On Armistice Day 1932, the Southern University Bushmen football team left Baton Rouge and traveled to Monroe, Louisiana to play the Tigers of Louisiana Negro Normal and Industrial Institute for the first time. Normal was far younger than Southern. It was a two-year junior college in the northeast cotton town of Grambling, and its football team was less than a decade old. Southern was the pride of the state's black population, serving the traditional role that larger southern state universities played for the white population--a source of identity for populations with few cultural, economic, or political advantages. The contest received no coverage in segregated Monroe's white dailies, and Monroe's black weekly no longer survives. But the scant sources that prove the game took place demonstrate the power of sport for a depressed population stifled by Jim Crow. They demonstrate that the identity phenomenon of state universities--often attributed to white Southern conceptions of honor and loyalty--was not necessarily a white phenomenon at all. More simply, they tell the story, however incomplete, of the first contest in what would become by the end of the century the most culturally significant black football rivalry in the nation. In this article, the author talks about race, loyalty, and the first Southern-Grambling football game. He discusses the development of black higher education in Louisiana and the legacy of the Southern-Grambling game for black and white Louisiana. (Contains 58 footnotes.)