although it played against Washington State University, which had a Black player, two years ago. USC was told to leave the team’s three Black players.
“Texas called us about a week before the game and said we couldn’t play any colors, that the races couldn’t compete at the same time,” Roberts told The Austin American-Statesman in 2005.
After some negotiations, the entire team traveled to Austin. But the hotel the team planned to stay at wouldn’t accept Roberts, Byrd and Hill as guests, and arranged for them to stay at a YMCA. The team refused and went to another hotel that, despite its segregation policy and after some persuasion, let them in. Black hotel employees and local citizens gathered to welcome the three players.
Roberts did not play in 1957, his senior year, after the Pacific Coast Conference (now the Pac-12) imposed sanctions against USC and other schools for providing prohibited financial aid to players.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in business administration from USC in 1957, Roberts played two seasons for the Toronto Argonauts of the Canadian Football League. He then moved to the NFL, where he gained 637 yards on 155 carries over four seasons with the San Francisco 49ers.
He later taught typing and business skills in high school and college and opened a travel agency and a tax consulting service.
In addition to his daughter Cathy, he is survived by another daughter, Chandra Roberts; a son, Craig; and four grandchildren. His marriages to Joyce Moss and Yvonne Barton ended in divorce.
For all his football exploits, the Texas game — and the emotions it evoked — remain vivid in Roberts’ memory. On the day of the game, he recalled in an interview with The Los Angeles Times, “I didn’t realize who we were playing.”
“We will beat them,” he said. “Everybody had a chip on their shoulder. We played our best game.”