The 1947 Wilberforce State Green Wave football team was an

American football American football (referred to simply as football in the United States and Canada), also known as gridiron, is a team sport played by two teams of eleven players on a rectangular field with goalposts at each end. The offense, the team with ...

team that represented Wilberforce State College of Education (now known as

Central State University Central State University (CSU) is a public, historically black land-grant university in Wilberforce, Ohio. It is a member-school of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund. Established by the state legislature in 1887 as a two-year program for te ...

) in the

Midwest Athletic Association The Midwest Athletic Association was an intercollegiate athletic conference of historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) that existed from 1926 to 1970. It was later known as the Midwest Conference from 1962 to 1963 and as the Midwestern ...

(MAA) during the

1947 college football season The 1947 college football season finished with Notre Dame, Michigan, and Penn State all unbeaten and untied, but the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame were the first place choice for 107 of the 142 voters in the final AP Poll in early December, and re ...

. In its 12th season under head coach Gaston F. Lewis, the team compiled a 11–1 record and all outscored opponents by a total of 415 to 79. Wilberforce State was ranked No. 2 among the nation's black college football teams according to the ''

Pittsburgh Courier The ''Pittsburgh Courier'' was an African-American weekly newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from 1907 until October 22, 1966. By the 1930s, the ''Courier'' was one of the leading black newspapers in the United States. It was acqu ...

'' and its Dickinson Rating System. The team's only defeat was against

Tennessee A&I Tennessee State University (Tennessee State, Tenn State, or TSU) is a public historically black land-grant university in Nashville, Tennessee, United States. Founded in 1912, it is the only state-funded historically black university in Tennes ...

, the team selected by the ''Courier'' as the 1947 national champion. Key players on the 1947 Wilberforce State team included halfbacks Walt Sellers and Carl Baylor, quarterbacks Freddie Hall and Michael "Mickey" Carter, and end Blake White. Prior to the start of the 1947–48 academic year, the State of Ohio withdrew support from the church-supported portion of the school. The two portions of the school then split and fielded separate football teams with different coaches. Lewis, who had been the coach at Wilberforce since 1934, took responsibility for coaching the state school, and Dwight Fisher coached the religious school.

Schedule

References

{{Central State Marauders football navbox Wilberforce State Central State Marauders football seasons Wilberforce State Green Wave football