Remembering Ron Hill, one of the University of Wyoming Black 14

The University of Wyoming football team hosted the Arizona Wildcats in the first game of the 1969 season. It was college football’s centennial year, and 20,000 fans packed Memorial Stadium in Laramie on Sept. 20 of that year. In the second quarter, split end Ron Hill, a transfer from Northeast Junior College in Sterling, Colo., caught a pass from quarterback Ed Synakowski for the Cowboys’ first score of the season.

Less than a month later, Hill and the other 13 Black varsity players were purged from the team when they came to Coach Lloyd Eaton’s office on the Friday morning before the Brigham Young University game. The Mormon Church, which owns BYU, did not permit African Americans to become priests, and the Black 14, as they came to be known, wanted to protest the policy by wearing black armbands. But as soon as Eaton saw the players’ armbands, he took them to the fieldhouse bleachers and told them, “You’re no longer Wyoming Cowboys.”

Hill, age 77, died last month in his home state of Alabama after a battle with cancer, leaving only 10 of the Black 14 surviving him.

Hill was born and reared during his early childhood in Bessemer, Ala., along with eight siblings, where his father worked in a steel mill. When Hill was about 15, he went to live with his oldest brother, Roosevelt Hill, in Denver. He starred as an athlete at Manual High School and was a teammate of Don Meadows, another future member of the Black 14. 

After playing at Sterling, he transferred to UW in the fall of 1968, but was redshirted that season. In May 1969, Powell Tribune editor Dave Bonner traveled to Sheridan to cover a Cowboys’ intra-squad game and three Black players caught his eye. “Among the other standouts were split end Ron Hill, tailback Rick Marshall and defensive back Ivie Moore,” Bonner reported. “Hill caught four passes for 174 yards and showed great speed in taking two of the tosses for TDs.” 

Moore was also part of the Black 14 with Hill. 

After the University of Wyoming trustees and Gov. Stan Hathaway supported the coach’s decision to remove the players for the season, Hill finished the semester and then left UW. 

Nine months after he was dismissed from the team, he suffered a devastating blow in his young life when his brother, who was the director of the Black Studies program at Colorado University-Denver, was shot and killed. Roosevelt Hill had taken a couple of his students and his wife to the Colorado State Penitentiary to talk to the Black prisoners there on the topic “Awareness of the Black Man.” On the way back, they stopped at a gas station in Colorado Springs to fuel the Colorado University vehicle they were driving. He handed a CU credit card to the attendant, a soldier just back from a tour in Vietnam who was stationed at nearby Fort Carson and working part-time at the gas station.

The attendant apparently suspected the car and credit card were stolen and went inside to make some calls. When the attendant did not come back out for an extended time, Roosevelt, his wife and one of the students, all unarmed, went in to see what was happening. The attendant was in a little office and accounts of what happened differ, but tempers flared. The attendant pulled a .38-caliber revolver from the drawer and shot Hill dead. Within a few days, a grand jury was called by the county prosecutor and after hearing testimony from witnesses, including Roosevelt’s wife, the jury declined to bring charges, apparently accepting the attendant’s claim of self-defense.

Two Black state senators and civil rights groups protested, calling for an investigation by the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. They also demanded that the prosecutor bring charges directly, but that did not happen. The soldier was quickly transferred to another Army base.

Six months later, the Hill brothers’ mother died, another blow to Ron. But he persevered. He worked for the Burlington Northern Railroad for 13 years, earned a degree in education and taught and coached physical education at two middle schools in Denver, according to his friend and Black 14 roommate John Griffin, another 1969 junior college transfer to UW who was UW’s leading receiver when he was purged from the undefeated and 12th-ranked Cowboys.

Hill was the father of a son and daughter.

In September 1993, Ron Hill participated in a “reunion” of the Black 14 players and some of the administrators from 1969, organized by the head of UW’s newly established Black Studies program. 

In a 2010 interview, Hill said he and Moore worked in Denver for a time after leaving UW. He was best man at Moore’s wedding. “Me and Ivie figured [the dismissal from the team] was something that happened at a time and place and we went on. We left there knowing we were winners. It was all just a lesson. It made me more mature, but the struggle goes on still, not just in Laramie but across this nation.”

Hill kept up his participation with the Black 14, attending the 50th anniversary commemoration in September 2019, when UW’s president and athletic director issued an apology to the players expelled from the team.

Hill renewed his friendship with Black 14 teammate Lionel Grimes of Ohio at that event. In a recent email, Grimes said, “Ron and I grew very close by talking non-stop on the phone after meeting in Laramie in 2019, and he was so thrilled when he and I started FaceTiming.”

In recent years, Hill had worked at a plant that converted plastics into fiber. For a time, Moore came from Arkansas and lived and worked with Hill.

Hill died on July 5 in Florence, Ala. A private memorial service will be held by the family, according to Hill’s page on the Thompson & Son Funeral Home’s website.

The first of the Black 14 to pass away was the only one from Wyoming, James Isaac of Hanna, son of a Union Pacific railroad worker. He died in California in 1976. Don Meadows, who returned to the team in 1970 and was selected to the All-Conference first team, passed away in 2009. Earl Lee, a well-respected teacher, coach and principal in Maryland, died in 2013.