How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
How the Memory of a Song Reunited Two Women Separated by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade
In 1990, scholars found a Sierra Leonean woman who remembered a nearly identical version of a tune passed down by a Georgia woman’s enslaved ancestors
In 1933, the pioneering Black linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner met an elderly Gullah Geechee woman named Amelia Dawley in a remote coastal village south of Savannah, Georgia. While Turner recorded, Dawley sang a song of unknown origin, passed down through the generations by her ancestors. Dawley didn’t know the song’s meaning, but a Sierra Leonean student who heard the recording recognized its lyrics as Mende, a major language in his home country. Turner published an English translation of the song in his 1949 book, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect.
Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala came across Turner’s work. He eventually decided to travel through Sierra Leone with ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and native linguist Tazieff Koroma in an attempt to trace the provenance of the mysterious lyrics. After a long, fruitless search through humid country, Schmidt ended up in the isolated village of Senehun Ngola, where she met a local woman who had preserved a shockingly similar song that traced back hundreds of years.
“[Her] grandmother had taught her the song, and she had kept it alive by changing the words for other occasions,” says Schmidt.
Located on the Windward Coast of West Africa, the region now known as Sierra Leone was a key player in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Westerners also referred to the area as the Rice Coast; as English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson wrote in 1788, the red rice found there was “finer in flavor, of a greater substance, more wholesome and capable of preservation, than the rice of any other country.”
When slave traders arrived in Sierra Leone, they found a lush country of verdant forests, knobby mountains and waters thick with aquatic life. Cultivated rice fields and wild indigo sprawled across the landscape. Massive mangrove trees crowded the riverbanks, rendering certain villages “scarcely perceptible” and protecting their inhabitants from potential enslavers, who could pass “within a few yards of a town” and not suspect anything, wrote English physician Thomas Masterman Winterbottom in 1803.
Bunce Island, where captive West Africans were held in a stone fortress before being forced onto slave ships for the deadly journey across the Middle Passage, served as the center of the region’s slave trade. In 1791, Anna Maria Falconbridge, the wife of an English abolitionist, wrote about the unforgettable “sight of between two and three hundred wretched victims, chained and parceled out in circles, just satisfying the cravings of nature from a trough of rice placed in the center of each circle.”
In North America, wealthy rice planters whose plantations lined the Lowcountry—a region along Georgia and South Carolina’s coast that includes the Sea Islands—paid a premium for enslaved people from Sierra Leone. When slave ships docked, local newspapers reported their arrivals and made sure readers knew the enslaved people on board were from a part of Africa famed for its rice cultivation. A 1785 advertisement published in Charleston, South Carolina, for example, touted the sale of “Windward Coast Negroes, who are well acquainted with the culture of rice, arrived from B[u]nce Island.”
Between about 1750 and 1800, the slave trade brought thousands of West Africans to the Lowcountry, whose Sea Islands resembled the marshes of their homelands. These individuals’ diverse languages melded together, and a distinctive patois and culture started to emerge. Known as the Gullah Geechee, the community has preserved remnants of its African heritage through food, rituals and art—including Dawley’s ancestral song.
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Turner, the scholar who first recorded Dawley’s melody, counted Zora Neale Hurston among his students. The Harlem Renaissance author later remembered Turner as the professor “who most influenced me,” a handsome, soft-spoken “Harvard man [who] knew his subject.”
After a chance conversation with two students at what is now South Carolina State University, where he was teaching summer school in 1929, Turner decided to focus his fieldwork on Gullah language and culture. Walking along the Lowcountry, Turner interviewed descendants of the enslaved, made careful notes about their dialect and songs, and took photos. Turner’s first wife, Geneva Townes Turner, helped him record Gullah sounds and even enrolled in phonetics classes to prepare for the research.
Musicologist Lydia Parrish, who was also studying the music of the formerly enslaved, drew Turner’s attention to Dawley’s song. In the summer of 1933, he met 52-year-old Dawley and her 11-year-old daughter, Mary, in Harris Neck, Georgia. Dawley told Turner about a song passed down by her paternal grandmother, Catherine, who had survived the Middle Passage and was enslaved by a Georgia plantation owner. Catherine had several children with her enslaver, including Dawley’s father, Mustapha Shaw, who served a soldier in the 33rd Regiment of the United States Colored Troops during the Civil War.
After Union Major General William Tecumseh Sherman completed his famous March to the Sea from Atlanta to Savannah in late December 1864, he issued a special order that set aside 400,000 acres of captured Confederate territory for redistribution to Black families. The plan didn’t last: President Andrew Johnson rescinded it in the fall of 1865, returning the land to its original owners. Shaw was one of the many freedmen who fought back against the reversal, which the newly emancipated “understood as an assault on their hard-won freedom,” wrote historian Allison Dorsey in a 2010 essay. But Shaw’s efforts were unsuccessful, so he returned his birthplace of Harris Neck, buying ten acres from none other than his father and former enslaver.
Turner’s July 31, 1933, recording finds Dawley sharing her family song, which helped her remember her mother, Tawba Shaw, and her paternal grandmother. Today, the aluminum disc is housed at Indiana University’s Archives of Traditional Music alongside 835 other recordings made by Turner between 1932 and 1960.
Until his death in 1972 at age 77, Turner remained dedicated to the study of Gullah and similar languages. His groundbreaking research showed that Gullah, long dismissed by white observers as simply “bad English,” was actually derived from more than 30 African languages.
The dialect’s existence speaks to “the strength of the people brought here as slaves,” Alcione Amos, curator of a past exhibition about Turner at the Smithsonian’s Anacostia Community Museum, told Smithsonian magazine in 2010. “They couldn’t carry anything personal, but they could carry their language. They thought everything was destroyed in the passage. But you can’t destroy people’s souls.”
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Turner’s work was foundational for subsequent Black language scholars, including Opala, the anthropologist who identified the African counterpart to Dawley’s song. After graduating from college in 1974, Opala joined the Peace Corps, which shipped him off to Sierra Leone, where he worked with rice farmers before shifting focus to archaeology.
“The U.S. ambassador at that time, Michael Samuels, urged me to do an archaeological survey of Bunce Island”—the first of its kind, says Opala. Begun in 1976, the excavations “led to my efforts to find out where the enslaved people shipped from that island were taken.”
