Curator's Statement

Hello, and welcome to my digital exhibit on Black student-athletes at Dartmouth.

I came to this project through one story I could not stop turning over. Matthew Bullock, Class of 1904, was the first Black varsity football player at Dartmouth. In October 1903 the team travelled to Princeton, and the hotel refused to give Bullock a room; his teammates would not stay without him, so the whole team slept in New York and made the trip on the morning of the game. On the first play, Princeton players piled on and broke his collarbone, ending his college playing career. I wanted to know whether that afternoon was an ugly accident at another college, or the visible edge of a pattern Dartmouth itself belonged to.

I expected a story of progress, and at first administrative enrollment numbers do show one. Dartmouth had produced only about 130 Black alumni by 1968 but within a few years of that, more than 170 Black students were enrolled at once. However the realities of the experiences of student-athletes is something that cannot be captured by enrollment numbers alone. The stories of these athletes are entangled with not only shifts in American culture and politics but also institutional changes within Dartmouth College as it began to accomodate a more diverse student body. This is best shown by the concentration of archival materials on this topic dated to the years succeeding the Civil Rights Movement. 

My thanks to my research adviser Val Werner '20, to the Rauner Library staff, and to my fellow HASRP fellow. Above all I want to thank the men whose oral histories provided a wealth of information, among them Woody Lee ’68, Thomas Price ’71, Willie Bogan ’71, Wesley Pugh ’73 and Tyrone Byrd ’73.

Curated by Israel Allen '28, Summer 2025 Historical Accountability Student Research Fellow.