'The Butler' and the Coaches: The New Yorker In the spring of 1967, a former football star at Grambling College, in Louisiana, with the evocative name of Frederick Douglass Kirkpatrick paid a visit to his old coach, Eddie Robinson. In itself, the gesture was nothing unusual; lots of former college players, having graduated to the N.F.L., returned to help with spring practice. But Kirkpatrick, who years earlier had finished a brief pro career, arrived with a different agenda. He wanted to know if Coach Robinson, with all the prestige and influence that he held in Grambling, would support and endorse the civil-rights group Kirkpatrick had helped to found, the Deacons for Defense and Justice. Robinson offered a few private words of encouragement to Kirkpatrick, but nothing more. Robinson approached civil rights with the same cautious, conservative attitude that he had in football, willing to wait for hard work's reward in the fullness of time, hoping to make an indirect case for black equality by producing young men cut in his own mold of faith, education, and understated dignity. The Deacons for Defense, in contrast, were pushing well past the nonviolence and civil disobedience of Martin Luther King. With their rifles and .38s, like some small-town version of the Black Panthers, the Deacons had joined together to defend civil-rights workers from Ku Klux Klan attacks, turning the Klan's tools of intimidation against it. Robinson's ethos seemed not one but two generations behind the times. A few years earlier, Robinson's rival and peer among black college-football coaches, Jake Gaither, of Florida A. & M., stood on the steps of a courthouse in Tallahassee. Inside, a judge was handing down jail sentences on a group of A. & M. students who had picketed a segregated movie theatre, just as they had earlier protested the whites-only lunch counter at a downtown Woolworth's store. Exactly why Gaither had come to the courthouse was unclear. A photograph of the moment shows him taking in the scene, more an observer than a participant, maybe worried about trouble breaking out. During the previous decade, as civil-rights activity regularly stirred Tallahassee, he had always remained at a studied distance from it. Privately, Florida's segregationist governors turned to him for reassurance that Negroes truly were grateful for what they had under Jim Crow. The eloquent and erudite words that Jake Gaither spoke about black history, and the arguments he made for black equality, were reserved for the addresses he delivered to black audiences at churches, schools, and lodges. These two incidents from the world of sports sprang to mind in the wake of Lee Daniels's new film, "The Butler." Some of the highest praise for the film has deservedly gone to its portrait of the tormented black moderate embodied by Forest Whitaker in the title role. His performance as Cecil Gaines, a White House butler for almost a half-century, is a study in remembered pain, endured humiliation, and impossible patience. Gaines needs no lessons about the evil of race hate, having seen his mother raped and his father shot by a white boss on their sharecropping farm. Yet his preternatural ability, in adulthood, to politely serve the powerful white men of the White House leads Gaines's eldest son to reject him for the activism of S.N.C.C., the Panthers, and congressional candidacy. The rift between the generations lasts for generations. As the experiences of Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither show, White House butlers were not alone in having to master the excruciating balancing act between racial pride and deference to white power. Both of them, like the fictive Cecil Gaines, had seen racism's lethality up close. In 1937, Gaither took his first coaching job at Florida A. & M. just weeks after two young black men accused of a robbery had been pulled out of jail by a mob, forced to run away, and then shot dead. In an oral history he gave about forty years later, Gaither could still recall being afraid to stop for a Coca-Cola at a white-owned gas station on his way into town. Robinson, for his part, started coaching in Grambling in the aftermath of an especially gruesome murder in neighboring Ruston, when a celebratory crowd watched the torture and lynching of a young black man who was the purported suspect in a sexual assault on a white woman. Even such horrific memories explain only part of the reason why Robinson and Gaither tiptoed so gingerly on civil rights. They both worked for state schools in states where every single elected official was white; quiescence, if not outright grovelling, was required to loosen the capitol's purse strings. The excellence of Robinson and Gaither at football - something even the white political overseers enjoyed - spared them the worst indignities. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties, for example, Grambling had sent students out on a minstrel show to raise money, and the A. & M. band serenaded legislators with a rendition of "Dixie." Robinson and Gaither each largely remained within the sanctuary of the black college campus where he worked. There, they received respect for their dress suits and master's degrees. There, they required their young men to attend church and class as well as to play ball. There, they offered words of praise to America for its opportunities, even if that love looked to be forever unrequited. By the nineteen-sixties, their approach appeared worse than naïve. In one speech, Gaither felt compelled to defend himself by saying, "There are no Benedict Arnolds in our race." As for Robinson, the critiques arrived not only from student activists who called him an Uncle Tom. Even his star quarterback, James Harris, who otherwise revered Robinson, found himself muttering, "Coach sure does love to wave that flag." The subtleness and sensitivity of Lee Daniels's film captures what some of most perceptive black writers of the civil-rights years observed at the time. "The "middle class" Negro is really "in the middle," " Thaddeus Stokes wrote in the Atlanta Daily World. He has not been accepted into the mainstream by those at which the social revolution is aimed. And now the revolutionists are beginning to reject him. Stokes concluded the essay by lamenting, "The tragedy of the situation is that the middle class Negro is not the real culprit. He is a victim of his own insecurity. James Baldwin visited Florida A. & M. during a period of friction between its wary administration and restive students. What he wrote about the university's president, George Gore, could just as well have applied to Jake Gaither: These men are in an impossible situation, because their entire usefulness to the state ... depends on their ability to influence and control their students. But the students do not trust them, which means the death of their influence and their usefulness alike. It is easy to judge those Negroes, who, in order to keep their jobs, are willing to do everything in their power to subvert the student movement. But it is more interesting to consider what the present crisis reveals about the system under which they have worked so long. The culmination of "The Butler" - the reconciliation of Cecil Gaines and his politicized son - might seem contrived were it not so broadly true. Before time ran out on Eddie Robinson and Jake Gaither - before history left them forever if not on the wrong side, then certainly on the sideline - each man took his stand. Robinson developed Harris into the player to break the color barrier at quarterback in the N.F.L., defying the conventional view that a black man was not smart enough to compete in that most intellectual of positions. Gaither cashed in decades of favors with Florida's white politicians to gain permission to play the first-ever game between a white school and a black school in the South. It took place in 1979, between Florida A. & M. and the University of Tampa, and, like Harris's career in the N.F.L., it is one of the landmarks of civil rights in American athletics. And these achievements were real - not the third act of a screenplay. Samuel G. Freedman is the author of a new book, "Breaking the Line," about black college football and the civil-rights struggle.