Tom Williams Becomes the First Black Football Coach at Yale

Clockwise from top left: Gene Boyars; Josh Haner/The New York Times; Aaron Houston for The New York Times; Orlin Wagner/AP; H. Rumph Jr./AP; Winslow Townson/AP

NEW HAVEN — Wearing a Yale football tie and a silver bulldog pin, Tom Williams stepped into a job that no African-American had held before Wednesday. As the new coach of the Bulldogs, he is only the second black coach to take the helm of an Ivy League football team, and later this year he will be the first to take part in the 125-year history of Harvard vs. Yale.

But in the Ivy League, a conference in which 7 of the 16 football and basketball coaches are black, Williams’s hiring was hardly surprising. While issues of diversity still affect every level of college’s marquee sports, Ivy League institutions seem to be doing just fine on that issue these days, even though the once-segregated Southeastern Conference hired its first black football coach before the Ivy League did. Full Story Here

Tom Williams was a defensive coach with the Jacksonville Jaguars.