Ethnomusicologist Schmidt was teaching at Sierra Leone’s Fourah Bay College when Opala requested her help in studying Turner’s recordings of Gullah stories and songs. The pair spent six years collaborating with Sierra Leonean linguist Koroma and Mende man Edward Benya to reconsider and correct Turner’s original translation. Ultimately, the group settled on this phrasing:
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei tambee
A wa ka, mu mone; kambei ya le’i; lii i lei ka
Haa so wolingoh sia kpande wilei
Haa so wolingoh, ndohoh lii, nde kee
Haa so wolingoh sia kuhama ndee yia
Translated into English, the lyrics read:
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be perfectly at peace.
Everyone come together, let us struggle; the grave is not yet finished; let his heart be very much at peace.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a firing gun.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention, oh elders, oh heads of the family.
Sudden death commands everyone’s attention like a distant drumbeat.
The breakthrough came when Koroma recognized a word from the song as a Mende dialect from southern Sierra Leone. In 1990, the researchers traveled around the country’s Pujehun District, playing the song for villagers in hopes of finding someone who recognized the words. Schmidt says she and her colleagues acknowledged that this was a “remote possibility,” but after many weeks, they found a small village, Senehun Ngola, and a woman named Baindu Jabati who astonished them by singing a nearly identical version of the song.
Jabati revealed that the tune—taught to her by her grandmother—was originally a funeral elegy. As Jabati explained in the 1998 documentary The Language You Cry In, her grandmother said that “those who sing this song are my brothers and sisters.” Given the similarities between the two songs, the researchers concluded that Dawley’s ancestors hailed from this specific area of Sierra Leone.
Schmidt and Opala reached out to Dawley’s daughter, by then married and known as Mary Moran, to share their discovery. But the outbreak of the Sierra Leone Civil War in 1991 prevented Moran and Jabati from connecting in person. During the conflict, Jabati was enslaved by rebels, who killed several of her family members and razed her village. By 1997, the war had eased enough for Moran to travel to Senehun Ngola, where her meeting with Jabati was recorded for The Language You Cry In.
The documentary concluded with a message from the village’s blind, 90-year-old chief, Nabi Jah, who encapsulated hundreds of years of trauma by saying, “You can identify a person’s tribe by the language they cry in.”
Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”
In her 1986 book, Radiance From the Waters: Ideals of Feminine Beauty in Mende Art, art historian Sylvia Ardyn Boone wrote that the Mende people remember “a vast storehouse of information” through the use of song. According to Boone, when someone dies, “the ear remains alive.” The Mende repeat the mantra “Ngoli nda ii haa ma,” which translates to “There is no death [within] the ear.”
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In addition to shedding new light on Dawley’s story, Opala joined other scholars in tracing the ancestry of a 10-year-old African girl named Priscilla, kidnapped in 1756 from Sierra Leone, to a 21st-century woman living in South Carolina. Today, Dawley’s family keeps her legacy alive with repeated visits to Sierra Leone and ongoing charitable support. “The 1619 Project” miniseries, based on the New York Times investigation of the same name, shared the story of Dawley’s father, Shaw, and featured interviews with some of her descendants.
Identifying the origins of Dawley’s song “solidifies my identity, because I know where I came from,” says Dawley’s great-nephew, Winston Relaford. “I am no longer another person with a general origin. I now know who I am.” For Relaford and his relatives, the lyrics mean neither “slavery nor the width or depth of the ocean could keep [them] separated” from their Sierra Leonean heritage.
(Originally published by Smithsonian Magazine and edited by Meilan Solly.)
This Black Football Player Was Fatally Injured During a Game. A Century Later, a College Stadium Bears His Name
This Black Football Player Was Fatally Injured During a Game. A Century Later, a College Stadium Bears His Name
Rival athletes trampled Jack Trice during his “first real college game.” He died two days later at age 21
On September 29, 1923, ahead of the football season’s opening kickoff, Jack Trice stepped onto the field at Iowa State College as the school’s first Black athlete. According to the student yearbook, the Iowa State Cyclones easily defeated Simpson College, whose first dropkick “was neatly blocked by Trice, star tackle.”
Nine days later, Trice was dead at age 21. The cause of death: “traumatic peritonitis” from internal injuries sustained during the second football game of the season.
Iowa State’s first Black athlete
It was 1922 when Trice first arrived in Ames, Iowa, with three of his teammates from East Technical High School in Cleveland. They were accompanied by their former coach, Sam Willaman, who’d recently become Iowa State’s new head football coach. Willaman had persuaded the athletes to help form the nucleus of a powerful team in Ames, but since NCAA regulations barred freshmen from competing on varsity squads, they would need to wait a year to take the field for a major game.
Back home, Trice and his teammates had dominated Ohio football circles. In the 1920 season—their junior year—they made it to the national championship game but lost to Everett High School. The next season, East Tech was set to play for the title against Bryan High School in Texas, but the team backed out after learning Trice would not be allowed to compete on account of his race. As a player told the local newspaper, “[Trice] gave us the best he had—we owe it to him.”
In a column for the Waco News-Tribune, Texas sports commentator H.H. “Jinx” Tucker suggested Bryan allow Trice to play, ominously predicting that he would be “carried off the field at Cotton Palace park. More than likely, he would be embalmed.” Tucker knew his audience: It’s possible some readers were among the 10,000 people who participated in the gruesome lynching of farmhand Jesse Washington in nearby Waco in 1916. Many more were complicit in Texas’ institutionalized system of segregation.
At Iowa State, Trice majored in animal husbandry and competed on both the freshman track and football teams. As the son of a farmer, he wanted to use his degree to uplift other Black farmers throughout the Cotton Belt.
Ames was a community with very little diversity. According to a 2010 journal article by historian Dorothy Schwieder, only “20 or so Black students were enrolled at [Iowa State], a college of around 4,500 students.” Most lived in downtown Ames, separated from their classmates by an unofficial policy barring non-white students from living with white students.
Trice brought his wife, Cora Mae Trice, to Ames in the summer of 1923, around the same time that members of the Ku Klux Klan officially formed a local chapter in the city. It didn’t take long for the Klan to start burning crosses in Ames. Nationally, the Klan was in the middle of a huge expansion, capitalizing on cultural upheaval and white Protestants’ desire to maintain the status quo to fill the ranks of their white supremacist organization.
