Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  In many ways, even as its leaders managed to avoid a showdown with federal troops, UT was a conventional institution of the South, one whose early patrons rued the Confederacy’s Civil War defeat. In 1933, a little over two decades before Earl Campbell’s birth, the university commissioned a memorial to Jefferson Davis: to the men and women of the Confederacy, read a dedication plaque—one not removed till 2015—“who fought with valor and suffered with fortitude that states rights be maintained and who not dismayed by defeat nor discouraged by misrule built from the ruins of a devastating war a greater South.”

  Six years later, in 1939, George Allen, a life insurance salesman in Dallas, became the university’s first black student when he decided to enroll in a few graduate business courses; to beat Jim Crow, he registered by mail and telephone. When he appeared on campus two weeks later and his race was detected, he was pulled out of class and his registration was canceled. “Negro Discovered in Class at U.T.” said one headline. Evidently anxious about the prospect of integration, the regents resolved in 1944 that buildings on campus “shall not be used for any public meeting or entertainment attended by members of the Caucasian Race and the Negro Race, until and unless definite arrangements shall have been made in advance of the meeting or entertainment to segregate completely the members of the Caucasian Race and the Negro Race to be seated in the audience.” One of the regents, Orville Bullington, announced, “There is not the slightest danger of any Negro attending the University of Texas, regardless of what Franklin D., Eleanor, or the Supreme Court says, so long as you have a Board of Regents with as much intestinal fortitude as the present one has.”

  As if taking Bullington up on a dare, Heman Marion Sweatt, a civil rights activist and mailman from Houston, a slight man, un-Campbellian in stature, applied to the University of Texas Law School in 1946. When UT declared him ineligible because of his race, Sweatt sued; a trial judge allowed the state to establish a temporary law school. It initially consisted of two attorneys in Houston teaching courses near their offices. “It is fairly obvious that the Negroes are determined to make it as embarrassing as possible and as expensive as possible for us to maintain separate institutions for the two races,” UT president Theophilus S. Painter wrote in 1948 to D. K. Woodward Jr., a Dallas attorney who chaired the UT Board of Regents. “In the end, the financial burden will be extremely heavy to the State, and, as you have often said, it is the price we pay for segregation.” The state attorney general, a dairy farmer named Grover Sellers, promised that Sweatt would “never darken the door of the University of Texas.” But in 1950, the US Supreme Court, in a case that anticipated Brown, ruled in favor of Sweatt, holding that the faculty, reputation, and facilities of the all-black law school were unequal to those at UT. The Equal Protection Clause, in short, required Sweatt’s admission to the University of Texas. (One of Sweatt’s attorneys was Thurgood Marshall.) Upon Sweatt’s enrollment, one law faculty member ceased his custom of addressing students by an honorific in order to avoid having to say “Mr. Sweatt.” That October, during Sweatt’s first semester, a wooden cross covered with kerosene-soaked rags was set aflame on the law school grounds. W. Kirk Astor, a contemporary of Sweatt’s who hoped to do graduate work in political science, ran a similar gauntlet. He was finally allowed to take classes on campus—as long as he sat in a specially assigned seat in the back of the classroom with a metal ring on the floor around his desk-chair “so that his blackness wouldn’t rub off on the white students,” the historian Joe Frantz wrote in his Forty Acre Follies. “Kirk was abased, the other students were embarrassed, and eventually the barrier came down.”

  It wasn’t until 1954, in Brown v. Board of Education, that the Supreme Court declared that the doctrine of separate-but-equal educational facilities violated the Equal Protection Clause. The very notion of separate but equal was an impossibility, the justices held, because to separate children in public schools “from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

  The Brown decision prompted at least two decades of attempts by the regents and university administrators to maintain an apartheid system—one meant to prevent African Americans from fully participating in the life of the university, especially on the football field, even as courts technically allowed them to be on campus. Less than two weeks after the Brown ruling was handed down—about a year before Earl Campbell was born—H. Y. McCown, the admissions dean, dashed off a note to the university president with a proposal to “keep Negroes out of most classes where there are a large number of [white] girls.” In one internal letter after another, McCown, a decorated retired US Navy man who had commanded a destroyer in the Pacific during the war, comes across as decidedly anti-integration, regularly cloaking his segregationist tendencies in concerns about bad publicity and about public feeling generally. “If we want to exclude as many Negro undergraduates as possible,” began McCown in his 1954 memo, the university should require African American students seeking admission to undergraduate professional programs to first spend a year taking mandatory courses at Prairie View A&M or Texas Southern University, both black schools. Essentially ignoring the thrust of Brown, the regents adopted the proposal.

