by Asher Price
Perhaps Price told administrators about being approached by Ford. Later that week, in a confidential memo, McCown, who as dean of admissions had tried to thwart Ford’s admission in the first place and who was now the dean of student services, reassured the UT president and vice president that Bible, the athletic director, “feels that the coaches will have fairly positive control over Negro participation in the contact sports in selecting their teams.”
University officials moved swiftly. Less than a month later, in mid-October 1956, UT president Logan Wilson issued a confidential memorandum titled “Concerning the Participation of Negro Students in Intercollegiate Athletics.” Acting in “the best interests of colored as well as white students,” considering “long-established traditions in this region,” and aiming to “minimize frictions which might develop and which might be expected in extracurricular areas,” the regents had decided that even while “complying with the mandate of the Supreme Court by providing full educational opportunity to Negro students . . . it would be unwise at this time to extend the interpretation to include all areas of student life, many of which are not directly educational in character.”
That same month, Clinton Givans, an air force enlisted man who planned to enter the university under the Korean GI Bill, wrote to Bible, the athletic director, about trying out for the football team. He wanted to go to UT, he wrote, because as a native Texan he would not have to pay out-of-state fees and
because there are no Negro schools that rate as high . . . in subject matter or intercollegiate athletics and since I’ve been in service the competition was rather stiff that I had formed a small ambition in my mind and to make the University’s football squad was one of them. . . . I do not wish to make any national scandal or bring any bad reputation upon the school by a matter of racial segregation, but I really want to get a chance to try to make the varsity squad of the football team.
Bible rebuffed him. In the coming season, Bible wrote to Givans, UT had games against Georgia and Tulane, “neither of which will permit its team to play against integrated squads. Furthermore, our Conference has not taken any action along this line. And it is our plan to continue to schedule teams in the South and Southwest. So the picture is most uncertain at this time.”
These questions clearly preoccupied UT officials. The same day that Bible wrote Givans, McCown wrote to UT’s vice president to ask the university to establish a policy “concerning Negro participation in intercollegiate sports, particularly football.” The university reiterated that African Americans could not participate in intercollegiate sports. There were holdouts: Sterling Holloway, a regent, argued in a letter to UT president Logan Wilson in 1958 that UT was a diminished university for not allowing African Americans to participate in athletics: “Provincialism, of which total exclusion of Negroes from athletics is an expression, is not the hallmark of a university destined to pay a crucial role in the intellectual life of the free world.”
Tellingly, Holloway suggested at least allowing them to participate in track and field because “no bodily contact is involved.” This sort of thing lurks in the correspondence among university officials in the 1950s and into the early 1960s—an explicit anxiety about physical contact between whites and African Americans, especially between black men and white women. In the wake of Brown, university officials eliminated intramural wrestling, ordered separate hospital wings for black and white students, demanded that lab partners not be of different races, canceled an annual coed swimming competition, and ended mixed-race dancing. “We will try to avoid embarrassment by not scheduling dances such as a Paul Jones”—a kind of square dance—“where a person has little or no choice in selecting a partner,” according to one confidential memo.
It was one thing to talk with people of another race and another to touch them. It’s no wonder that the football team and the dorms—that is, areas of campus life that involved the intimacy of human contact—would be the last areas of the university to be integrated. Students, by and large, were instigators of integration. In October 1961, as they weighed a nonbinding referendum on the question “Do you favor allowing participation of capable athletes of all races in the University’s athletic program?” an undergraduate named John B. Holmes Jr. argued for the “no” faction in the pages of the Daily Texan. Holmes, whose father was an oilman who gave Darrell Royal the use of his personal airplane for recruiting visits and who himself would go on to a twenty-year career as a district attorney in Harris County, winning a reputation for convincing juries to sentence black men to death, claimed that integration would harm recruiting and the performance of the Longhorns.
But there was evidence of just the opposite—that segregation was harming football recruitment. In March 1961, Junior Coffey, a top high school athlete in the state, the soft-spoken son of a farm laborer in the Panhandle town of Dimmitt, announced he would like to play for the University of Texas if the Southwest Conference allowed African Americans to compete.
Coffey said he wouldn’t mind being the first Negro athlete to play for a Southwest Conference school but he also thinks it will be a while before Negro athletes are allowed to participate. “It all depends on the people—your people,” he said. “Some of them might not understand and accept it. I know it would make things rugged for everyone if it came now. I am going to have enough trouble with my studies. I understand the problems involved. I guess they (the Southwest Conference) knows what they are doing but they’re losing a lot of good Texas boys.”
Unable to play in the Southwest Conference, Coffey ended up leaving the state for the University of Washington in Seattle, and later had a successful NFL career.