The 1923 Simpson game marked Trice’s much-anticipated varsity debut. Iowa State fans watched Trice tear around the field, using his speed and power to create havoc. Among them was Cora Mae, attending her first game in Iowa.
A photograph of Trice taken during the Simpson match is the highest-quality snapshot among the few surviving images of him in action on the football field. Startling in its immediacy and sharpness, the image captures a brief moment in between plays. In those days, games moved quickly. Endurance was necessary, because players had to play both offense and defense. As an offensive lineman, Trice opened up holes for the backfield to dart through; as a defensive end, he held down the line of scrimmage.
Iowa State won the Simpson game despite less-than-stellar conditions on the “muddy, slippery field,” as the student yearbook noted. The team was eagerly looking forward to its next game against the University of Minnesota, which was considered the season’s first major match because Simpson was “a much smaller school than [Iowa State] and not regarded as a serious threat,” according to Schwieder.
A fatal injury
Before catching the overnight train to Minneapolis with his team, Trice bid farewell to Cora Mae. It was an experience she never forgot. “He came to tell me goodbye,” she recalled in a 1988 letter. “We kissed and hugged, and he told me that he would come back to me as soon as he could.”
When they took the field in Minneapolis on Saturday, October 6, the Iowa State athletes donned new gold jerseys utilizing the latest design advancements in college football. “Our intention is to reduce the weight and gain speed without sacrificing protection to the individual player,” Willaman told the Iowa State Student. Pads were built into the elbows, and manufacturers started adding friction cloth to the front and sleeves. Athletic catalogs offered several design options, the most popular being two ovals or vertical stripes on the chest.
The jersey redesign spoke to a fundamental shift in college football after World War I. Scarred by the carnage of the Great War, Americans embraced entertainment and pleasure, including college sports. Major universities started building new concrete stadiums. Some were named Memorial Stadium in honor of American soldiers killed during the conflict. The rapid expansion of radio brought thrilling football plays to living rooms and turned athletes into stars.
Waiting for the Cyclones in Minnesota were the Golden Gophers, led by All-American Earl Martineau and Coach William Spaulding. They posed a formidable challenge, but the Iowa State team was ready.
Once the game started, the Gophers targeted Iowa State’s star players, including Trice. He suffered a serious shoulder injury in the first half (later identified as a possible broken collarbone) but insisted he was still able to play. During an offensive play in the third quarter, Trice tried to perform a rolling block, but the Minnesota backfield overwhelmed him, knocking him to the ground and trampling him. Whether the intensity of the team’s response was motivated by racism remains the subject of debate, but Iowa State apparently didn’t think so. After Trice’s death, Willaman scheduled another game with Minnesota for the 1924 season.
After the trampling, team captain Ira Young and lineman Harry Schmidt helped Trice off the field. (Young’s torn, stained football jersey is the only known artifact to survive from the game.) “He was removed from the game immediately, against his wishes, and taken to [the] university hospital,” where a doctor “at once pronounced his condition serious,” the Minneapolis Starreported.
The game concluded with a 20-17 victory for Minnesota. But the Iowa State players had more pressing matters on their minds than the loss. Physicians decided Trice was healthy enough to endure the long overnight train ride back to Ames, where, on Sunday morning, he was whisked away to the campus hospital. As his condition worsened, doctors brought in a stomach specialist from Des Moines, but nothing could be done. Trice’s friends and family could only pray.
The end came on Monday afternoon. As Cora Mae wrote in her 1988 letter, “He looked at me, but never spoke. I remember hearing the Campanile chime 3 o’clock. That was Oct. 8th, 1923, and he was gone.”
Commemorating Jack Trice
On Tuesday, October 9, Iowa State canceled classes, and several thousand people attended Trice’s funeral, which was held on the lawn near the iconic Campanile. Speaking to the crowd from a raised platform behind Trice’s coffin, Iowa State President Raymond Pearson started reading a letter found in the athlete’s personal possessions after his death.
The day before the Minnesota game, the Iowa State team had checked into the Curtis Hotel in downtown Minneapolis. While Trice was allowed to stay at the hotel, he was barred from eating in the dining room with his teammates or being around white guests. Isolated in his room, Trice began writing on a small sheet of hotel stationery:
To whom it may concern:
My thoughts just before the first real college game of my life. The honor of my race, family and self are at stake. Everyone is expecting me to do big things. I will! My whole body and soul are to be thrown recklessly about on the field tomorrow. Every time the ball is snapped, I will be trying to do more than my part.
Trice’s letter was reprinted in newspapers across the country. A few months later, his words were memorialized on a bronze tablet in the Iowa State gymnasium.
Cora Mae dropped out of school and returned to Ohio to mourn. She went back to Iowa State the following year but never graduated. She remarried in 1926 and died in 1993. Trice’s mother, Anna Trice, didn’t arrive in time to see him before he died, but she returned to Ames several times. In a letter to Pearson, Anna wrote, “He was all I had, and I am old and alone. The future is dreary and lonesome.”
Jack Trice Stadium
In the decades after Trice’s death, his story receded from memory, only resurfacing every so often. In 1957, Iowa State student Tom Emmerson learned about Trice and wrote an article on him for a student magazine, but it attracted little response.
It was only in 1973, on the heels of the civil rights movement’s calls for Black equality, that Trice’s achievements garnered more widespread attention. According to a 2008 journal article by Jaime Schultz, Alan Beals, a counselor in Iowa State’s athletic department, happened upon Trice’s memorial plaque—by then “covered in rust, dust and bird droppings”—and decided to co-write a story on him for the student newspaper. English professor Charles Sohn, who had already discussed Trice with Beals, assigned his freshman students to look into Trice’s life. Their efforts helped spark a student movement to name the school’s new football stadium after Trice. But university leaders refused, preferring Cyclone Stadium to honor all athletes.
The fight to name Iowa State’s stadium Jack Trice Stadium continued for a decade. One key figure in the campaign was the irascible Des Moines Register writer Donald Kaul, who continually revisited the issue in his columns.
