Without the pictures, Johnny Bright's broken jaw probably would have been considered just another football injury.
With fewer than eight minutes gone in the first quarter, and with the nation's leading ground gainer out of the Oct. 20, 1951 game, A&M--later to become Oklahoma State--erased an early deficit and rolled to victory over previously unbeaten Drake University.
It was not until the next day that Bright's injury took on a more sinister cast.
The Des Moines Register had devoted an entire page of the Sunday paper to a sequence of photos from the game. The pictures, which would earn a Pulitzer Prize for photographers Don Ultang and John Robinson, showed A&M defensive tackle Wilbanks Smith pummeling Bright on two separate plays.
Bright was nowhere near the action on either play.
He was simply standing in the backfield, watching the ballcarrier, when Smith delivered a forearm--or perhaps a fist--to his unprotected jaw (helmets did not yet have face masks).
While the photos were shocking for their depiction of savage, unsportsmanlike play, they might have faded on the pages of the Register had it not been for one thing: Smith is white, and Bright was African American.
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When Bright went to Drake in 1948, he was one of only a few African Americans at the small private university in Des Moines.
"There was a distinct line between us and rest of the student body," says Jim Ford, an African American who attended Drake in the late '40s and early '50s and shared an apartment with Bright. "We were not permitted to live on campus."
If Bright was troubled by Drake's housing policy, he kept it to himself.
"When you tried to talk to Johnny about segregation, he'd make a joke out of it," says Ford. "He'd tell you, 'Don't bring this garbage to me....If you want to prove something to me, prove it out there on the football field."'
Bright's desire to view life through the prism of football was understandable.
Off the field, he might have been a second-class citizen.
On the field, he was the biggest star Drake had seen.
In 1949, he became the first sophomore to lead the nation in total offense, running and passing for nearly 2,000 yards as a halfback in the old single-wing formation. The next year, he gained a record-setting 2,400 yards in total offense and became the first player to both rush and pass for 1,000 yards in the same season.
