Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  The case exposed how out of touch, how suspicious, Tyler was in those days. Joe Richard Lansdale, the lead plaintiff in the case, remembers that hidebound period: “In a restaurant, I’d get: ‘Hey, honey! You give head?’ People thought [the hairstyle] was an affront to the American way of life.” And the decision marked Justice as an agitator as far as other Tyler citizens were concerned. “He was setting a tone for modern East Texas,” said Lansdale—who added that Justice’s principle of equal treatment extended from hair length to race. “He was loathed by just about everyone because of the quaint idea that blacks and whites should be treated equally.” Quickly, Justice got the cold shoulder from some of his fellow Rotarians. “If someone devised a litmus test for good old boys, Wayne Justice would flunk it,” the Texas Monthly reporter Paul Burka wrote in a 1978 profile titled “The Real Governor of Texas.” The judge, observed Burka, “displayed an astonishing lack of political finesse.”

  Then came the cheerleader case.

  After the walkout, Justice decided the black students at John Tyler High had been suspended in violation of their rights to free speech and procedural due process, and he required the school to immediately reinstate them. “They were tickled and eager to get rid of black students,” Justice later said of the high school administrators. And, reflecting a certain late-1960s, early-1970s earnestness, one that also spoke to how hands-on Justice was willing to be to settle matters, he created a local “bi-racial committee” charged with “discussing ways and means of achieving inter-racial harmony and understanding among students, teachers, and patrons”—and ordered the school to choose two more cheerleaders, one white and one black, to better reflect the school’s overall racial breakdown.

  With that ruling, he gained a new title: the Antichrist of Smith County. When Justice and his wife appeared at the Petroleum Club for dinner, other patrons stood up and stepped out. Workers who had been remodeling the couple’s two-story brick house walked off the jobsite. The minister at the First Baptist Church called him a socialist. (Situated on opposite sides of the street, the federal courthouse and the church faced each other “like fortresses across the Rhine,” Burka wrote.) Beauticians refused to do his wife’s hair. A full sixth of the city’s population signed a petition calling for his impeachment. A cousin wrote a letter to a Tyler paper claiming to be ashamed of being related to the judge. Texas lawmakers passed a measure calling for a halfway house for juvenile delinquents to be built next to the judge’s home. Death threats ensued; the judge boosted the insurance on his home and stepped up courthouse security. In his early forties, Justice shed fifty pounds and took up taekwondo. “It was a great way to take out my frustrations,” he later told the New York Times. “You build up a lot of hostilities sitting on the bench all day.”

  Justice’s championing of Tyler’s black students didn’t stop with cheerleaders. Tyler’s Robert E. Lee High School, the school attended by rich and middle-class white kids, sported a Confederate streak—at the school’s football games, the marching band wore Confederate uniforms; the drill team was called the Rebelettes; and the football team stormed onto the field beneath a giant Confederate flag “as wide as the goal posts,” according to Rostell Williams, an African American who spearheaded a group called Concerned Parents. “Black students at Lee feel the Civil War is fought over and over again each year between September and May,” Williams told the Tyler school board in July 1971. “This is of grave concern to the black community and it burns at our hearts.” The atmosphere in the classroom was likewise inimical. Bettye Mitchell, one of the black students enrolled at Robert E. Lee after Justice’s integration order, remembers that the teacher would write twenty-five words on the board each morning for students to practice their spelling. More than once, at the beginning of class, a white student would enthusiastically wave his hand: “Teacher, teacher: There are 26 words on the board today.” Sure enough, one of the students had chalked in the n-word. “She would just say, ‘That’s not nice’ and erase it. There were never any repercussions.” In November 1971, at a morning pep rally in the school gym before the big football game against rival John Tyler, white students sang “Dixie” as black students waved shredded Confederate flags and booed. Scuffles broke out, teachers were injured, school was closed down, and police were summoned.