Kaul needled officials who kept deflecting or delaying with no real resolution. “They mumble low, they mumble high, and soon the question is borne aloft on clouds of mumble,” wrote Kaul in 1975. In a separate column, he claimed to have visited “a witch I know in Georgetown” and asked her to place “a conditional curse … on the team.” He reportedly told her, “If the university officials, a small band of willful men much given to thwarting the popular will, should fail to give Jack Trice the recognition he deserves … the school should not win a game in the stadium.”
In 1984, Iowa State tried to appease everyone by formally naming the stadium Cyclone Stadium and the playing field Jack Trice Field. Kaul lamented the compromise, later writing, “Iowa State has had to be dragged kicking and screaming” to it. The matter seemed settled, but remarkably enough, Trice proponents kept pushing. Finally, in 1997, Iowa State President Martin Jischke formally renamed the arena Jack Trice Stadium.
In recent years, the Iowa State football program has honored Trice with a new logo modeled on his jersey and a patch on players’ uniforms. The logo is emblazoned on the side of the school’s football facility, visible from Jack Trice Stadium.
Last fall, a century after Trice’s arrival in Ames, Iowa State began a yearlong commemoration of him. The school’s slate of events include the unveiling of a new sculpture at Jack Trice Stadium and an inaugural Jack Trice Legacy game against Texas Christian University on October 7. During the game, the team will wear special throwback uniforms inspired by Trice’s story.
“Trice committed himself to being an honorable, stand-up man,” Greg Bailey, head of Iowa State’s special collections and university archives, tells Smithsonian magazine. “[This] was exemplified in his ideals of service.” Today, Jack Trice Stadium is the only Division I Football Bowl Subdivision stadium across the United States to bear the name of a Black man.
(Originally published by Smithsonian Magazine and edited by Meilan Solly.)
Ancient Greeks Built a Road and Primitive Railway to Haul Cargo Overland
Ancient Greeks Built a Road and Primitive Railway to Haul Cargo Overland
Thousands of years before modern railroads appeared, the Diolkos stone road featured a section of grooved tracks and spanned across the Isthmus of Corinth.
Beginning as early as 600 B.C., the ancient Greeks created the Diolkos, an ambitious road partially paved with stone, that spanned across the entire Isthmus of Corinth. The overland route allowed sailors to avoid the perilous circumnavigation of the Peloponnese peninsula. One section of the road featured purposefully grooved tracks—considered among the earliest known railways in recorded history.
The Diolkos was “the first systematic attempt to facilitate the portage of merchandise and warships from the Saronic to the Corinthian Gulf and vice versa,” says Dr. Georgios Spyropoulos, assistant director of the Corinthian Ephorate of Antiquities.
Ancient Corinth: A Bustling Center of Trade
Located on an isthmus west of Athens, ancient Corinth was a powerful, wealthy city that controlled commerce by land and sea. The region was home to the Isthmian Games, held in honor of the sea god Poseidon. Olive oil, wine, textiles, pottery and other forms of exotic trade flowed throughout the region.
South of the Corinth isthmus was Cape Maleas, which tore vessels to pieces and plunged sailors to their deaths. In Homer’s Greek epic Odyssey, the heroic Odysseus tried to sail through these dangerous waters but was blown off path and ended up in the land of lotus-eaters. Rather than braving the treacherous southern route, some ancient travelers used the Diolkos, which bridged the 4-mile distance between Corinth’s primary western and eastern ports.
Centuries later, in A.D. 67, The Roman Emperor Nero attempted to build a canal between Corinth’s ports using thousands of slaves, but the project was soon abandoned.
Construction of the modern (but narrow) Corinth Canal was started in 1882 and completed by 1893.
Discovery of the Diolkos
Starting in the late 1950s, archaeologist Nikolaos Verdelis excavated parts of the Diolkos and dated it to around 600 B.C. during the reign of Periander, the Second Tyrant of the Cypselid dynasty that ruled over ancient Corinth. One legend says Periander built the road instead of a canal because his priests warned “the anger of the two oceans at being mingled would result in the downfall of Corinth.”
After ships approached the coast via the Gulf of Corinth, they “were hauled over a sloping stone-paved jetty, the west end of which was probably underwater, upon wooden rollers, before being hoisted onto the wheeled vehicle,” says Spyropoulos. Many wagons were laden with heavy cargo, likely timber or marble, and pulled by animals.
The Diolkos varied from 15 to 20 feet wide and was paved with poros limestone. Some stone blocks were taken from abandoned monuments and archaic Greek letters were still visible. The Diolkos stretched for about 5 miles because it was built around the landscape to ensure a consistently mild inclination of less than 1.5 percent. No trace remains of the eastern portion and the exact terminus is unknown.
As the Diolkos curved inland, excavations revealed that the worn wheel ruts gave way to a unique railway, carefully and purposefully cut into the stone. “Verdelis [the archaeologist] was right to read these as cut grooves,” says Dr. David Pettegrew, professor of history and archaeology at Messiah University. The grooves measured 5 feet wide and were clearly engineered to accommodate wheels.
The Diolkos was part of a larger road network meant to move people, ships, and cargo. Other rails existed in the ancient world, but they had a singular purpose, such as moving stone out of a quarry to a staging area, and so aren’t considered a true precursor to modern railroads.
Warships Crossing the Isthmus
Most historians now believe ancient warships were not regularly moved overland via the Diolkos, but ancient texts suggest it was used at times in this way.
In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Greek historian Thucydides recounted the first Isthmus crossing in 412 B.C. when Spartans secretly moved their warships across “with all speed” towards Athens, rather than braving the treacherous sea voyage. Other ancient chroniclers, including Polybius, wrote about several more dramatic journeys over the centuries.
One such event occurred in 102 B.C. when Rome dispatched Marcus Antonius, the paternal grandfather of Mark Antony, to attack Cilician pirates. His fleet portaged across the Isthmus and sailed to Pamphylia to his eventual triumph.
Roman historian Cassius Dio wrote about Octavian’s military maneuvers during the War of Actium in 30 B.C. and noted “because it was winter, he carried his ships across the isthmus” and returned “to Asia so quickly” that the feat startled Mark Antony and Cleopatra, for they “learned at one and the same time both of his departure and of his return.”
