Charlie Davis, my Super Bowl hero
What does Charlie Davis, defensive tackle for the Pittsburgh Steelers and St. Louis Cardinals, have to do with Alexander Schmorell and White Rose resistance? Read on!
I.
Spring semester of my senior year at TCU, I took a course on curriculum development. The academic advisor in the Math department had counseled “his” students to take courses in pedagogy instead of basket weaving or tennis. He had nothing against basket weaving or tennis. “Even if you don’t want a career in teaching, what you learn from education courses will help you in life.”
Because of Dr. Deeter’s sage advice, I found myself sitting next to a giant of a man, three hours one day every week. Luck of the draw, for an entire semester, I sat next to Charlie Davis.
Charlie had been drafted by the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1974. He played for the Steelers for only one season, but that was all it took to earn himself a Super Bowl ring – Super Bowl IX. He would come into his own once he was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. By the time I sat next to him in Curriculum Development, he had established quite a name for himself. Defensive tackle. Did I say he was a giant of a man?
Neither of us talked a great deal the first few weeks of that class. Charlie had returned to TCU after the close of the regular season, although in retrospect, I’m not quite sure why. He had graduated with a degree in business in 1974. But I’m glad he did.
Because: One day, something the professor said triggered Charlie. I don’t recall the topics discussed, but I’ll never forget Charlie’s reaction. Until you have sat in a Math class and had a teacher hand out graded papers face up, so everyone can see you failed the test, you don’t know what it feels like to be humiliated. He spoke passionately about his experience. One teacher shamed him, seemingly delighting in highlighting his deficiencies.
Since that day, he had hated Math. With a white-hot hate. To the point that he had a mental block regarding that subject.
He didn’t know he was sitting next to a Mathie – a Mathie who had been extraordinarily quiet to that point. Charlie, until you have suited up for a P.E. class and had a gym teacher who loved mocking non-athletes, you don’t know what it feels like to be humiliated. I told him about my experiences with gym teachers who, instead of trying to figure out what I could do, thought it more appropriate to taunt me, and a few of my other friends who likewise could not have done ten push-ups if our lives depended on it.
To my utter shock, Charlie didn’t ignore my comment. The ensuing dialog has stuck with me. Charlie Davis probably doesn’t remember the conversation at all. I remember that the professor stopped talking and let Charlie and me compare notes.
Charlie’s main gripe centered on the tendency of his secondary school teachers to assume he was nothing more than a dumb jock. They made him feel small. He knew he wasn’t dumb, but growing up as a young Black boy, into a young Black man, it was next to impossible to shake that stereotype. Turns out, Charlie Davis is one smart man. In November 2022, TCU honored him as one of the first Black athletes to graduate with a degree in business. In a speaker series entitled “Against All Odds: Stories of Grit and Determination,” Charlie told of the barriers he faced as a Black student athlete, as a football player who went to TCU to earn a degree, not just play football.
I had felt humiliated and marginalized because my elementary, junior high, and high school education pre-dated effective enforcement of Title IX, guaranteeing women equal access to sports. Our school district pretty much thumbed its nose at that regulation. We girls learned no life skills. No sports that we could play well into middle age. We girls were forced to endure several quarters per year of “gymnastics” and square dancing. And I loathed both.
Charlie’s hurt and distress went much deeper. He made it all the way to TCU, apparently without ever having had a teacher like Maggie Minyard or Ruth McAllister or Sandra Hanus, STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] teachers in my high school who worked grueling hours helping students who were not quite getting it. He suffered under teachers who assumed that because he was Black, because he played football, he had to be dumb.
And Charlie was anything but dumb.
Listening to him that day, a ton of bricks knocked some sense into me. Good football players must be able to learn massive playbooks. They must be able to think quickly on their feet. They’ve got to be able to change course if they determine that the play that’s been called has been sussed out by the defense and will fail. They work grueling hours. Yes, it’s a game. Yes, they get paid really good money to play that game. But only the elite – like Charlie Davis – make it to that level.
