Penn State
Along with Dennie Hoggard, Triplett was one of the first African-Americans to take the field in a varsity football game for Penn State. During the 1946 season, Penn State's Nittany Lions team voted to cancel a regular-season game at the University of Miami, rather than compromise by not bringing their black players. (Miami, like other southern schools at the time, refused to compete against integrated schools unless they left their black players at home.)
In 1948, Triplett became the first African-American to play in the Cotton Bowl Classic, catching the tying touchdown in Penn State's 13-13 tie with Southern Methodist University. It has been suggested Penn State's now-famous "We Are Penn State!" stadium cheer has its origins in SMU's request for a meeting to protest the participation of Penn State's two black players (Triplett and Hoggard). Team captain Steve Suhey was said to have responded, “We are Penn State. There will be no meetings.”
Triplett also co-founded the Gamma Nu chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha while at Penn State.
Read more about this topic: Wallace Triplett
Famous quotes containing the words penn and/or state:
“Let the people think they govern and they will be governed.”
—William Penn (1644–1718)
“... in every State there are more women who can read and write than the whole number of illiterate male voters; more white women who can read and write than all Negro voters; more American women who can read and write than all foreign voters.”
—National Woman Suffrage Association. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 13, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)