The Greek government is restoring and protecting some sections of the Diolkos to prevent further wear and erosion. Ongoing excavations may yield further details about the ancient engineering feat and its uses.
(Originally published by History Channel and edited by Amanda Onion.)
5 Extraordinary Ancient Stadiums That Influenced Future Arenas
5 Extraordinary Ancient Stadiums That Influenced Future Arenas
Ancient Greek and Roman stadiums were built to impress—and their designs are seen in many college football stadiums today.
Ancient Greeks and Romans placed immense importance on the pageantry and competition of sport, transforming modest playing fields into a connected network of stadiums designed to honor the gods and affirm their power. The stadiums’ extraordinary designs have inspired new structures for thousands of years.
From the 1900s to 1920s, college football saw a massive increase in popularity, and ambitious architects followed Greek and Roman design in the construction of monumental stadiums that sprang up on college campuses across the country.
Here are five ancient stadiums and some of their enduring influences.
Amphitheater of Pompeii
Pompeii was a town replete with erotic art and gladiator matches that drew thousands of fans. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in A.D. 79, volcanic ash preserved the oldest Roman stone amphitheater. The small oval arena interior was lush with thematic frescos “depicting wild beast hunts (such as a bear fighting a bull) and combat,” as Joanne Berry writes in The Complete Pompeii.
The exterior featured several peculiar trapezoid staircases, each supported by six arches, that led to the apex. According to Yale art historian Diana E. E. Kleiner, this staircase design was “never to be repeated” and there is “no other one like it in the history of Roman architecture.”
The Yale Bowl, opened in 1914, copied Pompeii’s amphitheater by excavating a giant earthen oval and building seats into the newly formed hills. According to Yale Alumni Magazine, engineers designed the field so “‘the minor axis points to the sun at 3 p.m. on November 15. Thus no football player would ever have to look into the sun when Yale plays its big games against Princeton and Harvard.’”
Roman Colosseum
Located in the pulsating center of ancient Rome, the Colosseum was built on top of the former Emperor Nero’s ruined palace and opened in A.D. 80 with a series of anticipated games. It was inspired by the earlier and slightly smaller Amphitheater of Capua where the enslaved Spartacus started a revolt, triggering the Third Servile War.
The Colosseum’s brilliant design efficiently managed crowd flow with dozens of vomitoria, or openings, throughout the arena. Designated sections allowed elites to enter, exit and mingle in their own personal corridors. Along the ground level were sections for shops and stalls. The stadium even featured pipes, sometimes hidden in statues, that misted spectators with a perfume often made from saffron steeped in wine.
Before Ohio State opened its new horseshoe stadium in 1922, architect Howard Dwight Smith wrote about the Roman influences in his design. The massive upper deck that swept around the entire stadium exterior was borrowed directly from the Colosseum’s own top story with “its small, square windows and its engaged pilasters.” Additionally, Smith echoed the Pantheon with his famous coffered semi-dome entrance on the north end. The Ohio stadium does not, however, feature discrete perfumed misting.
Stadium of Delphi
The mystical site of Delphi, situated amidst a gorgeous mountain range, was the omphalos, or hub, of ancient Greek culture and centered around the cult of Apollo and a mysterious oracle. The Stadium of Delphi held footraces as part of the Pythian Games and, unlike the older and more prestigious Olympics, women were allowed to compete in some events.
Delphi’s “stone stadium is far superior to Olympia,” says Jeffrey Segrave, professor of exercise science at Skidmore College. “The seating at Delphi is quite remarkable—12 rows of seats, special seats for the dignitaries, all divided by stairways.” Compared to Olympia’s simple earth banks, “Delphi looks like a real athletic venue.”
When Stanford University planned its new stadium in 1921, they kept costs reasonable by creating an earthen bowl, but included a unique feature. One section of the bowl was broken up by an excavated gulley to accommodate a long track straightaway leading away from the bowl. Stanford boosters pointed out the resemblance to Delphi’s own design that plowed through the hillside.
Circus Maximus
The chariot races of Circus Maximus, the largest circus of all, held over 200,000 spectators in suspense as charioteers in team colors raced laps around a 2,000 foot-long sand track. All circuses consisted of the oblong racetrack with a long stone wall divider called a spina running down the center. The spina was lined with various monuments and statues, including an Egyptian obelisk—a tall, four-sided, monument capped with a pyramid. The towering obelisk illustrated Rome’s power and wide reach. Rome’s various circuses also hosted athletic events, gladiator matches and animal hunts.
In 1903, Harvard’s new concrete stadium opened as the largest collegiate stadium of its time. This was during an era when other schools had rickety wooden bleachers lining the field. The design resembled an ancient Roman circus and, thanks to Harvard’s influence on college football, others took notice. During the 1920s stadium boom, dozens of schools followed in Harvard’s footsteps.
As Michael Oriard writes in King Football, boosters and sportswriters imbued college football with “overblown classical allusion: football players as gladiators, the stadium as a Circus Maximus, contending teams as Greek and Persian legions.”
Panathenaic Stadium
Panathenaic Stadium was originally opened by orator Lykourgos in 330 B.C. Then around A.D. 140, Herodes Atticus rebuilt it using white marble from the nearby Mount Penteli. The stadium was constructed in a natural ravine between two hills, and remains the only stadium built entirely out of marble. Like other ancient Greek stadiums, it centered around the stadion (also called the stade), a footrace that is the first Olympic event noted in written records.
The stadion was 600 Greek feet, but regional variations meant the actual track length slightly varied from stadium to stadium. One common length was approximately 185 meters and scholars have also cited 176 meters, which was a close match to the track straightaway at the Panathenaic and Delphi stadiums.
When Harvard built their stadium, the footprint measured approximately 185 meters while the stands ended after about 176 meters—an intentional match to the Panathenaic Stadium—as a way to connect college football to the great ancient stadiums of lore.
(Originally published by History Channel and edited by Amanda Onion.)
Adding color to Jack Trice’s fatal game
Some years ago, I came across the only known photo of Jack Trice playing against Minnesota and it was a small, blurry, dark image. When I published that story in 2018, I hoped I would eventually be able to find something else from that game, but so far I’ve come up empty–although there are still some dark corners that I’m digging through. In the absence of an original photo, there was only so much I could do to bring Jack to life in that game.
But why stop there?
