The trip to Death Valley
Perhaps the most memorable—and historically significant—experience at Maryland for Hill played out at Clemson during his junior year.
It came late in the 1963 season when the Terps traveled to play the Tigers on homecoming. Unbeknownst to both her husband and her son, Palestine Hill made plans to travel by train to South Carolina to watch her son play.
His father Kermit had a thriving trucking business and Saturday was typically his busiest day.
“My father had said to her, ‘Do not go to Clemson by yourself,’ and then she showed up. I was shocked,” Hill recalled.
His mother had secured a ticket despite knowing that African-Americans were not allowed to enter Memorial Stadium, relegated to an area of dirt adjacent to the stadium that some called “Ant Hill” and others had called by a racial epithet.
When a team manager told Hill that his mother had been refused entrance and was being given a difficult time from those at the gate, he told Corso he was leaving the locker room to help his mother. Kickoff was only minutes away.
“I took off my uniform and then I went out front,” he said. “She was standing there with a couple and the gentleman introduced himself, ‘I’m Dr. Robert Edwards, I’m the chancellor of Clemson University.
“He said, ‘I’m going to take your mother with my wife and I to our booth and she can come to my house after the game and we’ll see about getting her back to D.C.’ He said, ‘You go out and play the game, and his wife, Louise, said, ‘You go out and show ‘em.’
In a 21-6 loss to the Tigers, Hill displayed not only his pass-catching ability with 10 receptions, but also his toughness after taking several hard hits. Unlike some other teams he had faced, Hill said he didn’t have to endure any cheap shots from the Tigers.
“These kids from Clemson, they were whacking me, but they were not cheating,” Hill recalled. “They weren’t late-hitting or hitting after the whistle or gouging. They hit hard and I kept getting back up. By the third quarter, I saw the dudes in the pileup were giving me a quiet thumbs up.”
Though the Terps didn’t win, Hill’s performance was payback of sorts against legendary Clemson coach Frank Howard, who had reportedly threatened to pull the Tigers and other schools out of the ACC when Maryland signed the league’s first Black player.
Hill was not the only member of his family to make a positive impression at Clemson that day.
Palestine Hill, a Howard graduate who also earned her doctorate at Catholic before starting a long career teaching a variety of foreign languages, including Latin, in the D.C. school system, had moved the Clemson chancellor to action.
It came months after Harvey Gantt—a future mayor of Charlotte, N.C. and an unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate famous for not getting the support of Michael Jordan in his bid to unseat Jesse Helms - became Clemson’s first African-American student.
Within days after watching the game with Hill’s mother, Edwards, himself a Clemson graduate, ordered all the “WHITES ONLY” signs to be removed from the water fountains and bathrooms on campus.
“He didn’t flinch,” Hill said. ‘He told my mother, ‘I’m just going to have the signs taken down.’ He just did it.”
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