Very powerful article and good to face up to the hard, uncomfortable truths.
...Signed from Fourth Division Halifax Town on Bonfire Night 1977, for a fee of £5,000, Roland Gregoire – a quick, direct and confident striker known to everyone as Roly - had caught the eye with a hat-trick against the Wearsiders' reserves, earlier that season.
Gregoire settled into digs on the sea front in Seaburn, delighted and surprised that it was the very Sunderland suburb much loved by him and his family because of their annual Sunday School outings there from Bradford.
Sunderland manager Jimmy Adamson opened the new year by handing him the number seven shirt for the Second Division game against Hull City at Roker Park, and the teenager responded by setting up a goal for club legend Gary Rowell in a 2-0 win.
It was a landmark moment for Gregoire which was ruined, forever, by what happened next.
He remembers: "After the game I was having a drink with some supporters, and one of them asked: 'Were your brothers at the game today?' I said: 'Yes, five of them.' And he said: 'They're fast!' But someone interrupted, and I didn't get the chance to ask what he meant. Later, I rang one of my brothers to make sure they'd got home OK. He said they'd been coming to find me at the club hostel where I was staying, but on the way someone threw half a brick at them and shouted … they used the N-word, I'll put it like that.
"It was a group of men - a lynch mob - who chased them through the park near the ground. They were just teenagers. They were so scared – but somehow they managed to escape. It was despicable. Seaburn had meant so much to us, but from that day on my mother, 'til the day she died, never, ever spoke of Sunderland again."
For Gregoire, this was just the start...
"I knew only one other black fellow in Sunderland, he was at the polytechnic," remembers Gregoire. "Wayne Entwistle [a white striker, who signed the same day in a £30,000 deal from Bury] shared digs with me for a while and was a good guy, but it was quite a lonely time."
Gregoire cites the club's 1973 FA Cup-winning captain Bobby Kerr and experienced midfielder Mick Docherty as two colleagues who made him feel welcome, in a debut season where he made eight first-team appearances.
But he felt the dressing room attitude towards him change in the summer of 1978, with a couple of notable incidents on a pre-season tour of Kenya.
"After one game, all these children ran on to the pitch and went up to one of our players and gathered round him," he says. "But when they'd gone he came to me and wiped his hands on my shirt. I thought that was disgusting.
"It was like he thought those children had disease, and wanted to wipe it on me! Why me? Because I'm black, is that why?"
Later, at a post-match reception at the home of a wealthy local white family, the team lined up to meet the hostess.
"She shook the hand of the players on my right, bypassed me, then shook the hand of everyone else," he says. "I didn't waste a second. I just calmly and coolly walked out of the house and on to the team bus. I would rather be out there, with lions and hyenas, than be inside, being insulted like that.
"Not one person came to see how I was, or to offer some comfort. It was only when they'd finished eating and drinking, laughing and joking, that they came filing back on to the coach. I thought that was a disgrace. That woman insulted me, and by insulting me she insulted the club. There was no loyalty, no integrity – I felt abandoned."
...The fact Gregoire did not feature in Sunderland's first-team photo for the 1978-79 season hinted at the problems to come, and one post-match visit to the Roker Park dressing room during that campaign sticks vividly in his mind.
He explains that he was going round the changing room shaking everyone's hands – as was the tradition for anyone who hadn't played to do – when he came to one player who addressed him with a racial slur.
"I just held him by his throat, up against the locker, then put him down and walked out," he says. "The changing room was packed, but no-one came to ask: 'Roly, what happened there?' I started to feel it more and more, as each incident happened, with people putting me down all the time. It was as if nobody at Sunderland cared for me."
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...After nearly half a century, he just wants to set the record straight.
"I don't hate Sunderland, but I hate what they did to me and I hate the fact my legacy is mud," he says. "I'm a joke. I'm a laughing stock. What terrible thing did I do? I was just a young man. It's easy, because I'm the black fellow, you see."
Sunderland fan Bill Hern, co-author of Football's Black Pioneers, which chronicles the first black player at each of the 92 League clubs, is hoping Gregoire's reputation can be restored.
"I remember seeing him play, and he had great potential. You can only imagine how isolated he must have been in Sunderland at that time," says Hern. "He went through so much, but he paved the way for the likes of Gary Bennett, Darren Bent, Jermain Defoe and many others. For that reason his name will be forever cemented into the history of Sunderland AFC."
...A few weeks ago, Gregoire was invited back to Wearside with some of his family to meet the current squad. He chatted to players in the gym and admired the "beautiful" facilities, while also sharing memories of his time, including how windy it always was and the £1-a-minute fines for being late to training.
He made an emotional return to Seaburn to show his daughter and grandson where he had lived, looking out to sea with tears in his eyes and a "thank you, God" before adding: "Mum, dad, look where I am after all these years."
Gregoire was also a guest of Sunderland at their home game with Manchester United earlier this month, where he posed for photos with fans and signed autographs, later joking to his daughter that they had been "treated like celebrities".
"I'm so happy to be back," he told his former captain Kerr, whom he met at the Fans' Museum, where photos of Gregoire hang on the wall.
Gregoire, who says he still follows Sunderland's results and now "doesn't miss" an episode of Match of the Day, said that even though he had shed a lot of "eye water" remembering his experiences, he was glad to have now spoken publicly about what happened.
"We recognise the important role that Roly Gregoire played in Sunderland AFC's history as the Club's first Black player, and we look forward to continuing to work with him during the 2026-27 season to appropriately acknowledge and celebrate his contribution as part of the club's history," Sunderland said in its statement.
Does Gregoire think times have changed for black players?
"The problems they face are much the same," he says. "People maybe don't chant the racist things they used to, but instead they write it online. At least now black players have a voice and can make themselves heard.
"Going back to Sunderland after all this time was a wonderful experience. I feel purged... I feel purged. I'm happy."
The lads that did this could very well
