New Year’s Day has been marked by an annual tradition since 1916: two college football teams square off in the Rose Bowl, a game known for an extravagant parade and competitive gridiron action. The game is typically played in Pasadena, Calif., and associated with the Big 10 and PAC-12 Conferences — though the rise of the college football playoffs has upended the traditional pairing of teams.
However, in 1942, during World War II, the game was held in a very different setting. That year, Duke University hosted the Rose Bowl in North Carolina, the first time (and only time, until 2021) that the famous game was played outside of Pasadena.
This unusual edition of the Rose Bowl has become legendary in Duke football lore — its university football center used to include a display celebrating the matchup. But one piece of the story is conspicuously absent from the narrative: all of the players on both teams were white. This history exposes how, despite claims that sports are the ultimate cultural unifier, especially in moments of tragedy, they can bring together an “us” that is too often determined by exclusion.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, and with Japan posing an active threat, government officials deemed large gatherings on the West Coast too dangerous. Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commander of the U.S. Fourth Army, and California Governor Culbert Olson cancelled the Rose Bowl parade and game.
There was still plenty of support for playing the game elsewhere, especially from Oregon State, the West Coast team slated to play in its first Rose Bowl. About two weeks before kick off, officials decided that Duke, the East Coast competitor, would host the event.
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Wallace Wade, after whom Duke’s stadium would eventually be named, coached a formidable Blue Devil team. Duke had a 9-0 regular season record, averaged 34.5 points a game, and had scored at least 50 points three times during the season.
Tickets sold out in 48 hours for the novel event. Oregon State’s team traveled to Durham by train and arrived on Christmas Eve after a 3,417-mile journey.
The game drew approximately 56,000 fans, more than Duke Stadium would ordinarily hold. This forced the school to borrow bleachers from the nearby University of North Carolina and North Carolina State.
Yet, amid all of the excitement and spectacle, Black players and coaches were missing. There were none on either team, and Duke barely allowed Black fans to attend.
Despite their current overrepresentation in football, Black athletes were systemically excluded from participating in this big game. At root was Southern segregation and something called “the gentleman’s agreement,” which was an unspoken policy between Northern and Southern institutions. Essentially, this deal dictated that Northern schools would restrict their Black players from intersectional competitions.
The history of Duke football revealed the policy’s impact. The Blue Devils hadn’t competed against a Black football player until 1938, when they traveled to New York to challenge Syracuse. And an opposing Black football player wouldn’t compete on Duke’s campus for eight more years — until a game against Pittsburgh in 1950.
In this context, the intentional exclusion of Black players in the Rose Bowl wasn’t necessarily a surprise. And while Oregon State was situated outside of these geographic bounds, their team was also without Black players. Further, their only Japanese American player was legally unable to travel to the game due to military restrictions. He was later forced into an internment camp because of Executive Order 9066.
But the barring of Black fans was something different. Duke typically reserved a small, segregated section for Black attendees. This policy wasn’t initially extended to the Rose Bowl, though, despite the addition of 20,000 seats to the stadium to meet the demand for admission. On Dec. 20, 1941, the Carolina Times, Durham’s preeminent Black newspaper, brought attention to the issue in a piece headlined, “Negroes are barred from Rose Bowl.” Worried this kind of criticism would interfere with talk of the game, Duke found 140 tickets for Black attendees.
Oregon State ended up beating Duke 20-17, and the Rose Bowl returned to Pasadena the following year.
Historically, memory of the game typically centers on the fact that it was played at all. It was an early example of how political and cultural leaders relied on sports as the ultimate source of unity, especially during challenging times. Threads of nationalism and patriotism infiltrated these narratives. According to an editorial in the New Year’s Eve edition of The Durham Sun, “Regardless of who wins the ball game on New Year’s Day, one thing is certain — America will triumph,” as the wartime disruptions “couldn’t stop Americans.”
The game set a template: other athletic events would continue throughout World War II.
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More recently, Americans witnessed this use of sports after 9/11 and the Boston Marathon bombings, and by August 2020, MLB, the NBA, the WNBA, and the NHL had all found ways to resume play despite a global pandemic that demanded physical isolation. Each time, commentators described these sporting events as necessary acts that helped bring Americans together following tragedies.
The 1942 Rose Bowl, however, raises a question about this framing: who, exactly, gets to be included in American society in these scenarios when leaders envision Americans coming together? The game illustrates how the choice was — and is — an active, structural decision, one that takes power and hierarchy into account. Despite idealized representations of sports as a meritocracy, racialized, gendered, classed, and ableist inequality and difference often drive who gets to be a part of unity engendered by sports.
In 1942, this meant that the Rose Bowl was really only accessible for white players and coaches, and almost entirely reserved for white fans. The racial traditions of the South meant that the “us” that administrators hoped to bring together by playing the game was only a portion of the American population. In that regard, the Rose Bowl was reflective of the entire American war effort. Despite a propaganda campaign encouraging all Americans to come together and do their part to defeat the Axis and totalitarianism, the U.S. military remained rigidly segregated with people of color subjugated into subordinate roles and Black soldiers discriminated against abroad and at home.
It’s important to keep the question of inclusivity in mind when analyzing sports, and especially the pomp, pageantry, and patriotism so often tied to the games. Too frequently, performative unity and calls for Americans to come together are a cloak for inequality and exclusion. Sports can be a great unifier — but in many cases, leaders claim that branding without actually making them inclusive.
Tracie Canada is the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. She is the author of Tackling the Everyday: Race and Nation in Big-Time College Football (University of California Press, 2025) and the director of the Health, Ethnography, and Race through Sports (HEARTS) Lab.
Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.
