Black History Month: Wiley has legacy of winning national football championships
Published 5:40 am Monday, February 23, 2026
Editor’s note: In celebration of Black History Month, this is the final part in a series of stories about significant people and events in Marshall and Harrison County.
Ten Texas colleges have won national football championships – ever: TCU, one; Texas A&M, one; Angelo State; one; Texas A&M at Commerce/ETSU, two; Abilene Christian; two; Texas State; two; Mary Hardin-Baylor, three; and Texas, three-and-a-half (the Longhorns did lose that last game in 1970).
The champion of them all is the former Texas A&I with seven. But the runner-up, ahead even of the Texas Longhorns? The Wiley Wildcats of Marshall have won four national football championships.
It goes way back to 1920, when officials from six historically black Texas colleges met in Houston to discuss, among other things, creating a new athletic conference. Whitte Jordan represented Wiley College at the meeting that created the Southwestern Athletic Conference.
Wiley’s sports teams won more conference championships than all of its SWAC opponents combined. In 1921, the college’s football program, the first college football program, Black or white, in the area, achieved the impossible. For the third straight year, Wiley ended its regular season without a conference loss, but the Wildcats were hardly done.
That Dec. 9, on a Friday afternoon at the 1,000-seat Wiley Athletic Park, Coach Jason Grant’s Wiley Wildcats hosted Talladega College to play for the national championship.
The visitors held Wiley on downs in the first quarter “within a foot of a touchdown,” then took a 7-0 lead into the half. Finally, with only minutes left in the fourth, Wiley advanced the ball to the 10-yard line after “Wester, the star negro quarterback of the South,” passed them down the field, then faked his way into the end zone. The game ended in a tie, and the two teams were named co-champions. But Wiley football was only getting started.
Fred “Pop” Long was born in 1896 in Illinois. He went to college at Milliken University, where he played football and baseball and became the first Black student to graduate there. He served in the Army a couple of years before getting his first job coaching at Paul Quinn College.
When he was not teaching and coaching, he played a little baseball, too, spending four years in the Negro League. He played outfield for the Detroit Stars in 1920-21, then played in 1925 for the Indianapolis ABCs, and then back with the Stars for 1926.
But his real impact was as a coach, especially at Wiley beginning in 1923, where he would spend a total of 32 years. (The great teacher and poet, Melvin Toleson, made famous by the movie “The Great Debaters,” was an assistant coach.)
Long coached baseball, basketball, and track, winning championships for Wiley in all three sports in addition to his football duties.
His Wiley football teams won national championships in 1928 (10-0-1), 1932 (9-0), and 1945 (10-0). Pop Long was president of the SWAC three times and was a founding director of the State Fair Classic, played during “Negro Day” at the Texas State Fair in Dallas.
Mack Hopkins Jr. was born in 1917 on the Wiley campus, where his father Mack Sr. taught agriculture. He graduated from Central High School in 1936 and went to Wiley where he ran track and played football under Coach Long and his brother, Harry “Little” Long. They played in the Cotton Bowl each year he was at Wiley, including during the 1936 Texas Centennial. Hopkins was named all-SWAC in 1939. When World War II began, he tested for flight school at Barksdale and ended up as one of four Tuskegee Airmen from Harrison County. He served as a flight instructor and aerial photographer.
In 1947, when Wiley students went on a four-day protest strike, President E.C. McLeod blamed the popular Long and fired him and five others — then resigned. Long coached at Prairie View for a year before moving on to Texas College in Tyler. But in 1956 Wiley asked him to come back, so Coach Long ended his career back in Marshall with an overall record of 227-151-31, making him the 27th winningest coach ever at all colleges of any color or year.
He is a member of the Milliken University Athletic Hall of Fame, the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame, and Southwestern Athletic Conference Hall of Fame. He also was honored with the American Football Coaches Association’s 2009 Trailblazer Award. The Student Union building on the Wiley campus is named in his memory.
Perhaps the greatest tribute to Long came from probably the best football player he ever coached, Karnack’s Lee Thomas.
“Pop Long … was a legend, and he recruited me to come play football for Wiley. I also had a scholarship to play basketball at Texas College, but Pop Long bought me a new football and a brand-new pair of shoes,” Thomas said. “He talked to me and looked me dead in the eye and said, ‘Son, I’m not investing in this ball and these shoes for you to drop by the wayside. I’m investing in you. Take advantage of it.’ So that was a challenge for me. I wanted to show him that I wanted to do well.”
Thomas went on to play in the NFL with San Diego and Cincinnati. Revered coach Pop Long died in 1966 and is buried at Marshall’s Mack Johnson Cemetery.
So gig ‘em and hook ‘em and all the rest, but the sports king of them all was Wiley College football, with four national championships over three decades.
– Author John Godwin is a 1977 Marshall High School graduate.