With many African Americans wanting to stick closer to home, some say the best college football program in Texas in the 1950s and into the 1960s was not at the University of Texas but at all-black Prairie View A&M. The school, a two-hour drive east of Austin, won five national championships between 1953 and 1964. “Back in the good old days, before integration”—Michael Hurd, the author of a history on black football in Texas, is half joking as I interview him; he raises his eyebrows here and widens his smile—“there was a pipeline from black schools to black colleges.” Of course, UT never played Prairie View. Was it because UT was afraid of losing? Was it that African Americans were perceived as pollutants? “Don’t overthink it,” Hurd says. “A black person in Austin wasn’t even allowed on campus. They wouldn’t think of having a game between the schools.”
In the end, students at the University of Texas in the fall of 1961 passed the referendum by a margin of 5,132 votes for integration to 3,293 against it. The regents shrugged off the result. In a bit of fuzzy math, one of the regents told reporters the board would ignore the referendum, since “only about 20 percent of the student body” voted in favor of integration. “To me,” the regent W. W. Heath told radio station KTBC, “that would indicate a great majority of students are satisfied with the situation.” The board issued a statement, claiming, self-seriously: “[We have] a heavy responsibility to perform, and we respectfully ask you to trust our judgment. We do not feel that any substantial changes should be made in the immediate future, but we shall continue to move forward with due and deliberate speed as we think advisable under all the circumstances which exist from time to time.”
That phrase—“due and deliberate speed”—was, of course, a purposeful echo of the language in Brown. The regents wanted to suggest they were abiding by the ruling even as they continued to do everything they could to forestall the integration of the school and its football team. As a member of the all-white Southwest Conference, UT “should not take unilateral action,” Thornton Hardie, the chair of the regents, argued in the early 1960s. (Another conference team, SMU, managed to unilaterally integrate in 1966.)
In his memoir, Willie Morris wrote that he found the mix of politics, racism, and education in Texas “tawdry and suffocating.” What he chiefly noticed as an undergraduate were “the boorish remarks of Regents, who could make the mo
st reflective and charitable monk in the most isolated cloister want to bite back, the mindless self-satisfaction of most of the students, and politically, the general hardening of the arteries after the Supreme Court decision of 1954.”
Where was Darrell Royal amid all this? He had grown up poor in Oklahoma—perhaps as poor as the Campbells. Born in 1924 in the town of Hollis, a packed-earth sort of place just east of the rolling red hills of the Texas-Oklahoma state line, he was raised in hardship. The K in Darrell K Royal honored his mother, Katy Elizabeth, who died of cancer when he was just four months old. The family had a little house with a milk cow and chickens and a garden; the place was right by US Highway 62, and as a young teen, with the Depression taking hold and the creeks around Hollis choking up with sand, Darrell would keep an eye on the cars and trucks, water jugs hanging off the sides, driving off to the West. At night, he slept with a damp rag over his face to filter the dust. He took to sports early—he was basically a hyperactive kid—and when he wasn’t playing one sport or another, he was working: early jobs included shining shoes, feeding newsprint into the presses, and pulling cotton. “He was smaller than a lot of ’em,” his father, Burley Royal, once said, “but he could do a day’s work with the best of them.”
The summer after his freshman year in school, with opportunity hard to come by, he and his father and brothers struck out, in their loaded-down blue Whippet—a beaten-up sedan that looked not unlike a Ford Model T—for California. “What furniture we couldn’t sell we took with us,” Royal told Texas Monthly in 1974. “That old Whippet would barely make it through the mountains. We had some of those canvas water bags tied to the side . . . They were supposed to keep the water cool, but the water was as hot as the sun.” In the San Joaquin Valley, he worked as a fruit picker and painted figs with olive oil, which was said to ripen them faster. It was an unhappy time. He was ridiculed by other workers as an Okie bumpkin, and the whole family was squeezed into a shack.
And so when the fall rolled around and he was deemed too young to play on the local school’s varsity football team, he decided he had seen enough of California. He hitchhiked back to Hollis, wearing his government-issued overalls and carrying little more than a ball and a mitt in an old Victrola box. He led his high school football team to a state championship, and after a stint in the military, he ended up playing for the University of Oklahoma. As a player, he was rough and scrappy—just the kind of qualities he would long value in his recruits. Leading Oklahoma as its quarterback, he had a stretch of seventy-six passes without an interception; on defense he set an Oklahoma record for career pickoffs. He notched an eighty-one-yard punt and a ninety-five-yard punt return—both OU records. As in high school, he led his college squad to an undefeated record and a championship.
A decade later, at age thirty-two, he was hired by the University of Texas, at an annual salary of $15,000, to take over the beleaguered football program following the firing of Ed Price, the coach who had just turned down Marion Ford’s offer to try out. He had had short coaching stints at Mississippi State and the University of Washington and up in the Canadian Football League, but the once-storied UT team, coming off a 1–9 season, figured to be his toughest assignment yet. In Royal’s first season, he turned the team around for a winning record of 6–4–1, including a victory over tenth-ranked Arkansas and a Thanksgiving Day upset of fourth-ranked Texas A&M, quickly winning the hearts of the Longhorn faithful.