  That month, prompted by a new generation of African American activists, especially parents who had come of age in the 1960s, Justice’s biracial committee agreed the flag, the fight song “Dixie,” and the nickname Rebels should be abolished. Parts of the community pushed back hard. “It is unbelievable that we should be considering the idea of changing the name of Robert E. Lee High School or the established symbols of the school,” one N. B. Cooper of Tyler wrote to the Tyler Morning Telegraph in a letter following the committee’s recommendation. “Robert E. Lee was a man with great compassion and respect for human rights who freed his own slaves before the beginning of the Civil War. There is much being written and said about heritage today, but is it necessary to bury the heritage of the South? We have put to rest the bitterness, the animosities, but must we bury our history?” Sure enough, even after the pep rally riot, the school board rejected the recommendation of Justice’s biracial committee. “If the black students had been a little less arrogant, a little less demanding,” a board member named Vernon Goss said during the meeting, “compromise would have been accomplished. . . . You may eventually get a lot of these things, but is it worth it to polarize and alienate your whole community so that a great number hate each others’ guts?” But in December 1971, citing Justice’s order that school symbols not discriminate or upset racial harmony, the Texas Education Agency demanded the district get rid of Confederate symbols or lose $800,000 in state funding. The turn of events made Justice something yet worse to the citizens of Tyler—a person who misunderstood the South. “There’s a difference between being proud of your Southern heritage and being racist,” an indignant East Texas state lawmaker insisted.

  As a protest, in the afternoons after school let out, kids from Robert E. Lee “would make the circle around the (federal) building flying huge Rebel flags and honking their horns,” remembered a longtime court employee named Myra Rachel.

  For all his power—or because of it—Justice was a lonely, unbeloved person in town. After the controversy at the high school, a Tyler politician is said to have spotted Justice having coffee, alone as usual, at an old hotel. He razzed the meddling judge, “How’s my friendly neighborhood school administrator?” Unlike other judges who quietly presided over other desegregation cases, Justice would “get your nose rubbed in it,” said Charles Clark, a senior Tyler attorney who was, for a time, Justice’s jogging partner. (Justice’s customary predawn jogging route took him around the Robert E. Lee campus.) “He was not well-liked around here. He didn’t care to be.” Justice took the pushback with equipoise. “I like Tyler. Here I have found only a minimal amount of personal discourtesy,” he told an interviewer years later. To progressives across the state, the judge was a godsend: Justice, the great Molly Ivins wrote once with characteristic wryness, “was bucking for sainthood.” He remained in the community through the 1990s, owning a series of houses in the elegant, brick-paved streets of Tyler’s Azalea neighborhood, though his last house had louvered canopies over the ground-floor windows—for privacy and security, most neighbors thought.

  It was into this stew of race and politics that Earl Campbell stepped as a mere teen, a mess that, one way or another, he would slog through his entire life. Race is an inescapable fact in America, and even more obviously so in East Texas.

  Years later, when Tyler hosted a homecoming for Earl Campbell, after he had won glory on the football field, all the town’s dignitaries lined up to greet him. They gave Campbell a $10,000 Ford van: Earl Christian Kinzie, the osteopath who had delivered him, handed Campbell the keys. (It carried the license plate RBC 20; Campbell was later asked what it stood for: “Running Back Campbell, I guess,” he reckoned. “Hey, when somebod
y gives you something, you don’t ask a lot of questions.”) Campbell, in a gray three-piece suit, just shy of his twenty-third birthday, was driven through downtown Tyler in an open-top Mercedes; more than five thousand people—in a town of only sixty thousand—came out to see him, despite near-freezing temperatures and harsh early-February winds.

  Afterward, at a banquet that included speeches from the governor and the head of the University of Texas System, 1,200 Tylerites paid $12.50 apiece for sirloin steak, a baked potato, broccoli, and lemon icebox pie. An extra 200 seats had to be set up at Harvey Hall, which backed onto the East Texas Fair, the one that admitted African Americans only on certain days of the week. “We have, as I look out over the auditorium, a true (racial) mixture,” Darrell Royal, the coach who had recruited Campbell to UT, said. “And I don’t think anyone has done more to achieve that mixture than Earl Campbell. And I love him for it.” The only prominent person not serving as one of the official greeters at the event: William Wayne Justice, the judge whose desegregation of the schools had given Campbell the chance to compete on a level playing field and launch his lustrous career. The organizers had made sure not to invite him.