Since I have Ira Young’s 1923 Iowa State jersey and extensive knowledge of that doomed fall season, I decided to try adding color to the Minnesota game, despite the immense challenges that came with working on a small copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. (Not an exaggeration.) Across large swaths of the image, I was presented with a binary choice of black or white with absolutely nothing else. Vacillating between extremes, I teased out the tiniest specks of tonal differences and used those as a starting point.
There was also his equipment. On the left side of Jack’s head, there’s a small line that likely represented the collar of his shoulder pads peeking out, thus giving me a hint of where to apply some colors. His helmet was also the same one from the Simpson game photo the previous week, so that helped. I ended up layering 15 different shades of color on his uniform and many other tricks and barely had enough to pull it all together.
Other photos, especially the ones from spring 1923, are in a much higher quality and would be vastly easier to colorize, but don’t have the emotional impact of showing Jack minutes away from his fatal injury. This is also perhaps the final image of his life that still exists. The end result isn’t perfect, but every little step brings me closer to 1923.
Here is Jack Trice playing on Northrop Field in color.
Jack Trice and the Ku Klux Klan
I am haunted by Jack Trice’s life and cannot stop thinking about his last days. Over the years, I’ve often mused on the role of the Ku Klux Klan in that era and searched for an answer that simply doesn’t exist. Many popular stories only mention the presence of the Klan in Minnesota when the Iowa State team arrived for their game. The reality is much messier and adds crucial context to Jack’s tragic letter.
We should first consider an obscure tale from Jack’s senior year in high school, which I initially found in 2014. At the time, I was researching why East Tech’s football team didn’t play in another championship game in 1921, but set it aside because I felt there was a bigger story to tell. It took several years for me to piece together the full story and the shocking truth served as an ominous harbinger of events to come.
Two years later, the Ku Klux Klan sealed their presence in Ames. This is the untold story.
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In high school at East Tech, his wide eyes drinking up the city around him, Jack saw very quickly Cleveland wasn’t the small country village he grew up in. Custom dictated withdrawal here. The Great War whisked up East Tech students and they learned what burning flesh smelled like on the Western Front. Back home, the Spanish Flu took ragged bites out of America. Bodies piled up.
East Tech made sure no one forgot the sacrifice of those who never returned.
In 1920, Jack was one of several junior players who helped East Tech polish off an undefeated regular season that culminated with a bid to the prep national championship game in Washington–a game I previously wrote about. The boys rode the rails for a week and bonded on the trip. They played cards, sang, and giggled their way through spectacular western landscapes.
During Jack’s senior year, East Tech didn’t miss a beat, rolling to another undefeated season. The papers praised his play far and wide. He had come a long way and was one of the best players in the country, a colossal talent. In addition to his suffocating play on the line, he played some at fullback and shared punting duties. He could do it all and nothing could stop him.
Opposing fans took umbrage. They lashed out in anger and hurled insults. After one emotionally charged game that ended in victory, Jack was called a “monkey.” He always had to live with the implicit threat of bloodshed lurking in the shadows. When another high school was clobbered by East Tech, they offered an interesting cartoon recap of the game. Note the mysterious figure in the background.
The postseason beckoned. This time, East Tech would bring the crown home. Schools across the country clamored for a shot. Anticipation teemed.
Negotiations started with a New England school. One school in Minnesota wanted a game on Christmas Day. All potential games fell through, but in mid-December, East Tech agreed to meet Bryan High in Texas for the national championship. Texas was Klan country and the game would be held about 80 miles southeast of Waco, where the infamous torture and lynching of Jesse Washington occurred in 1916.
It was not to be.
When it became understood that Jack, the dread black phantom, presented a problem, his white teammates rallied around him and unanimously voted to give up the trip and their last shot at the national championship. One teammate said, “He gave us the best he had–we owe it to him.”
The Texas papers didn’t handle it well, fuming about the “nigger” who ruined the big game. One celebrated writer invited his readers to share in delightful imagery. Why not have Jack play in the big game before the crowd of thousands? After all, they would make sure he was carried off dead.
It would be nearly two years before Jack played in a big game again–the one that killed him.
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When Jack arrived in Ames, the Klan was already around him. Local papers speculated on how many people would join the organization. One nearby town reported Klan posters were “found in the police office, altho no one was able to explain how.” In communities across Iowa, Klan envoys brought gifts to homes, hoping to win favor.
A couple of years ago, I returned to Ames and met with Alex Fejfar, the Exhibits Manager of the Ames History Museum. The museum is a small gem directly across the street from the Masonic Temple where Jack had his last words with his wife Cora Mae before the Minnesota game.
With Alex as my guide, we rooted through the Masonic Temple basement, peering through the dust of decades, looking for any elusive sign. On the top floor, we retraced steps of long ago and breathed in the memories. In one remote staircase, we were trapped by a locked door closing behind us. It seemed, just perhaps, the ghost of Jack Trice was guiding us.
My list of research questions was immense and we had so little time. Back at the museum, Alex dug through the archives and presented a chilling example of hate so close to home. Thanks to the “Private Collection of Jerry Litzel, Courtesy of Ames History Museum,” we are able to present it here.
In August 1923, awash with patriotic faith in their country and flag, thirteen Ames men stepped forward to enshrine their names on the Ames charter of the “Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.” These men knew they were destined to be “All American” leaders of the Klan “Reincarnation.” Some time later, the Imperial Wizard, Hiram Evans, signed it. The ceremony was complete.
It didn’t take long for the crosses to start burning.
Less than a month later, the Nevada Journal reported a fiery cross was burned on the edge of town as the Ames Klan attempted to intimidate an accused bootlegger. Their presence was impossible to deny any longer. Membership swelled. More crosses were burned. Prominent Ames citizens took pride in their leadership role, including those who walked the Iowa State campus. Unbeknownst to some students they were taught by the Klan, including a very small and real possibility that Jack was among them (which I’m still researching).
Black students at Iowa State were barred from living near campus, so they usually ended up in downtown Ames near the Masonic Temple. Some worked at the Sheldon-Munn hotel. Unfortunately for them, Klan meetings were often held downtown. Members of the hooded order prowled near where Jack and Cora Mae held each other on lonely nights.
Something had to be done.
