Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, The Integration of College Football, and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans: Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781938532986)

When Jimmy Raye enrolled at Michigan State University in 1964, he did more than just enter a university hundreds of miles from his native Fayetteville, North Carolina: he was part of a movement that changed college football forever. Award-winning author Tom Shanahan updates his groundbreaking biography of the racial pioneer and the continuing impact of the integration of college football.

Raye's story, as well as his Spartan teammates and coach Duffy Daugherty, is told in Raye of Light: Jimmy Raye, Duffy Daugherty, The Integration of College Football, and the 1965-66 Michigan State Spartans. History has not accorded Daugherty, Raye, and the Spartans proper credit for their roles in the integration of college football. Too many view Daugherty as recruiting a couple of All-American players from the South, winning a bunch of games with his 1965-66 teams and then having it all come to an end.

But that ignores the history made by Raye and the Spartans. In his junior season in 1966, Raye was Michigan State's first Black starting quarterback and the first Black quarterback from the South to win a national title. The Michigan State team with a progressive head coach, a pioneer Black quarterback, and the first fully integrated roster in college football is the subject of this engrossing book by award-winning author Tom Shanahan.

In Raye of Light, Shanahan tells the story of how Daugherty integrated his Spartan teams in a time when leading college programs like the University of Alabama were still segregated, when it was unusual to see Black athletes at skill positions like quarterback, and when choices for outstanding Southern Black athletes were either traditionally Black colleges or northern colleges opening their doors to nationwide recruits.

This updated third edition covers the aftermath of the 1966 Game of the Century between the Spartans and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, including the coaches and players with ties to both the 1966 game and the 2026 resumption of the MSU-ND rivalry. Also remembered are the late Underground Railway pioneers who faced racial prejudice throughout their long careers, denied chances at the upper levels of the coaching echelon.