1931 Eureka Red Devils football team

Franklin Burghardt was an African-American who was the team's starting center. While playing a road game against Elmhurst College, a hotel refused to allow Burghardt and the team's other black player, Jim Rattan, to stay. The coach was angry and decided that the whole team would sleep on the bus. Reagan, Burghardt later recalled, worried that this would cause the team's performance to suffer and thus humiliate the black players and harm their morale, and suggested instead that the coach tell the team that the hotel did not have enough rooms.[15][16] Coach McKinzie gave him fare for a taxi for Reagan, Bughardt, and Rattan to Dixon, Illinois, to stay with his parents, Jack and Nelle Reagan, who welcomed them "like Amos 'n' Andy."[17]

In Reagan's 1986 autobiography, Where's the Rest of Me?, he told a story about a racist player on an opposing team who was "filled with hatred and prejudice" and "played dirty" while targeting Burghardt. Though Burghardt was injured, he refused to play dirty and astounded the other team with his strength and skill. At the end of the game, the defeated player turned around to shake Burghardt's hand, telling him he was the greatest human being he had ever met. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1986, President Reagan shared the same story at a school in Washington, D.C.[18] Reagan and Burghardt remained friends, many decades later.[19][20]