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Before Jack was a blank piece of Curtis Hotel stationary on the small desk. He was going to be the only Black player on the field against Minnesota. Hundreds of years of anguish and pain flowed from his pen. He was surrounded by hate and carried the burden of all before him. Those who were lynched without a thought. The bottomless eyes of white hoods. Flickering flames reaching high. The game was tomorrow and it was already too late.
“The honor of my race, family, and self are at stake.”
New Jack Trice photo discovered
When Jack Trice was in high school at East Tech in Cleveland, all eyes were drawn to him on the football field. His presence was controversial and political. It was rare for Jack to see another Black athlete to commiserate with. In tribute of his sacrifice, I’m pleased to unveil a new photo of Jack Trice playing for East Tech in a game almost 100 years ago.
This discovery was many years in the making.
I was able to use my expertise to descend into a particular, yet obscure, spot of Cleveland history to experience life during the early 1920s. Hunch after hunch had to be followed along an unknown path until one day came the metaphorical clink of my shovel. This photo was not labeled or dated, but I knew immediately. There was the lanky frame of Jack on the right, opening up a hole for Johnny Behm to plunge through. Johnny was the captain of East Tech and went on to become the captain of Iowa State, finishing his career as a honorable mention All-American quarterback.
The photo is not an original copy, but a printed version and white marks are visible on some of the players–which was a common practice for reprinting in newspapers. Johnny is not wearing an helmet again, just like the other photo I discovered of Jack and Johnny in the prep national championship game in Washington, seen in Jack Trice and the Nazi Olympiad.
Once again, let us pay homage to the hero of Iowa State formed in the crucible of East Tech.
Jack Trice in the Minnesota game
I have often wondered what it was like to watch the Minnesota game that killed Jack Trice. It’s difficult to be satisfied with the existing grainy photos that show indiscernible blobs on Northrop Field. With one photo in particular that was reprinted in the Iowa State yearbook and multiple football programs, I know one specific dark smear is Jack, but without additional research, there is no visual evidence to prove this.
Through my years of research, I’ve held out hope for the holy grail, which would be a newsreel film showing the game, but haven’t found anything yet. In the meantime, this is the best photo I’ve found that shows Jack in game action. To help clarity, I edited it from the original source and to the best of my knowledge, this photo hasn’t been reproduced anywhere else for 95 years.
Without further ado, here is Jack Trice playing on Northrop Field shortly before he suffered the injuries that killed him.
A timeless legacy
The next three years bring three key anniversary dates in Iowa State athletic history. These milestones will give Iowa State the opportunity to update their athletic vision by utilizing the most timeless historical elements to create a truly cohesive vision that recalls successful teams and experiences of past decades.
As always, let’s begin with Jack Trice.
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2018: JACK TRICE’S SACRIFICE
This fall marks the 95th anniversary of Jack Trice’s heroic stand against the University of Minnesota and the enduring letter that launched a legacy. To date, there still has been no official recognition of his jersey number by Iowa State University, despite ample available research showing it as 37.
Past stories have shown how Iowa State can honor him through jersey design, helmet stickers, and more. The jersey number can either be retired or given to a special player on a yearly basis.
It is time to do something.
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2019: CY’S MILESTONE
The following year brings a milestone birthday for our favorite feathered avian, born 65 years ago. Since his introduction in 1954, there have been various iterations of Cy, peaking with multiple variations during the 1980s, especially with Johnny Orr’s Hilton Magic teams.
The modern Cy logos have never been overly popular with fans and the vast majority of Cy merchandise features one of the four vintage versions. Thus, I took the best elements of each logo and designed an entirely new logo that feels entirely at home during any period of Cyclone history.
Introducing Timeless Cy.
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2020: CYCLONE NICKNAME
This year brings the 125th anniversary of the beloved, unique Cyclones nickname.
Last year, the athletic department brought back the missing nickname logo by using the same designer previously tapped for the Cy logos. Iowa State’s willingness to listen to fan feedback and try new things should be applauded.
The current branding package is clearly cohesive and fills its mission well, but has struggled to gain traction with fans, partially because more popular alternates exist. In contrast to the current branding package, let’s see what a truly timeless set of logos could look like.
I tweaked the I-STATE logo to make the “A” and “E” outlines more legible, while getting rid of the bevels. The updated Cyclone logo by Friendan Design makes its appearance again, while my new Timeless Cy is paired with a slightly tweaked 1980s Cy head.
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It’s time to be proud of our Cyclone history.
The heritage of Jack Trice and Johnny Orr
Two football seasons from now marks the 125th anniversary of the very first hardscrabble Ames football team to be bestowed with the Cyclones nickname, one that is older than the Iowa State moniker. As the oldest surviving varsity sport on campus, the football team drives the overall identity of athletics, as shown by the new Cyclone logo reveal during the Texas game last week.
The heritage of Iowa State University stretches back from generation to generation over American history, to a time before the Civil War. The trials and tribulations of the athletic teams serve as shorthand in our memories, the nectar of success sweetened by the lows, yet something tangible with the current identity appears missing.
The answer lies within two statues.
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In Hilton Coliseum stands a fist pump frozen in time, a statue commemorating the true birth of basketball greatness with Johnny Orr. The original Cyclone school logo from this period, in use for roughly a dozen years, famously oversaw nearly all of Johnny Orr’s years as the progenitor of Hilton Magic, culminating with Fred Hoiberg’s initial stint as the Mayor of Ames.
It also served as the helmet logo for four football seasons from 1983 to 1986, a period that saw typical football and a minor recruiting scandal that resulted in a temporary loss of just four scholarships.
As seen in previous stories, the updated Orr Cyclone by professional designer and alumnus Friendan.Design is the closest thing Iowa State has ever had to a timeless look and lends well to fresh, yet timeless branding possibilities, including my Storm Cyclones football helmet concept that caught the attention of many, including those within the football program.
When Coach Matt Campbell arrived in Ames, he quickly made clear his desire to shake up some dowdy brand elements, by pushing concepts including the return of a Cyclone logo that some within the school felt was already sufficiently covered by the unpopular Cy Head logo, despite being just about the only major school without a nickname logo, (as pointed out last year).
The reveal during the Texas game represents clear and tangible internal progress in loosening up branding and marketing possibilities, but did the new logo hit the target?
