Bobby Grier, Who Integrated the Sugar Bowl in 1956, Dies at 91

Bobby Grier, a University of Pittsburgh fullback who in 1956 became the first Black football player to take the field in the postseason Sugar Bowl in New Orleans, despite the opposition of Georgia’s segregationist governor, who sought to bar Georgia Tech, Pitt’s opponent, from playing in the game, died on June 30 in Warren, Ohio. He was 91.

His son, Robert Grier Jr., confirmed the death, at a rehabilitation facility.

The noisy run-up to Grier’s playing in the Sugar Bowl, a cherished annual tradition for the Deep South, played out early in the civil rights movement. Weeks before the game, on Dec. 1, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a city bus in Montgomery, Ala., igniting a 13-month bus boycott by African Americans there to protest segregation and fueling the cause of racial justice nationwide.

The next day, Gov. Marvin Griffin of Georgia — outraged by the prospect of Georgia Tech’s facing Grier and Pitt in the Sugar Bowl — sent a telegram to Georgia’s Board of Regents. He demanded that teams in the state’s university system not participate in events in which the races mixed on the fields or in the stands.

“The South stands at Armageddon,” Mr. Griffin wrote. “The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concession to the enemy in this dark and lamentable hour of struggle.”

In 2006, Grier remembered how he had felt about Governor Griffin’s attempt to scuttle the game. “Stupid,” he told The New York Times. “Why did the governor need to jump into sports?”

Although the governor was supported by a segregationist group, the States’ Rights Council, about 2,000 Georgia Tech students — at a school that did not integrate until 1961 — responded to Griffin’s telegram by protesting on campus. They burned at least one effigy of him, clashed with police and state troopers, and marched on the governor’s mansion in downtown Atlanta.