When Tyrone Byrd went from Jefferson High School to Dartmouth College in 1969, his arrival helped transform the school far beyond the football field.
Tyrone Byrd sits next to his Green Bay Packers jersey. He was signed as a free agent in 1974; however, after suffering an eye injury he was cut in the preseason.When Tyrone Byrd boarded the plane for Dartmouth College in 1969, unsure of his major but dead certain he would play in the NFL, he did the very thing his mother told him not to do: He looked back. An over-the-shoulder glance of his tall, lean frame caught the eye of his mother, Kizzie Byrd. Emotions welled.
Whoops! There was an error and we couldn't process your subscription. Please reload the page and try again. As the turbulent 1960s drew to a close, race and culture did not meld smoothly in the Northeast United States. The New York Times heralded the arrival of Byrd and his fellow freshmen with a headline: “Dartmouth’s Class of ‘73 is 10% Black.” From the story: “… among the 855 freshmen who arrived here Monday are 90 Negroes. This in a school that has graduated fewer than 150 Black men in its 200-year history; in a town that has only three or four Black families, and in a rural setting two and a half hours by car from the nearest city.
Dartmouth investigated and announced that 17 students had been placed on probation. Byrd was not one of them. To this day, none of his protesting classmates can name anyone who was “suspended,” as the media reported, or disciplined with probation, as Dartmouth had claimed. Byrd overcame a host of challenges. He rose to the freshman A team at Dartmouth, made second string varsity as a sophomore and became the team’s top receiver his last two seasons, helping the Big Green win three Ivy League championships. In a 1971 matchup with unbeaten Cornell and All-American running back Ed Marinaro, Byrd caught the game-clinching touchdown pass in Dartmouth’s 24-14 victory. “He was outstanding,” recalled Alan Kraus , who briefly played with Byrd before switching to rugby.
“I am friends with many of the [former] Vice Lord gang members today,” Byrd said, recalling several who became schoolteachers. “Our class was a test pilot to see if this experiment was going to work. There was a lot of pride among the graduating Blacks. We were hugging and kissing one another. It was a sense of achievement.”
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