Designed by Joe Bosack & Co., a brand consulting agency previously tapped for the current mascot logos, this logo has a few immediate issues. (To be fair, every designer is only as good as their client and its impossible to say what constraints were placed upon the agency.) When considering a timeless design, it all starts with the line, a simple mark on a surface. Ancient art is replete with simple outlines and shapes that resonate to this day, easy for the human eye to recognize.
The primary logo has three colors, including two red shades for contrast that don’t read legibly, and relies on a very thin yellow border as the outline. All fans could see during the Texas game was a big red smear on a red helmet, the nuances of design lost. The edgy lines remind me of the dated mid-1990s Iowa State basketball shorts and the old oval ABC Sports logo.
On merchandise rolled out the same day, the design appeared best on white or gray backgrounds. If a primary logo needs to move away from school colors to read in a legible manner, that’s a problem. Also, a solid version of the mark appeared, but with the same reliance on very thin lines.
The I-State logo initially suffered from a reliance on excessive bevels for a contemporary look, but recent efforts have evolved towards a stencil or solid color design, which appears much more iconic and timeless. The new Cyclone just looks like an inverted Hershey Kiss.
Change is usually met with some resistance, but feedback this time has largely been negative. The official Iowa State Facebook account had hundreds of negative comments and only a handful of positive. In a Twitter poll, I put up a simple image of the new Cyclone and the updated Orr Cyclone and simply asked which one people preferred. Hundreds of votes later, 86% were in favor of the Orr Cyclone.
After some inquiries this past weekend, it appears many in the football program favored the Orr Cyclone redesign making an appearance on football helmets, but unfortunately had to adhere to the final decision of others who felt the new logo would be a better direction.
It seems pretty clear below which version appears more iconic and timeless.
In the past, athletic director Jamie Pollard openly shared with alumni that the department felt the Orr Cyclone evoked memories of bad football teams with a small portion of the fan base and they had no desire to go through the travails of adding another secondary logo, thus giving the perception of Iowa State always changing their brand.
Do the facts support this? Let’s look at some numbers via Winsipedia:
Overall Iowa State winning % (1892-2017) = .442
Original Cyclone helmet logo winning % (1983-1986) = .409
Current I-State helmet logo winning % (2008-2017) = .336
It’s also worth noting the current I-State logo was inspired by a logo from the 1970s basketball uniforms, the exact same era that saw the worst basketball team in school history, the 1975-76 team that finished 3-24.
This makes the new Cyclone logo all the more puzzling. Hopefully, internal resistance to the updated Orr Cyclone will continue to melt away, given how much history is behind it when compared to the I-State logo. It remains the best option for Iowa State to properly honor its heritage and get off the endless spinning wheel of new secondary logo after new secondary logo with no real tradition behind them.
For now, this new Cyclone logo should serve as a retail mark, not quite making the leap to official nickname logo status, joining the many tornado variations seen on clothing and marketing materials. There is precedent for this as many football teams have used alternate logos on helmets that don’t become part of official school branding, but are found on merchandise.
Sometimes a design transcends time, just like a story familiar to many of you …
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South of Hilton Coliseum stands the modest statue of a black pioneer, head bowed in contemplation of the letter that made him famous. Jack Trice’s story remains the most enduring and important piece of Iowa State history and transcends the bounds of sport, spilling over into what it means to be human. Many are rightfully proud of the football stadium being named after him, but the accompanying details seem lacking.
In the earliest days of Kagavi, before I became a crack Jack Trice historian, I asked Iowa State athletic department if they knew what his number was and no one could give me an answer. Along the way, I found people like author Steven Jones who suspected his number was 37 from newspaper accounts, but it was the discovery at Simpson College of perhaps the only surviving game program from Jack’s single full game at Iowa State that confirmed the case.
Since then, multiple people including influential former Iowa State professor and historian Tom Emmerson who was one of the first to highlight Jack’s legacy in 1957, have asked the athletic department for Jack’s number 37 to be retired or honored. In a recent book, “Moments of Impact” by Jaime Schultz, she wrote that Pollard declined these requests to honor Jack further by noting how many parts of the stadium were named after him, essentially enough was enough.
In April 2016, I wrote a story asking Iowa State to elect Jack to the Athletics Hall of Fame, noting that they have honored people who didn’t even attend or play sports for Iowa State, so they certainly could find room for the pioneer of racial integration in sports, a player that may have been the finest to ever step on the field in Ames. This has not occurred yet.
This summer when I was reviewing the new football media guide, I saw a new section of compiled historical jersey numbers worn by players. For some odd reason, this ended with the year 1924, meaning that the last entry of players who wore number 37 was Tawzer in 1924. Surely there was space for just one more line in the guide to slide in an acknowledgement of Jack’s number, which still hasn’t formally been acknowledged in any way?
As Coach Matt Campbell continually preaches, the details matter.
By simply halting Jack’s honors with just the stadium name, Iowa State is willingly giving up the ability to take his story on the road for half of the football season. Many other teams use helmet stickers or patches to commemorate significant parts of their heritage. Look no further than Iowa and their ANF stickers, in use for decades, for how impactful a simple sticker can be. When reviewing ideas, I couldn’t stop looking at various East Tech scarab designs from Jack’s time there and two caught my eye, eventually leading to my new design of a proposed Trice Oval memorial sticker.
This proposed design recalls the shared gold color between East Tech and Iowa State, the triumphs of Cleveland and the sacrifice in Ames. The stylized block T evokes vintage Iowa State logos and the ancient scarab also represents rebirth, perfectly appropriate for this enduring tale.
Don’t stop with Jack Trice either.
More throwbacks and vintage logos should be introduced into the rotation and help strengthen the connections between the past and present. Let’s solidify the heritage connection of Storm Gray as a neutral color in the current branding package by taking one game to honor the original Cyclones team of 1895 and their school colors of silver, gold, and black. The helmets and uniforms could be auctioned off afterwards.
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To some, Iowa State may represent just a job or a way to pay the bills, but to thousands of alumni, it’s far more. By properly honoring two iconic figures in Cyclone sports history through design, Iowa State University can take a strong step forward, with a clear and cohesive timeless brand that advertises the Cyclone difference to the world.
Heritage matters.