Welcome

But how did you get here?

Oct 20

I noticed a bunch of new subscribers to Happened. Welcome, folks, I’m glad you’re interested — but I’m also a bit confused; I haven’t added to Happened since April. Instead I’ve been working on Feake Hills, Crooked Waters, my newer newsletter. Unlike Happened, it doesn’t have any particular theme, which is the whole idea. If there’s interest, though, I can start up Happened again. Let me know if that’s what you’re here for!

Stay on your feet today

The Eighty Years’ War was fought in Europe in the 1500s and 1600s. There were any number of causes — or maybe now, centuries later, we just don’t know what the causes were. The combatants were Spain (that is, the government) and various less-consolidated groups. You might suspect that the war took place in Spain, but it didn’t; it was mostly in what’s now the Netherlands. Spain generally controlled that part of Europe back then.

The groups fighting Spain, at least in 1572, included the Dutch and the English. They were beseiging Goes, a city in southwestern Netherlands. It’s still there, and mostly surrounded by water; primarily a river and wetlands. But it’s not a port city; they don’t have any direct access to the ocean, and that’s important for what happened on October 20, 1672. The Spanish forces couldn’t get to Goes by sea to save it from the seige. So soldiers — about 3,000 of them — waded across 15 miles of swamp and river in the middle of the night. When they arrived, the reinforcements forced the Dutch and English troops to give up the seige.

The water, they say, was up to chest-deep in places. It must have been freezing cold; it was October, after all, and 1572 was more or less within the “little ice age,” when glaciers advanced and temperatures dropped year-round. I keep thinking about how they got warmed up and dried off when they finally arrived in Goes.

Centuries later and on the other side of the world, the Long March ended on October 20, 1935. The army of the Communist Party was trying to escape the Nationalist Party army — if you’re at all familiar with the 20th-century history of China, you’ll be familiar with three names from the Long March: Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai led the Red Army, and Chiang Kai-sheck led the Nationalist army.

The name “long march” doesn’t even really capture the scope and lenth of the whole event; it lasted more than a year, involved up to 300,000 people, and extended across most of China; well over 5,000 miles. Spending months just marching, not really knowing where you were going, or whether you and your friends would survive — something like that is difficult to imagine.

At least one October 20 footrace, though, didn’t take nearly that long. It happened in 1951 in Oklahoma, and is still known as the Johnny Bright Incident. Johnny Bright was a football player for Drake University. The Drake Bulldogs were playing at Oklahoma A&M, which now is Oklahoma State University.

Johnny Bright was a star player; he was a running back and passer, led the entire country in yardage, and was considered a favorite for the Heisman Trophy. Thanks mostly to him, Drake had a five-game winning streak at the time of the game. On the other hand, Johnny Bright was Black. In Oklahoma, at least at the time, that made him a marked man. The Oklahoma team had an “enforcer,” of a sort, Wilbanks Smith, who knocked Bright unconscious three times in the first seven minutes, finally breaking his jaw and forcing him out of the game.

Smith’s brutality was reportedly supported and cheered by his coach and teammates. What they didn’t count on was the newspaper reporters and photographers at the game. A series of photos showed that Smith had punched Bright well after he’d handed off the ball to another player. Interviews by a reporter revealed the extent of team and fan enmity toward Smith (and any Black player, since they identified him simply by his race and may not have even known his name). The photos won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize, and the incident ended up in national magazines like Life, which at the time had a huge circulation.

Oklahoma A&M didn’t respond well. The president denied that anything had even happened, and declined to take any disciplinary action against Smith. The coverup lasted more than five decades. Drake University, as well as Bradley University, resigned from the Missouri Valley Conference which had sponsored the game, and neither ever played another game for the conference. The National College Atheletic Association changed their rules and added more protective gear for players.

As for the people directly involved, Johnny Bright graduated, turned pro in the Canadian Football League, and retired as their all-time leading rusher after a 12-year career. He’s in the Canadian Football Hall of Fame.

Willbanks Smith never apologized, and never amounted to anything.

The Oklahoma State University president finally apologized in 2005. It was only 53 years after the incident, and 22 years after Bright’s death.