Royal had overseen integrated teams at Washington and with the professional Edmonton Eskimos—he reportedly chewed out white players for directing racial slurs at black players—but the Longhorn team he inherited was all-white. Even as students and some faculty members pressed for change, Royal appeared uninterested in joining them. “Last Saturday a Negro football player from the University of Oklahoma made 135 yards rushing against the University of Texas football team,” wrote the UT student association president, Frank Cooksey—who would later become mayor of Austin—on October 15, 1959, to university officials. “I dare say that the coaches on the Longhorn staff would be quite ready to accept the services of any one who could play football as well as Mr. Prentice Gautt did on Saturday afternoon.”
Perhaps not. On November 10, less than a month after Cooksey’s letter, McCown sent a confidential memo to UT president Logan Wilson to brief him on “the feeling of our coaches concerning Negro students participating in intercollegiate sports.” Royal “has coached Negro students but says they create problems,” McCown wrote.
White players particularly resented Negro boys coming in their room and lounging on their beds. Darrell was quite pronounced in not wanting any Negroes on his team until other Southwest Conference teams admit them and until the housing problem is solved or conditions change.
McCown continued:
The coaches wouldn’t want to have their players housed in different places. On the other hand, it would be unthinkable to assign a Negro and white student as roommates. If we were the only Southwest Conference team with Negroes it would be ruinous in recruiting. We would be labeled Negro lovers and competing coaches would tell a prospect: “If you go to Texas, you will have to room with a Negro.” No East Texas boy would come here.
McCown suggested that in the meantime, the university should “continue our delaying tactics. In my opinion, we are not ready for integration in Intercollegiate Athletics at the present time. Neither is our public.”
Did that kind of thinking trickle down to the players? A few months later, on New Year’s Day 1960, the 9–1 Longhorns squared off against top-ranked—and integrated—Syracuse in the end-of-season Cotton Bowl. Syracuse was led by Ernie Davis, who would become the first African American winner of the Heisman Trophy. Just before halftime, a fight broke out. After the game, which the Orangemen won, Syracuse players said Texas players ignited the brawl with racial slurs. A Syracuse player said a Texas player, Larry Stephens, called Syracuse tackle John Brown “a dirty nigger.” “Oh, they were bad,” said the Orangemen’s black fullback, Art Brown. “Talk about high standards and scholarship. One of them spit in my face as I carried the ball through the line.” Royal countered that Syracuse players had said “some pretty uncomplimentary things” to Mexican American Longhorn halfback Rene Ramirez, known as the Galloping Gaucho. The New York team, he said, “was more concerned about the race question” than his own.
Written nearly three years later, an internal regents letter from November 1962 gives another glimpse into Royal’s thinking on integration—which might be described, generously, as pragmatic. Heath, the regents vice chair, wrote that at a meeting earlier that year, head coaches
unanimously agreed that they did not feel that the time had come for us to integrate athletics. Several, including Darrell Royal, said they had no objection to integration of intercollegiate athletics as such, but were greatly concerned about the effect it would have on our recruiting and that even though we might obtain a few good colored athletes, unless the other schools integrated at the same time, inevitably in their recruiting, they would use the fact that our colored boys were living in the same athletic dormitory and associating closely with the rest of the team in their recruiting efforts with the white boys and their parents who might object to such a system or prefer to live, socialize and play with white boys.
But late in 1963, facing lawsuits from their own students over segregated dorms and newly crusading powers in Washington, the regents finally cracked. Heath, a politically connected insurance attorney from East Texas and now the regents chair, was widely known as a segregationist. But an old friend, Lyndon Baines Johnson, prompted him to change direction. With passage of the Civil Rights Act on the horizon, Johnson told Heath that UT was in danger of jeopardizing its federal funding. Heath admitted that he “came on the board with a lot of prejudices” and did not realize that “on federal research grants, you get cut off a lot of places if you’re not integrated.” Publicly, Heath couched the regents’ change of heart that November—just days before the assassination of
John F. Kennedy in Dallas—as the latest manifestation of the body’s judiciousness. “Under our oaths of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States, our only choice has been that of timing the ‘deliberate speed,’” he said. “Some feel we have been too slow, others that we have been too fast.”
Immediately after the board’s action doing away with race-based student restrictions, Royal, cornered by reporters following a football game with Baylor, was asked whether he was currently interested in black high school prospects. “No,” he said. But Royal also said that any student who met the university’s academic requirements and could make the team could play for Texas.
That answer left the team’s door ajar to African Americans, causing some Texans concern. One Longhorn fan from Houston, an engineer named A. Rogers Mielly, reading Royal’s remarks in the newspaper, wrote straight away to the UT chancellor to register his concern. Royal
is an ambitious young man who’s [sic] dream is to produce a football team second to none, and surely he is to be commended for this viewpoint, but when he has in mind searching the nation for negro football material to strengthen his team has he given thought to the necessity of absorbing these negroes in the social life of Texas University where they will be placed on a pedestal before young women at dances, and other social events which in due course brings on marriage.