‘Battle of the Marne’

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Perhaps we should read this book to find out what happens next.

The BSC-Howard Rivalry: Birmingham’s ‘Battle of the Marne’

By Benjamin Lewellyn and Peter Starr

The annual Birmingham-Southern College and Howard College (now Samford University) football game remained one of Alabama’s fiercest sports rivalries for much of the first half of the twentieth century. Known as the South’s own ‘Battle of the Marne,’ the BSC-Howard game drew attention from governors, mayors, U.S. senators, and even Wallace Wade, the University of Alabama’s first national championship–winning football coach. The rivalry soon spread off the field and infiltrated the student body of both schools; eventually the extra-curricular events spiraled from imaginative pranks and mascot abductions to destructive vandalism and even manslaughter. Though this intense rivalry ended with the disbandment of Birmingham-Southern’s football program in 1939, it nevertheless brought a flash of exhilaration to the city of Birmingham each year, uniting the community in the much-anticipated weeks of late November.