The Moby Riot: CSU protested more than BYU in 1970

The Fort Collins Coloradoan's front page Feb. 6, 1970, read "Blacks disrupt basketball game."

The editorial board called the Black Student Alliance at CSU a dangerous organization because of the riots "negroes" instigated. An editorial page in The Rocky Mountain Collegian referred to those involved as the N-word.

Reports blamed the black community for the riots that occurred during halftime of the Brigham Young University vs. Colorado State University basketball game at Moby Gym. Race was the central issue — CSU students were protesting against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' policy of not allowing black men into the priesthood — but it wasn't only black students involved; there were just as many white men and women on the floor.

Within a span of 15 minutes, a Molotov cocktail ignited on the floor of Moby Gym, a Fort Collins police officer was assaulted with a piece of metal, patrol cars were broken into and a Rocky Mountain News photographer was hospitalized, all due to the actions of the Black Student Alliance. Or so the the era's reporting states.

Overlooked was the fact that the seven people arrested that day were white.

In the 45 years since, those 15 minutes of Fort Collins history have been relegated to a few sentences in a book.

And though many who were there remember the account differently, all agree it's a forgotten piece of history. Through interviews with some of the key figures and research of past media coverage, the Coloradoan retells the story, this time with 45 years of civil rights history and perspective.

The fear

At the University of Arizona, fans burned the free-throw line. At Oregon State, protesters surrounded the court. At the University of New Mexico, the student senate demanded the university cut all ties with BYU.

When BYU played away from Provo, Utah, during the 1969-70 season, the team was met with opposing fans voicing their disagreement of the all-white basketball team Steve Kelly played on, his religion and its 140-year-old policy of not allowing black men to become clergy.

But nothing frightened Kelly and his BYU teammates as much as what they went through at CSU. All they could think about was surviving.

Kelly didn't know if there was a specific reason why the vocal opposition to Mormon policies became so strong in 1970, but there was no masking the fear he felt in Fort Collins.

"I remember seeing people all around the court. Very close to the sidelines and lined along the end lines, and we had to go through them to get onto the floor. They had their hands held, some posters with stuff on them and it was quite intimidating," Kelly said.

He remembers halftime running long and the sound of a commotion muffled through the locker room walls. When BYU players were finally allowed to exit the locker room, police escorted them to the floor. Officers created enough of a barricade to allow players to squeeze past the protesters. But then a Molotov cocktail was hurled from the stands, delaying the game further.

The game resumed, and so did the anti-racism chants. BYU lost 94-71 and finished the season 8-18.

"Our team that year had a bit of trouble. It wasn't for a lack of talent, but we were terrible," Kelly said.

This was surprising given the Cougars had future NBA draft picks in Kelly and Paul Ruffner and a FIBA Hall of Famer in Kresimir Cosic.

"It was a year that was really hard on the players," Kelly said. "That protest was a bad scene all the way around. ... I think the losses were because there wasn't a lot of fire in our bellies. The protests took the starch out of us."

The intent

The halftime protest had been planned. It was meant to be peaceful.

Jim Starr, the president of the Associated Students of Colorado State University, and his friend Paul Chambers, president of the Black Student Alliance, negotiated a deal with athletic director Perry Moore to protest BYU and the practices of the LDS Church weeks beforehand. It wasn't until the morning of the game that Moore informed Starr it wasn't in the school's best interest to allow a demonstration during halftime.

Students were instead given time to have their voices heard before the game. Starr, Chambers and more than 100 of their classmates took advantage of the stage to oppose the LDS Church's policy preventing black members from entering the priesthood and also CSU's refusal to take a stance against BYU, along with what they described as racial discrimination taking place in Fort Collins.

Relationships between black and white students — and with most administrators — were strong, said Chambers, who was in his final semester at CSU in 1970. Yet being part of the black community, which made up only half a percent of the student population, was rarely easy. Should he or a friend want to rent an apartment off campus, for example, they'd send one of their "white girlfriends or acquaintances" to meet the landlord and sign a lease. Rental agencies didn't provide housing to black students, Chambers said.

The pregame protest came. The point was made. Everyone took their seats to watch the game, Starr said, but about 50 students — black, white and Latino — began to congregate along the sideline around midcourt shortly before halftime. They held signs that read, "End racism in the (Western Athletic Conference)" and "CSU perpetuates racism."

When the halftime show started and BYU cheerleaders took the floor, so did the CSU students. They were led by members of the Black Student Alliance, some locked arms, others held up their fists to signal black power.

By the students' account, it was peaceful, the way Starr had hoped. When dean of students Burns B. Crookston instructed over the public address system that anyone on the court should take their seats, they did. But not soon enough, Starr said.

"Then all of the sudden ... doors opened and I can just describe it as a phalanx of Fort Collins police officers came onto the basketball court. They had riot gear, helmets on, batons, shields and they formed a line on that end of the basketball court," Starr said.

"Once the police came out, students stopped coming back into the stands. It was more curiosity to see what this was all about. I don't think anything in particular triggered the start of the police officers marching slowly up the whole width of the court."

By the time the line of 20 police officers — who had been waiting on-call a block away at Green Hall — reached midcourt, the students who had returned to the bleachers came back to the floor, Starr said.

"It was as if (the police) were ready to stop a riot, but there was no riot," Starr continued, and he believes the police were responsible for the violence that followed.

After the playing surface finally cleared — most heading to the doors in southeast corner of the gym — officers lined the court with their shields and batons drawn.

That's when what looked to be a railroad iron flew from the stands above where Starr was sitting 10 rows up, hit an officer and spun him around. After the officer was hit, the piece of metal bounced and struck photographer Howard Brock in the head.

Brock's daughter Anita recalls her father having a 3-inch gash on the right side of his head that required stitches. Doctors at Poudre Valley Hospital told the family he would have been killed instantly had the metal hit Brock an inch lower, in the temple.

Seconds later, a Molotov cocktail was launched at the feet of the police. It was lit but didn't explode, sliding across the floor until, Starr said, someone stomped it out.

Pandemonium broke loose.

Students who were in the stands began rushing the court, and those who were trying to leave through the southeast doors were stuck in a bottleneck as the riot squad approached and began getting physical.

Had the police not taken the floor, Starr contends, students would have returned to their seats, as they were asked.

To Chambers, the events of Feb. 5, 1970, have become a blur.

There were police in riot gear who probably acted too quickly, he said, fans who threw things and chaos. A lot of chaos. Protesting the LDS Church was a big deal, he recalls, but it was only a small piece of the battles he fought as a civil rights leader at CSU.

He went to Denver with the first minority group to ask the state legislature for more higher-education funding and constantly clashed with former CSU president William Morgan, who, Chambers said, refused to budge when it came to policies regarding the treatment of minorities. When A.R. Chamberlain succeeded Morgan in 1969, inclusion at CSU finally began to improve, including the school cracking down on housing discrimination.

"You can't tell me 'I don't see color' because you do," Chambers said, adding people don't see discrimination unless they have experienced it.

Despite the relationship the Black Student Alliance developed with Chamberlain, Chambers left CSU in disgust. He said he had the grades but was forced to hire a lawyer to graduate in the spring of 1970 because of various accusations by the university's administration labeling him a troublemaker, including but not limited to starting the riot he hardly remembers.

The disbelief

Brownie McGraw couldn't believe her eyes. This was Fort Collins. Not Selma, Alabama, or Little Rock, Arkansas.

She grew up in Denver during the 1930s and '40s and never experienced racial tension. She went to high school with black students — though not many — and they were included in everything. Her husband, Thurman "Fum" McGraw, coached black athletes such as Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who acted as a big brother to their children.

To see a protest of this magnitude in Colorado was something she couldn't fathom.

She thought it was the Black Panthers. What other group would storm Moby Gym at halftime, flipping off the crowd and purposely creating a riot?

The assumption was the protesters came up from Denver by way of California — "where most of our problems came from." Talk was they'd be on their way out of town and on to Laramie, Wyoming, that weekend to create the same ruckus. Her husband, a longtime CSU athletic director who was then the assistant A.D. — phoned the University of Wyoming to warn it about what to expect when hosting BYU on Sunday.

Wyoming State Troopers lined the floor at Arena-Auditorium while the Cowboys and Cougars played to prevent another riot.

The demonstrators didn't show.

It wasn't the Denver chapter of the Black Panther party. These were CSU students, people McGraw remembers pushing BYU cheerleaders to the floor, spitting on them.

"I scared myself. If I'd have had a gun, I would have shot somebody," McGraw said. "To think that people would act like that in our facility? BYU was our guest. And this is how you deal with wanting them to have blacks on their team?"

