AMES, Iowa – An upcoming lecture at Iowa State University will shine the spotlight on the stories of Jack Trice and two other Black college football players at Iowa institutions who sustained serious injuries due to foul play on the gridiron.
Jaime Schultz, an author and professor of kinesiology at Penn State, will deliver the lecture, titled “Moments of Impact: Examining the Legacy of Jack Trice,” at 6 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 3, in the Memorial Union Sun Room. The event is free and open to the public, and a video of the lecture will be available on the ISU Lectures Program website a few days after the lecture.
The lecture coincides with the closing of the year-long centennial commemoration of the death of Jack Trice, Iowa State’s first Black athlete. A full list of events connected to the commemoration is available from ISU News Service.
Trice competed on the football and track and field teams and was a student of animal husbandry. He aspired to use his education to help Black farmers in the South. Trice suffered severe injuries in his second collegiate football game and died in Ames on Oct. 8, 1923. He was 21. He is the namesake of the university’s football stadium, the only stadium at the nation’s major college football schools to be named for a Black man.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Trice, Ozzie Simmons, and Johnny Bright were Black athletes who played college football for three Iowa institutions: Iowa State University, the University of Iowa, and Drake University, respectively. At a time when the overwhelming majority of their opponents and teammates were white, the three men sustained serious injuries on the gridiron. Schultz’s lecture will tell their stories and examine how the local communities of which they were once a part have forgotten and remembered the athletes over time.
Schultz is the author of “Moments of Impact: Injury, Racialized Memory, and Reconciliation in College Football.” The book primarily focuses on Trice's life and influence on Iowa State University through the 1990s. She also writes about the legacies of Simmons at the University of Iowa and Bright at Drake University.
The University Book Store will be onsite selling her book at the event. This event is sponsored by the Committee on Lectures, which is funded by Student Government.
