A Permanent Place for Johnny Bright

On Friday morning, October 16, 2026, Drake University unveiled a bronze statue of Johnny Bright outside the southeast gate of Drake Stadium. Six and a half feet tall on a one-foot concrete pedestal, it is the first human statue on Drake's campus. The unveiling came 75 years to the week after the afternoon that made his name national news, an occasion Drake Athletics announced for this fall.

The player

Bright arrived in Des Moines on a track and field scholarship with a chance to compete for the football and basketball teams. He earned varsity letters in all three sports as a sophomore, then focused on football and rewrote the record book.

He led the nation in total offense in 1949 with 1,950 yards and again in 1950 with 2,400.

Entering his senior season, he was one of college football's premier players and a leading Heisman Trophy contender.

October 20, 1951

On October 20, 1951, during a game at Oklahoma A&M in Stillwater, Bright was repeatedly struck after the play and suffered a broken jaw. Two Des Moines Register photographers, Don Ultang and John Robinson, captured the assault in a series of photographs that won the 1952 Pulitzer Prize. The images drew national attention to racial discrimination and player safety in college athletics.

He missed three games and still earned All-America honors for the second straight year, finishing fifth in the Heisman Trophy voting.

The educator

After earning his bachelor's degree in education in 1952, Bright chose the Calgary Stampeders of the Canadian Football League over the Philadelphia Eagles, who had taken him fifth overall in the NFL draft. He would have been the Eagles' first Black player. In Canada, he could focus on the game.

He led the CFL in rushing from 1957 to 1960, finished with 9,966 rushing yards, became the first Black player to win the league's Most Outstanding Player award in 1959, and entered the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1970.

When football ended, he stayed in Edmonton and taught. He led the physical education department at Bonnie Doon High School and coached its football team, then served as principal of Hillcrest Junior High School from 1970 to 1981. He died in 1983 at the age of 53. Edmonton named a school and a sports park for him.

The recognition, and ours

Drake named the field at Drake Stadium for Bright in 2005 and founded the John Dee Bright College in 2020. The statue stands in the Ron and Jane Olson Plaza, made possible by Drake alumnus Ron Olson and his wife Jane. Olson, a former Bulldog halfback himself, put it plainly: "Without question, Johnny Bright was the greatest football player in Drake history."

The NAACP has stood beside Drake on this history before. On September 30, 2006, at the dedication of the Johnny Bright football field, the NAACP gifted the university the brass plaque that hangs on the Drake Stadium wall.

This week the NAACP put its applause in writing again. The NAACP commended Bright and the university for courage and leadership on racial justice in the face of extreme resistance. The letter notes that Drake took its stand in 1951, three years before Brown v. Board of Education, when segregation was still the law of the land.

Friday morning

dsm magazine reported that the night before the unveiling, the Varsity Cinema screened "The Bright Path: The Johnny Bright Story."

The Des Moines Register reported that Bright's daughter Deannie Bright-Johnson attended Friday's unveiling, as her father's legacy took its permanent place on Forest Avenue.

They broke his jaw in 1951. They did not break what he stood for. Now he stands at Drake Stadium, in bronze, where every student who walks past will know his name.

All photos by Russell Lovell, Legal Redress Co-Chair, NAACP Des Moines Branch.