SEPT. 24, 1949: FRED BATISTE BECOMES FIRST AFRICAN-AMERICAN ATHLETE TO PLAY A GAME FOR ARIZONA
Fred Batiste was 23, a World War II veteran, when he left Compton Junior College in the spring of 1949. He moved home to Tucson where he had been the state’s football and track player of the year in 1943-44.
Only then, five years after Batiste left Tucson High School, did the UA offer him a chance to play on the Wildcat football team.
After the first day of training camp at Fort Huachuca, an Arizona Republic headline said: “Fred Batiste Ready.”
Two days later, a Tucson Citizen headline read: “Fred Batiste Shines.” The accompanying article said “Batiste has been accepted by the rest of the boys.”
In 1993, I asked former UA assistant football coach Don Vosberg about Batiste’s pioneering route as the first African-American athlete to play in a game, any sport, at Arizona.
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“Fred was good, but he had been in the service and lost some of his edge,” said Vosberg, a Tucson TV analyst. “Had he been allowed to go straight from Tucson High to the UA, he would’ve been one of the best they ever had.”
The UA added a second black football player, Phoenix’s Don Beasley, for the 1951 season. By 1960, the Wildcats had eight black players on the football team.
Batiste’s first season at Arizona created one headline after another. He was not permitted to play in an Oct. 14 game at Texas Tech because, the Star reported, “of a racially restrictive clause” in the agreement between Arizona and the Border Conference’s Texas schools, including UTEP, West Texas State and Hardin-Simmons. (Batiste was withheld from the UA’s 1950 game at UTEP.)
But later in the ’50 season, five days before his final UA football game, Batiste was told that West Texas State had rescinded its “Negro ban.” It was Nov. 22, 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson broke MLB’s race barrier. Fred Batiste charted a similar path at Arizona.
It wasn’t easy, in Tucson or elsewhere.
In his 1970s book “They Fought Like Wildcats,” Star sports columnist Abe Chanin wrote that UA athletic director Pop McKale “did nothing to encourage black athletes to enroll at Arizona. … (He) held many of the prejudices that were commonplace in Tucson, a city that once flew the Confederate flag and also once segregated blacks in elementary and junior high schools.”
The culture of Tucson in the 1949 football season was so unlike the 21st century. No females were allowed in the UA marching band. The full-page ad on the inside front cover of the UA-Utah game program was for Phillip Morris cigarettes. Its slogan: “You’ll be glad tomorrow that you smoked today.”
Batiste was the only African-American of 108 fellow football players. The UA basketball program would not have an African-American player until 1954.
Batiste’s legacy at Arizona was twofold. He broke color barriers and left memories of what might have been.
In a 1950 home game against Hardin-Simmons, the Wildcats trailed 28-0 at halftime. In what is believed to be Arizona’s largest comeback victory in history, the Wildcats won 32-28, as Batiste broke up two passes in the end zone on the game’s final series. He similarly saved the Iowa game later that season, breaking up a pass on the game’s final play.
At that time, the Batistes were regarded as the greatest athletic family in Arizona history; you could make a case they still are.
Ernest and Loretta Batiste left Lake Charles, Louisiana, in 1926 driving an old truck, headed for a better life in California. Their truck broke down in Tucson. They stayed. Ernest found jobs as a laborer.
Ernie, the oldest of four sons, was not allowed to play football at Tucson High. He broke his neck playing sandlot football and became the sports supervisor for the Tucson Parks and Recreation Department for 31 years.
Joe was so dominant at Tucson High that he broke the American record for the high hurdles. The school didn’t allow him to play football until Mesa High School tried to recruit him to play at MHS. Then Joe played football and became the state’s Player of the Year. His chance to be on the USA Olympic teams of 1940 and 1944 were ended by World War II.
Frank set a state record in the low hurdles, was an all-state football player, but was not allowed to play at Arizona. He set the NJCAA record in low hurdles at Compton College. Fred followed him to Compton.
“I don’t think you’ll get much argument that my brother Joe was the best athlete this city has ever had,” Ernie Batiste told me in a 1984 interview. “But he couldn’t play football at the UA because blacks weren’t allowed there. There were just so many restrictions then.
“Through the years, the racial prejudices of Tucson have changed. But I’ve always wondered how it would’ve been for my family, my brothers, to have been given the same treatment that Tucson gives its black athletes now.
“We just came along at the wrong time.”
Where are they now? Fred Batiste died in 1978 from complications related to diabetes. He was 51. He worked in the airline industry in Los Angeles. His grandson, Michael McDonald, was the starting point guard for Stanford’s 31-3 basketball team of 2000-01.
How they did it: Ernie Batiste died in Tucson in the spring of 1988. His six children, all college graduates, attended the services. The funeral service closed with a recording of Ray Charles singing “America.”
“It was his favorite song,” Candace Selwyn, one of Ernie Batiste’s children, told me. “He loved this country.”