  Nearly three decades earlier, a few years after the end of World War II, according to Campbell family lore, a small plane crashed in some farmland northwest of Tyler. The land was tended by Reuben Collins, and as he cleared away the rubble and tried to get help, his heart seized up.

  Reuben Collins had grown up illiterate—the 1895 “Assessor’s Report of Colored Scholastic Population” for Smith County records that as a sixteen-year-old he still couldn’t read—but he had diligently been working this plot of land, giving money each month to the Pattersons, the white family who owned the property, in hope of taking possession of it. This arrangement was itself unusual in the area: whites frequently refused to sell land to African Americans.

  But Reuben Collins died, leaving behind a wife, Lizzie Collins, and their eleven children. Collins, a resourceful woman, was a seamstress who owned a Singer sewing machine, and it was by use of that machine that she managed to make some money: show her a picture and she’d cut out a dress. But she could not earn enough to make even modest payments to the Pattersons, who soon repossessed the land. Suddenly, the land that she and her children had hoped would be the family homestead—and all the money they had saved and sunk into it—was taken from them. The change in family fortunes was devastating. One her kids would eventually be killed at gunpoint. But at least one child, twenty-two year-old Ann, had graduated from high school and was married, and with that, the door to opportunity was left just slightly ajar.

  Ann Collins and B. C. Campbell had known each other while growing up—their families lived only about a mile from each another, attended the same Baptist church, and had dinner together once a month. Julius Campbell, B. C.’s grandfather—Earl Campbell’s great-grandfather—had settled in the Tyler area as early as the 1890s. He hailed from Alabama, and in Smith County he planted pears, plums, and sweet potatoes. Ann had wanted only one child when, in 1942, three weeks out of high school, she married B. C.—a small, thin, mustachioed, “jolly type of fellow,” in the words of his sister, Laura McGregor. B. C. served in World War II—journeying all the way to France—and back in Texas, he had an amusing penchant for buying cheap, nearly broken-down jalopies, never owning the same car for much more than a month. But he could also be stern. “He was a tough man,” said Donald Hamilton, who played with the Campbell boys on the playground at Griffin Elementary in the early 1960s and was struck even then by Earl’s preternatural balance and strength. “Not mean tough, but tough.” He also had a taste for white lightning, and he and Ann long engaged in a sort of hide-and-seek: Ann rooting out his stash and him hiding it anew. “All our fathers were alcoholics,” said Hamilton, who himself worked a long time to get sober and whose sister married one of Earl’s brothers.

  When Hamilton’s mother died while walking the couple of miles to work as a maid one January morning in 1963—she walked everywhere because she couldn’t afford a car—she left behind seven kids, ages eight through sixteen. Their father had long been absent, and her congregation didn’t help with the funeral arrangements. For years, after serving in the Marines and working for General Electric, Hamilton said he “carried a bitter root in my heart for the church.” But, he said of himself and of the world more generally, “everything that looks dead ain’t dead.” He holds a luminous smile in a very soft face, one topped off with a Vietnam Vet ball cap; his rounded shoulders sit inside a navy General Electric T-shirt. His story serves as a small window onto that generation of black men’s hardship—often marked by addiction, poverty, and the efforts to overcome them—that could have been Earl’s lot. Like Earl, he has little time for a certain kind of racial negativity. He explains his lack of resentment this way—“You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar,” an adage that serves him well as the minister of a small Baptist church in North Tyler, one that concerns itself with restoring half-lost African American cemeteries. When Ann Campbell was growing old, Donald Hamilton would sit by her bedside to minister to her. They used to play a kind of game, each taking turns recalling their own tough times and announcing, “You ain’t got nothing on me.”

