The Legend of Jack Trice and the campaign for Jack Trice stadium, 1973-1984

Journal of Social History, Summer, 2008 by Jaime Schultz

Prologue: The Presence of the Past in the Present

There was very little fanfare or media attention paid to a ceremony on the afternoon of August 30, 1997, despite the fact that the event was seventy-four years in the making. Hours before Iowa State University's first football game of the season, supporters gathered to honor Jack Trice, the school's first African American student-athlete, its only athlete to die during competition, and to dedicate Jack Trice Stadium. The occasion, remarked one journalist, signified that Trice "still lives in memory at Iowa State University." (1) But institutional memories of Trice have been neither consistent nor prominent since his 1923 death. Instead, the Iowa State community has remembered, forgotten, and re-remembered in him ways that shifted and assimilated with changing socio-historic circumstances. After the mid-1920s, memories of Trice lay dormant for fifty years. In the 1970s and 1980s, students rediscovered his legacy, engaged in intense efforts to resurrect his memory from the dustbin of history and, in doing so, sought to rewrite "The Legend of Jack Trice." (2) In this article I interrogate two dominant, competing Trice narratives that various collectives constructed between 1923 and 1984 and the ways that each story has been used to suit particular political agendas.

The first narrative, produced at the time of his death, represents Trice as a heroic figure. The basis of this heroism concerns the seemingly insurmountable odds he overcame in his life to achieve far above his original station. As such, his death, though untimely and poignant, is narrativized as a romance. Hayden White contends that historians emplot, or fashion particular kinds of stories, from the existing evidence according to a series of archetypal forms. (3) Among those forms, he argues, is romance, "symbolized by the hero's transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it."(4) In this version of the story, Trice becomes "football's fallen hero" (5)--a "victor on the fatal field," (6) so that his tale is ultimately one of conquest after enduring a series of trials and tribulations that would defeat a lesser man.

The second rendering of Trice's story surfaced in the early 1970s when Iowa State University (ISU) students rediscovered his legacy and invested it with contemporaneous socio-political issues. They reframed him as a victim of racial violence, a move that coincided with recent matters of student unrest, civil rights movements, and heightened attention to racialized issues on the ISU campus. Students lamented his death but infused their sorrow with a new anger, feeling that such an injustice could have been avoided. The greater travesty, they argued, was that the school had failed to honor Trice in a prominent way and they proposed that the new football facility be named in his honor. He had not been liberated by death, as perceived by romantic visions; instead, his legacy mired in the muck of disregard and disrespect.

Students construed Iowa State administrators' opposition to Jack Trice Stadium as the continuation of a narrative of discrimination and bigotry that defined Trice's life. They argued that the resistance to campaigns for his commemoration was simply a refashioning of the same racism that caused his injuries and ultimate death. The opposite of romance, writes White, is satire, in which the hero suffers without any type of redemption. Students averted such a conclusion by re-imagining the story as one of tragedy so that although the protagonist had fallen, there could be a "gain in consciousness for the spectators." (7) Honoring Trice in a significant way could then serve as both a constant reminder and a means of redressing the racist heritage of the past.

The differing characterizations of Trice and the competing versions of his biography speak to the construction and narration of memory. In particular, the issue of presentism, or the idea that the past is a social construction shaped by concerns with the present, accounts for why Trice was remembered differently in the 1970s than he was in the period immediately following his death. Sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel writes a feature of human memory is to transform past events into coherent historical narratives. Through emplotment and re-emplotment, people establish connections between past and present events in order to imbue them with historical meaning and collective memories of Trice cohered with the specific times at which he was remembered. (8) In the 1920s the exceptionality of Trice, including the circumstances he was able to overcome and those that ultimately overcame him, afforded an uncritical view that belied culpability on anyone's part. Conversely, students in the 1970s were especially tuned into racialized issues and what they perceived as an unwillingness of those in positions of authority to listen to their grievances. Using Jack Trice as a symbol for their multiple feelings of disenfranchisement and discontent, they perceived administrators' resistance to honor Trice with a prominent site of memory as another way in which the school both victimized him and ignored the wishes of students.(9)