Despite the brains, despite the hard work, despite split-second decision-making [hello, can anyone say Patrick Mahomes?], far too many Americans still think of football players as dumb jocks.
And because they are typecast as dumb jocks, it’s next to impossible to get people to see beyond the stereotype. Our loss, not just theirs.
II.
In 1998, William Hathaway penned an article for the Fulbright Funnel. Entitled “Come Back” – Echoing a Plea Heard a Century Ago in Jerusalem, the essay sketches the impact that “few or no Jews” has on modern German life. Here is an excerpt that should give you a good idea of Hathaway’s logic and reasoning.
[Germany] lost the dynamic of two counterpoised cultures, different, sometimes conflicting, but basically complementary. These two elements enriched each other for hundreds of years until Germany hacked off one of its limbs. The wound is far from healed, and the loss is irreplaceable. …
Germany had finer achievements when it was part Jewish, and it would improve now if more Jews returned. Although the past can’t be erased, much of value could be restored. … This may remain an impossible wish, a litany of hope bred of loss, but living here in the shadow of the Holocaust it’s the only response I can make: Please come back.
I am grateful that Dr. Hathaway characterized the Shoah as the hacking off of a limb. Mutual destruction. German Jews were initially “only” marginalized, “only” forced into lower-ranking positions. ‘What difference should it make,’ so Nazis reasoned, ‘if a Jewish CPA was not allowed to prepare tax returns or dispense financial advice? He could still be a bookkeeper. What difference should it make if an attorney loses his law license? He can still be a paralegal. What difference should it make if a headmaster can no longer run a school? He can still teach. Only Jews, of course, but teach.’ And on and on, career by career, region by region.
‘And what should it matter if Jews cannot sit on park benches? Cannot date non-Jews? Cannot play professional sports? It’s not like we’re killing them or anything.’
Until of course, the genocide began.
But the genocide could not have begun without the marginalization. Without the relegation to menial labor. Without the denial of basic human and civil rights.
In 2002, Dr. Armin Ziegler told me that he would not tolerate words excusing inaction during the Shoah. Absolutely no claim of inner emigration was allowed when speaking to Dr. Ziegler. They – Germans, including himself – may not have taken part in the mass murders in extermination camps. They may not have loaded the trains. They may not have massacred European Jews in Riga, in Ejszyszki, in Kyiv. But they – Germans, including himself – looked the other way when neighbors were not permitted to sit on park benches. No one protested when Jewish children were not allowed to attend Gymnasium or Realschule. No one filed a missing persons report when neighbors disappeared overnight.
They – Germans, including himself – were just as culpable as Adolf Eichmann, Reinhard Heydrich, and Heinrich Himmler. Because they permitted their Jewish neighbors and European Jews in general to become the Other. After which, it was relatively simple to exterminate them.
‘We didn’t know is not a valid excuse,’ so said Armin Ziegler. ‘We knew we were excluding fellow German citizens who happened to be Jewish from their rights as German citizens. We are culpable.’
III.
Weakness is strength, strength is weakness. Lilo Ramdohr remembers that Alexander Schmorell repeated this sentence like a mantra. It expressed Alex’s deep-seated conviction that the have-nots, the oppressed, the lowly represented the Good in society. He believed that if you needed help, you should ask a poor person who could ill afford the cost of assistance, not the wealthy whose funds logically would enable aid. This was a young man who made it a habit to seek out conversation in working-class pubs.
Alex and Niko – Nikolay Daniel Nikolaeff-Hamazaspian – would undertake bicycle tours outside Munich. On these trips, they gave bread and tobacco to French (and later Russian) POWs. They cooperated with Yugoslavian, Norwegian, and Russian classmates, as well as with Niko’s sister Anna, in this humanitarian effort. They obtained the tobacco by collecting cigarette butts.
