The 1956 Sugar Bowl featured the 7th ranked Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, and the 11th ranked Pittsburgh Panthers. The game was played on January 2, since New Year's Day was a Sunday. Much controversy preceded the 1956 Sugar Bowl. Segregationists and Georgia governor Marvin Griffin used all his political power in an attempt to keep Pitt fullback/linebacker Bobby Grier from playing because he was black. But ultimately, Bobby Grier played making this the first integrated Sugar Bowl and is the first integrated bowl game in the Deep South.
Background
This game occurred during segregation battles in the south, including Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the murder of Emmett Till (1955). The Sugar Bowl had been racially segregated since its first inception in 1935. No black players had ever taken the field in it. There were even different sections of the stadium set aside for black and white attendees. In the past, most Southern colleges (including Georgia Tech) were all-white and had an unofficial "gentleman's agreement" with integrated Northern schools in which the teams would only play against each other if the African American players on the team were benched for the game. By the 1950s, this agreement was starting to break down, with some Northern schools refusing to honor it and some Southern schools agreeing to play against integrated teams so long as the game took place in the North. Many Southern schools responded to this shift by simply refusing to play Northern schools at all, resulting in a significant decline in inter-sectional gameplay. The Bowl games, most of which took place in the South, became a focal point of contention. The Cotton Bowl in Dallas held its first integrated game in 1948, and the Sun Bowl in El Paso held one in 1950. But up to 1956, most Southern games still remained strictly segregated.
Georgia Tech had been involved in a previous racial incident in 1934, when the team refused to play a game against the University of Michigan unless the Wolverines benched their star end, a black player named Willis Ward. Michigan eventually complied with the demand, but only after Georgia Tech agreed to reciprocate by benching their own star end, Hoot Gibson. With both players out of the game, it proceeded on schedule, with Michigan winning 9-2 to earn what turned out to be their only victory of the season. By 1956, Georgia Tech had a progressive President, and they had played against integrated teams before, including a game against Notre Dame two years earlier (a 27-14 defeat that ended the Yellow Jackets' 31-game winning streak), but none of these games had taken place in the South.
Pittsburgh's linebacker and fullback, Bobby Grier, was black. Many segregationists in New Orleans fought to bar him from playing. This stood in stark contrast to the 1956 Rose Bowl, which featured two of the most racially integrated college football teams of the day with six African American players for the UCLA Bruins and seven for the Michigan State Spartans. Pitt's official stance was "No Grier, no game". The School announced Grier would “travel, eat, live, practice, and play with the team.” After receiving the team invitation to the Sugar Bowl, Georgia Tech coach Bobby Dodd took a poll of his players to see if they were willing to play an integrated team. Every single player voted in favor of playing the game. Starting quarterback Wade Mitchell said "I personally have no objection to playing a team with a Negro member on it, and, as far as I know, the rest of the boys feel the same way.”
Opposition by Griffin
Georgia governor Marvin Griffin, who had a son attending Georgia Tech at the time, privately told Dodd and Georgia Tech's President Blake R Van Leer the game could proceed, but would later publicly oppose Georgia Tech's participation in the game. On December 2, 1955 (the day after Rosa Parks began her Montgomery bus boycott), Griffin publicly sent another telegram to his state's Board Of Regents imploring that teams from Georgia not engage in racially integrated events which had Blacks either as participants or in the stands. It read: