The four University of Kentucky football players credited with breaking the color barrier in the Southeastern Conference in the 1960s have been immortalized in statue form.
UK was first integrated by order of the Supreme Court in 1949, but it would be another 17 years before the school would sign its first two African-American football players – a pair of friends, Greg Page and Nate Northington. While Page passed away before ever competing on the field, Northington went on to become the first black football player in the Southeastern Conference.
Thursday night, five decades later, Northington looked on as his bronze likeness – along with three of his fellow trailblazers – was revealed.
"As young boys growing up in various parts of the commonwealth, none of us could have dreamed that destiny would allow us to make our mark in history quite like this," he said.
University Athletics Committee chair Dr. C.B. Akins situated the statue, and the struggle behind it, inside a larger narrative of slow, hard-won social progress.
"In order to right decades and even centuries of humanity's inhumane treatment of other humans, there is forever the need for a Greg Page, a Nate Northington, a Wilbur Hackett, and a Houston Hogg," Akins told the audience.
The four larger-than-life football pioneers will stand side-by-side on a lit pedestal between the new football training center and Commonwealth Stadium, reminders of what it took to change the face of a sport.