Everyone who knew Alex knew that he felt like an outsider, like an Other. Even with friends like Lilo, Niko, Hans Scholl, Christoph Probst, and Willi Graf, Alex could never shake the sense that he did not belong in German society. Russians were barely half a step above Jews in the subhuman category designed by National Socialists. And German society never let Alexander Schmorell forget that he was half-Russian.
Gerhard Feuerle was not a racial outcast, but he was artistic, soft-spoken, fearful. None of these personality traits endeared him to the Nazi soldiers with whom he rubbed elbows every day. Only Wilhelm Geyer understood him, felt his frustrations at not being taken seriously. Even Sophie Scholl – and Gerhard Feuerle was madly in love with Sophie Scholl – wouldn’t spare him a glance.
The ultimate outsider, Gerhard would sit in the foyer of Eickemeyer’s Atelier or studio when Theodor Haecker read aloud from his works, or when the friends simply got together to talk. Gerhard was drawn to their radical ideas, but they ignored him. Still, he could not stay away. At least there, he had a face. ‘The Nazis have stolen my face,’ he told his diary.
Without Geyer’s rock solid friendship and mentoring, Gerhard would have been a lost soul, just as adrift as Alex, but for different reasons.
IV.
We humans tend to be tribal. Jeff Probst is putting on a master seminar on this topic, as Survivor explores the different ways that tribes function. Whether our tribes consist of our immediate family; our church, synagogue, or mosque; our university or high school; professional sports (Go Iggles!); our mishpacha, ohana, oikogéneia; our neighborhoods; or simply, community…
No matter how we define our particular tribe, it brings us comfort. I will never forget the first Yizkor after my mother’s death. I burst into uncontrollable sobbing during the Mourner’s Kaddish. What? I was supposed to thank God for my mother’s death? It was more than I could bear. Until six of the most wonderful women on the planet gathered around me, enclosing me in a wall of love. They let me cry as they thanked God for my mother’s life. Ruth, Brenda, Fran, Donna, Lee, Lois, forever in my heart.
Yes, it is important to have a tribe. Without a support system, we will fail. Without a support system, life is not worth living. Without our tribe, we are susceptible to feelings of hopelessness.
But. When tribes become exclusive, when we shut people out because they are Black or Hispanic or Asian, or because they don’t wear the right clothes, or because they have grease under their fingernails, or because they are gay or lesbian or trans, or because they live in a trailer park, or because they clean our offices or schools, or because they are fleeing oppression in their homeland and seek refuge with us – if we exclude people for any of these reasons or for others even more ridiculous, we are culpable for whatever harm befalls them.
There are consequences to stigmatizing those not in our tribe. There are consequences when we make any person invisible, for whatever reason. There are consequences when we deny basic human and civil rights to the Other. There are consequences, always there are consequences.
Alex lost his life, defending his Otherness, calling out an evil regime. Niko lived a life of poverty, as even after the war, he remained an outcast, first in Germany, then in his homeland (Bulgaria, part of the USSR) because of his war-time life in Munich. Gerhard Feuerle was interrogated by the Gestapo for his suspected White Rose involvement, but died as result of a freak air raid while he was waiting at a train station. His parents blamed Wilhelm Geyer for his death. Wilhelm Geyer, who himself had been an outcast, “the most dangerous artist in Germany,” reduced to penury.
Million upon millions of Jews – from Germany, Poland, France, Hungary, USSR, and more – were murdered, merely because they were Jewish. They had committed no crimes, they had harmed no one. They were executed for being Other. And there has never been a sufficiently accurate count of non-Jewish victims of Nazi venom. Jehovah’s Witness, LGBTQ+, the disabled, Communists, Socialists, dissidents, no one was spared if Adolf Hitler said they should not live. And Others should not live.
Thankfully, Charlie Davis’ Otherness did not result in his death. His path to success was made much harder by being a Black student athlete. His white teammates on those horrible TCU football teams in the early 1970s faced far fewer obstacles on the road to graduation and success after football. Count me as a member of the Charlie Davis fan club, grateful for what I could learn from him.
