Nebraska Made Welcome Place For Brown

His parents raised him with strong Christian values. He knew right from wrong. He always displayed good manners.

Then again, he had to when, as a boy, Bob Brown would help clerk the small grocery store his dad operated on the south side of Cleveland. Brown can’t tell you how many times he uttered the words “Can I help you please?”

He enjoyed people, engaging in conversation. It gave Brown a sense of connection and responsibility.

All that said, this day would be different. This day would test his manners like no other, making certain Brown behaved to his utmost standards.

Mr. Sittler. Mrs. Sittler. Yes ma’am, Yes sir.

The weekend invitation to the home of Lyle Sittler and his parents in tiny Martell, nearby Lincoln, marked the first time the 18-year-old Brown would spend in the house of a white family.

Brown remembers waking early one morning to a gigantic breakfast Lyle’s mother had made. The milk was fresh from the cow in the barn.

“That was the darndest thing,” Brown said, “right from the factory to the table.”

Brown also learned on that visit he wasn’t a hunter, not even of pheasants.

“It had nothing to do with being able to shoot the game, but I’m just not that type of person who can shoot something that I’m not going to utilize,” Brown said. “I just didn’t see the purpose on it, so I never did it again.”

But the weekend overall made a positive impression on Brown, who’d never even been around white people until coming to play football at Nebraska in 1961.

“During my time at Nebraska, Sittler is the only person who ever invited me home, and that really touched me,” Brown said. “I’ll never forget that. His mom and dad were so nice to me and made me so terrifically welcome.”

Brown smiles as he thinks about his former Nebraska teammate, who died in 2017.

“Lyle will always have a place in my heart,” Brown said. “He was a very good football player, but more importantly he was just a great human being; a very, very nice guy.”

As we celebrate Black History Month in February, stories from former Husker black student athletes, like Brown, are valuable reminders and lessons.

Brown, 77, lives in Cleveland. The All-American guard is a member of the College Football of Fame, and his No. 64 Nebraska jersey is retired. A second-round pick in the NFL Draft, he played for the Philadelphia Eagles, Los Angeles Rams and Oakland Raiders. He played in six Pro Bowls, and he is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Brown distinctly remembers life on the Nebraska campus in the early 1960s. He’d grown up in an all-black community, had just turned 18 and faced culture shock more than he’d imagined.

“I had never been around, or associated with at any level, whites,” Brown said. “And now all of the sudden I’m thrust in the middle of this white community and very few of my brethren there.”

The only blacks Brown had an opportunity to see were student athletes, like himself. At most, there were 25 black men on campus, by his memory.

“The 60s – that was a difficult time,” Brown said. “The dynamic in the country was very, very different. There were times when I felt very isolated. I really did. I never felt unwelcome, but I did feel at times not truly accepted.”

Few social events existed for Brown and other black student athletes to attend, but Brown knew he had the support of the Nebraska football coaching staff, beginning with Bob Devaney, who arrived on campus in 1962 as the team’s head coach.

“Coach Devaney’s door was always open,” Brown said. “He was always trying to figure out, ‘How can we make it better, Robert?’ I heard that so many times, I can’t begin to tell you. That made it better for me. To have someone that I could talk to, that understood the pain that I was going through because of the transition of one type of an environment to a totally different one.”

That being said, Brown also acknowledged the people of Nebraska welcoming him, too. They took him in as one of their own, he said. Not once does Brown remember being booed or hearing negative comments.

“I never felt like I wasn’t wanted,” Brown said. “I was given a chance to receive a free education. I had an opportunity to work with the best coaches in the world. The head coach was, other than my dad, the most magnificent man that I have ever sat down and talked to. It was tough, but I was able to weather the storm.”

Brown, however, does remember some students facing what he remembers being labeled “social probation,” or the negative reactions from some when learning of black men dating white girls on campus.

“It was a terrible, terrible thing,” Brown said. “It’s a shame when we can’t deal with each other as human beings. Just be nice to someone because they are human and a nice person.”

Meanwhile, Brown and other black football players embraced Devaney and his open, caring nature. He remembers Devaney always insisting the players hung together as a team.

“I remember the scuttlebutt was that when black athletes, when we were going to play Oklahoma or Oklahoma State, that the black athletes stayed with black professionals in their homes – black doctors, black dentists, black attorneys,” Brown said. “Coach Devaney said, ‘It’s not going to happen. We practice and play as a team. We ride as a team.’

“That was very impressive to me. I had a lot of coaches over the years. I never had one quite like Devaney.”

Brown’s goal, as silly as it seems now in hindsight, was to play well enough to keep his scholarship. He was the first in his family to attend college, and his parents demanded that he come home with a degree.

“Football was the vehicle,” he said, “but the goal was the degree.”

Browns father’s family was from Oklahoma, and his mother’s family was from Alabama. Like many blacks in the late 20s, early 30s, the Browns began migrating to the so-called North for more opportunities.

They landed in Cleveland. His dad worked for Alcoa Aluminum and the public steel for many years. An entrepreneur, his father also had the aforementioned small grocery store. Brown worked there from the time he was a boy until he came to Nebraska.

Not until age 14 or 15 did Brown begin showing an interest in weight lifting, when he went to the YMCA and merely watched others do it, and then try to replicate it.

“This older black guy from the very beginning came over and said, ‘You don’t know what you’re doing, do you?’ I said, ‘No, sir.’ He said, ‘Well, I’m going to keep you from getting hurt.’ He started showing me how to lift, and I got the bug.”

Nebraska didn’t have the weight room it does now, but did have athletes who caught the lifting bug -- Gary Toogood, Larry Kramer and Lloyd Voss, to name a few.

“The weight room was a wimpy dog room,” Brown said. “I mean, if these guys playing now, if these great athletes could see that weight room, they would be in hysterics laughing. But you know, We did the best with what we had. In those days, people thought, ‘Well, if you lift too many weights you’ll get muscle bound and be stiff.’ Ah, please. It worked out OK.”

As for his style of play, Brown fixated on playing physical.

“My theory was always to be the hammer and never the nail,” he said. “Attack, and attack relentlessly. That’s what I did.”

Brown played on Nebraska’s first bowl-winning team, when the Husker defeated Miami in the 1962 Gotham Bowl in New York. He also played in the first game of a streak of home sellouts that dates to the present day.

“To watch a program go from infancy to the level it is now … I believe it’s the finest football program in the country. I do,” Brown said. “I think every young kid who aspires to be an athlete and wants to play football should attend the greatest football program – academic scholarship program – in this United States of America. They should go to the University of Nebraska.”

Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.