What limited written history of the protest that exists doesn't begin to tell the entire story, McGraw said. Fum had to restrain black student-athletes from intervening once the riot squad arrived and Brownie's memory is that former athletic director Perry Moore found a bomb at his house shortly after.

The aftermath

Fort Collins Police Services have no record of Feb. 5, 1970.

Steven Griffith, 67, who lives in Loveland, was one of those arrested. He said his friends were waiting at the jail to pay his $100 bail when he arrived in handcuffs. He was given 15 days of probation for interfering with the police.

No one served jail time beyond sitting in a holding cell.

Dennis Pete, a student at Aims Junior College in Greeley at the time, was arrested and charged with second-degree arson three weeks later for allegedly throwing the Molotov cocktail; he was acquitted.

No one is exactly sure why CSU students decided 1970 was the time to protest BYU, when the LDS Church's policies dated to the 1800s. The best Chambers, Starr and Griffith could speculate was because they were part of a generation that grew up following Martin Luther King Jr.'s march on Washington and the Montgomery Bus Boycott and they'd finally had enough.

In 1978, the LDS Church extended priesthood and temple blessings to all males, regardless of race.

Meanwhile, at CSU, the peaceful protest-turned-riot and other demonstrations Chambers led began to enact change and continue to make an impact.

"The university has seen how critical it is to be more inclusive, identify programs where all students can feel that they are welcomed on campus, valued on campus and affirmed on campus. Those ideas were nonexistent when Paul Chambers ... and others were protesting. They were asking that the university start thinking about those things," said CSU vice president of diversity Mary Ontiveros, who was a freshman in 1969-70.

An endowed scholarship was established in Chambers' name for students committed to increasing the awareness of African American culture at CSU and in the community. Ethnic cultural centers were established because of his efforts as was the position of assistant director of minority recruitment in 1974.

Ontiveros thinks she can count on her hands how many black students she went to CSU with in the early '70s. When the school did begin keeping diversity data in 1986, 1.2 percent of the student population was black. Today, the percentage is 2.1.

Fewer than 600 black students at a school with an enrollment of 27,086 isn't a lot — Larimer County is 1 percent black — but it's progress, thanks in part to a racially diverse group that had the courage to stand against injustice 45 years ago.

"I think that brought to people's attention that there was really a disconnect," Ontiveros said. "Sometimes movements require dramatic action."

For insight and analysis on athletics around Northern Colorado and the Mountain West, follow sports columnist Matt L. Stephens at twitter.com/mattstephens and facebook.com/stephensreporting.

Who's who

Paul Chambers, 66

Chambers graduated from CSU in 1970 before earning his master's degree from the University of Colorado. After school, the Houston native lived and worked all across the U.S., creating his own construction company, and is now retiring, living half the year in Philadelphia and half in the Tampa Bay area.

Steve Kelly, 65

Kelly grew up in Grand Junction, and after graduating from BYU was drafted by the Detroit Pistons. Instead of playing professional basketball, Kelly returned to the Western Slope and became an oral surgeon. He operates Colorado West Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery PC in Grand Junction.

Jim Starr, 66

Starr became an attorney after graduating from CSU. He and Chambers were close friends in college, bonded over a desire to create change, and recently reconnected. He's retired and lives in Crested Butte.

Brownie McGraw, 84

McGraw's legacy in Fort Collins is as a legendary local educator. McGraw Elementary in south Fort Collins was named after her, and she lives in town. Fum McGraw died in 2000.

Notable BYU athletic protests

1968

•Protestors surround the court during BYU's basketball game at Oregon State.

•UTEP track athletes boycott meet at BYU.

1969

•14 black football players are kicked off team the team at Wyoming for wearing armbands supporting the Black Student Alliance.

1970

•Arizona students scorch the floor of their home arena the night before a nationally televised basketball game against BYU.

•Protests by CSU students lead to a riot at Moby Gym.

•A second attempt by CSU students to protest the LDS church during the 1970 WAC wrestling championship at Moby Gym is denied by university officials.

About diversity in the LDS church

From the mid-1800s until 1978, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints did not ordain black men into the priesthood or allow black men or women to participate in certain ceremonies, even though they were allowed to be members of the church. In 1978, the LDS Church extended priesthood and temple blessings to all males, regardless of race.

Today, there are 15 million members of the LDS church worldwide. There are about 150,000 in Colorado, according to the LDS church website.