ACC Civil Rights History Takes Center Stage

UMD English Professor Michael Olmert recreates alumnus and first black ACC football player Darryl Hill in new play Moving the Chains.

By Priya Kumar '09, TERP
Photo by John T. Consoli

When Darryl Hill took the football field in 1963 wearing a Terps uniform, he caused a stir before the game even started.

Hill ’65 was known as the Jackie Robinson of Southern college football for his role as the first black football player in the ACC. Emmy award-winning writer and English Professor Michael Olmert ’62, Ph.D. ’80 recreates Hill’s experience in his new play, “Moving the Chains: The Darryl Hill Story.” “Darryl, he didn’t set out to be a hero of the race problem. He just wanted to be a football player,” Olmert says. Nevertheless, racism propelled Hill to excel on the field and in the classroom. “Bigotry was my steroids,” reads one of Hill’s lines in the play. “It jacked me up into revenge, got the old juices flowing.” Olmert, a prolific author of books, plays, films and TV documentaries, set this story on stage instead of in the pages of a book because “a play is a much more intense experience than a nonfiction book.” Hill attended a table reading of the play in Tawes hall last May. Students questioned him afterward, expressing disbelief at the discrimination he faced. Hotels refused to house the team and he was subjected to death threats and racist taunts. People are “used to seeing the hoses and demonstrations of the ’60s, but when you switch it over to football, it just doesn’t seem to click in,” Hill says. “I think it’s time that the nation understood that the University of Maryland was on the forefront of integrating sports. The play is as much about me as it is about the [university’s] administration of the time.” The Lincoln Theatre in Washington, D.C., will hold a staged reading on March 21 as part of its “Backstage at the Lincoln” series. The reading, a cooperation between the Lincoln Theatre and Theatre J, seeks to spur a dialogue about the prejudice blacks and Jews have faced. “This play is so beautifully written. It’s very poignant,” says Bonnie nelson Schwartz, executive producer of the series. “It has great historical significance, and it’s what this series is all about.”