  Ann and B. C. had inherited from the Campbell side of the family a fourteen-acre plot on which they grew peas, corn, and, soon, the cash crop of Tyler—roses. To understand something about the Campbells, about work and race and privilege in Smith County, you have to understand the history of the rose industry in this part of Texas. It was on roses that the Campbell family relied for its meager income. Not for nothing was Earl Campbell nicknamed the Tyler Rose. “Enough thorns stick you,” said Sam Goldwater of Lonestar Nurseries, “it becomes part of your blood.”

  As recently as the late nineteenth century, Smith County was known not for its roses but its peaches. The climate of the area was, as it is now, moist and warm, with southerly winds blowing in heat from the Gulf of Mexico; the soil was acidic; the first freeze came in November, the last in early March, allowing for a lengthy growing season. The trees virtually dripped with the fruit. In 1889, county residents harvested about fifteen million peaches. A few years later, on the southwestern edge of downtown, growers keen to promote the bounty of East Texas opened a white-and-red Victorian convention hall they called the Texas Fruit Palace. At the turn of the century, in the small rural community on Tyler’s northwestern fringe that was home to members of the Campbell and Collins families, agricultural agents estimated there were about one million peach trees.

  But disaster lurked: a shipment of fruit trees from China to California’s Bay Area harbored a destructive insect species that came to be known as the San Jose scale. The scale feeds by sucking juices from twigs, branches, fruit, and foliage—basically, every single component of a fruit tree. And within thirty years of arriving on American soil, the San Jose scale found its way to Smith County; by the outbreak of World War I, the peach orchards of East Texas had been nearly wiped out.

  The nurserymen, despondent, had to find another crop.

  Several families had done some pioneering work in the rose business: the climate and the sandy loam that had been good for peaches would now lead Tyler to become the rose capital of the country. By the end of the 1930s, more than two hundred companies around Smith County grew roses; in 1936, the year when Tyler crowned its first rose queen, they produced about six million plants. A decade later, they were growing as many as twenty million plants, with names like Radiance, Talisman, Étoile de Hollande, and President Hoover. At home, Tylerites made rose-petal jelly. Each February, the county, or at least some of the white citizens of the county, reveled in the annual rose festival. Tyler was “blanketed with dollar-apiece blossoms,” reads an old Chamber of Commerce history of Tyler’s Rose Festival day. “The streets were festooned with them. Young women with great armfuls passed out rare buds to pedestrians. Others tossed bouquets into passing automobiles. In the beautiful floral parade, great floats and s
treams of private automobiles, resembling mobile heaps of multi-colored roses, moved between the dense masses of spectators while low-flying airplanes constantly showered the crowds with rose petals from the air.” By 1955, the year of Earl Campbell’s birth, Tyler growers shipped out about 250 train cars, each stuffed with 25,000 rosebushes, across the country. Spurred by the Brown ruling and the forced integration of schools, among other reasons, white suburbs began blossoming throughout the United States—and many of the new homeowners, it seemed, wanted sweet-smelling roses cultivated by the African Americans of Tyler.

  In her testimonial You May Plow Here, about growing up black in rural Alabama in the early twentieth century, on land not much different from the kind the Campbell family tended, Sara Brooks remembered, “We never was lazy cause we used to really work. We used to work like mens.” Rose work was especially miserable. “It’s skilled, back-breaking work—uncomfortable work,” said Sam Kidd, whose family ran one of the largest rose farms in the area and who, as a high school junior, preferred the dreary, ceiling-fan-cooled work of printing out and affixing labels for office mailings to toiling outdoors in the rose fields. “Nobody ever liked working in the roses. It was hard work in the sun, and it was mostly blacks doing it.” Decades later, in a demonstration of how she and her siblings had worked, Martha Campbell crept, half squatting, half crawling, along the living room of the one-story brick ranch house she shared with her sister, Margaret, the one Earl had constructed for their mother Ann with money from his first professional contract. Rose raising depended on a horticultural surgery called budding: the operating theater was a furrow; the patients—thousands upon thousands of them—were thornless stems called cuttings; the equipment consisted of a small beaten wood-handled paring knife and small rubber ties; the light was an already-hot mid-spring sun; the nurses, in the case of the Campbell family, were a line of kids bent double, each younger than the one ahead.