But Charlie Davis’ forebears in the United States did not fare as well. Our history with regards to Black Americans in particular, and non-white Americans in general, has been pretty miserable. Before 1865, we deemed Black Americans not fully human, 3/5 human, to be precise.
Even after the Civil War, we didn’t do much better. Between lynchings, false testimony during trials resulting in executions of innocent men and boys, denial of access to a good education, blocking access to capital, we turned our Black American neighbors into Others. As an aside, and this is hard to believe: When I was very, very young, I remember a tall, white-haired man who bragged that he had presided over the last lynching of a N***** in Houston, Harris County, Texas. He allowed as to how it was a shame they were not allowed any longer. To this day, I shudder at that memory.
V.
We cannot change the past. We. Cannot. Change. The. Past.
But we can put our shoulder to the wheel. As Paul Spiegel said in his November 9, 2000 speech in front of the Brandenburger Tor in Berlin, when we see prejudice, racism, injustice, well, here it is in his own words, first in the original German, then in translation. The entire speech is here [German only].
Nur wenige sind Helden. Nur wenige haben den Mut einzugreifen, wenn sie Zeuge werden, wie Skinheads einen wehrlosen Mann, eine wehrlose Frau und – ja auch das mittlerweile – wehrlose Kinder auf offener Straße überfallen und zusammenschlagen. Aber jeder von uns ist in der Lage, die Polizei zu rufen. Und jeder von uns ist in der Lage, bereits im Kleinen einzuschreiten, in seinem Lebensumfeld. Wenn am Stammtisch abfällige Witze über Juden, Türken, Farbige oder Schwule erzählt werden. Wenn am Arbeitsplatz ein Fremder benachteiligt, schlecht behandelt wird. Reden Sie mit Ihren Freunden und Arbeitskollegen, wenn sie dies tun! Reden Sie mit dem Betriebsrat und demonstrieren Sie somit immer wieder Ihre Opposition! Straßen und Stammtische dürfen nicht dem braunen Pöbel überlassen werden.
Ich freue mich, dass es so viele sind, die der rechtsextremen Gewalt auf unseren Straßen mit dieser Demonstration sagen: „Schluss jetzt! Es ist genug! Wir lassen es uns nicht mehr gefallen, dass hierzulande Menschen wieder Angst haben müssen!“
English:
Only a few are heroes. Only a few have the courage to intervene when they witness skinheads attacking and beating up a defenseless man, a defenseless woman and, yes, [even] defenseless children on the street. But each of us is capable of calling the police. And each of us is able to intervene on a small scale, where we live. When derogatory jokes are told at the Stammtisch about Jews, Turks, Blacks, or gays. When a stranger is discriminated against and treated badly at work. Talk to your friends and work colleagues when they do this! Talk to the works council [union] and demonstrate your opposition again and again! Streets and Stammtisch must not be left to the brown mob.
I am pleased that there are so many who are saying – with this demonstration – to the right-wing extremist violence on our streets: “Stop! We’ve had enough! We can no longer tolerate the fact that people in this country have to be afraid again!”
Each of us is responsible for the injustice we see in front of our faces. Not as much for the injustices on the other side of the globe. But what we see on our street, in our workplace, where we live.
Thank you, Charlie Davis. The life lesson you gave me in that Curriculum Development class is worth ten Super Bowl rings.
© 2024 Denise Elaine Heap. Excerpts from White Rose History, Volume I regarding Alexander Schnorell, © 2002, 2005 Denise Elaine Heap. Many thanks to Lilo Fürst-Ramdohr for her memories of Alex and Niko, and to Lilo’s grandson Domenic Saller for his interview with and obituary for Niko in 2013. Used by permission. Please contact us for permission to quote.
Really good article, Denise! It’s so disturbing to see that, in large part, we haven’t learned the lessons of history as we huddle with our tribes against “the Others”.