  An episode that unspooled over the summer of 1954, just after the Brown decision was handed down, illuminates how far the regents were willing to go to keep the football team free of African Americans. That June, Marion Ford, a sixteen-year-old from Houston who was a top student at his black high school, and who in his young life had already worked as a newspaper carrier, a truck driver, a lifeguard, and a columnist for the school newspaper, applied to the university. Known by the nickname Big Drip, he was a talented kid, counting himself a saxophonist and creative writer. He belonged to an engineering honor society. He said he wanted to major in chemistry. McCown, citing the policy he had devised to keep African Americans out of UT, wrote Ford that he could major in chemistry at Texas Southern, and therefore he was refused admission to UT. Ford responded that he in fact wanted to study chemical engineering, a major not offered at Texas Southern. He suggested he was getting the runaround—“Southern Discrimination,” was his phrase—and wrote, “I am not interested in living in your dormitories or becoming socially prominent with the Caucasians, but I do want a chance to get the best formal training in my state.” In a condescending letter of admittance in late July, McCown wrote to Ford, “I hope that you will do well in the University and that you will get over your inferiority complex and the idea that you are being discriminated against.”

  Finally, all appeared set for Ford and six other African American men to become the first class of black undergraduates at the university. Ford arranged for housing in Austin. In mid-August he submitted a rushee information card to UT’s Interfraternity Council, still on file in a warehouse of university records. He wrote that he planned to join the ROTC program, and in a sign of his eagerness, he asked that a copy of the Fraternity Handbook be sent to him.

  But there was a problem: Ford, who was a brawny five-ten-and-a-half and 209 pounds and had been a varsity swimmer and all-state lineman at his all-black high school, told a Houston Chronicle reporter in August that he hoped to play on UT’s football team. The reporter, in turn, contacted UT regent Leroy Jeffers, a Houston attorney, to ask for comment. Jeffers said the regents hadn’t considered the prospect but that it would be weighed “from all angles for the best interest of the university.” Privately, he was alarmed. The following day, Jeffers sent a copy of the article—headlined “Houston Negro Seeks Grid Tryout at Texas”—to the members of the board of regents and the chancellor. It was one thing to admit African Americans, another to allow them to play on the football team. (Or to perform on the football field in any capacity at all. On the very day, August 25, 1954, that Jeffers sent the article to the regents, Arno Nowotny, the widely beloved dean of student life at the university, wro
te to UT president Logan Wilson about the problem of black students who wanted to study at the university and also participate in the school band. “An undergraduate Negro student, J. L. Jewett, has inquired about playing in our Longhorn Band in the fall,” Nowotny wrote. “I hope we continue to admit Negro students only when we have to do so. I could wish that young Jewett had chosen the symphonic band or some other less spectacular student activity; but I plan to have a real conference with him, and stress the importance of his showing real humility in his band participation.”) Five days later, on August 30, the regents chair asked the state attorney general whether, even if the law required UT to admit African Americans, the university was required “to permit such negro students upon admission to participate in such extracurricular activities as band and football or other intercollegiate activities.” That same day, McCown wrote to the UT president that African Americans, were scheming to figure out courses of study that were not offered at black schools, taking “a more calculated approach” in their applications. “They are now carefully advised and are constantly probing for programs of work not offered at one of the Negro institutions,” he wrote.

  In a memo marked “personal and confidential,” UT Board of Regents chairman Tom Sealy, a Midland oilman, informed the other regents that after a “full investigation,” the university had determined that black students could take at least their freshman classes at black institutions. In other words, even if Texas Southern did not have a chemical engineering major, it had freshman offerings that mirrored UT’s. The plan was essentially a delaying tactic, meant to buy the University of Texas at least another year in which to figure out how to prevent black students from enrolling.

  And so, less than a week after Marion Ford had told the Houston Chronicle he wanted to try out for the football team, after the university president, the regents, the university lawyers, and the state attorney general had huddled together, letters were sent to him and the other incoming African Americans, explaining that their admission had been rescinded. The full weight of the Texas government and the University of Texas had come down on this teenager—and a half-dozen other African American admits—because of the mere notion that he might step onto the football field.

  Ford was refunded the $20 deposit for his room at a blacks-only dormitory (the dormitory had been established for black graduate students first admitted in 1950); at McCown’s direction, he was informed that the rooming contract was “now voided.” The sacrosanct football program remained unsullied, and some Texans who learned about the university administration’s about-face were pleased. J. L. Shanklin, a dentist in the Hill Country town of Kerrville, wrote McCown “to congratulate you on your very sane stand in re—the case of Marion G. Ford Jr.”: “The problem is not one of racial, religious, social, or political, but is one of our Constitutional rights. . . . If Democracy is the best form of government and is to survive, we will have to fully subscribe to the theory that the majority must supersede the wants and claims of the minority. Surely the majority of Texans does not want to accept racial equality, nor do they want to foster a situation that will surely lead to social and sexual homogeneity.”

  Apart from a one-sentence story in the Informer, a Houston black newspaper, that noted Ford had been “rejected then accepted and rejected again,” a line that in its weariness suggests something of the condition of being black in America, there was little mention in the press of UT’s backtracking. But the university had been shaken by the prospect of an African American trying out for its football team. The admissions department put a one-year moratorium on accepting Negroes (the word it used) while it figured out a long-term strategy.

  In June 1955, university administrators convened, for the first time, the four-person Committee on Selective Admissions. The committee members suggested, in a report delivered to the university president and marked “not for publication,” loosening the graduate student application process so that “the University would be in a position to plead that it is acting in good faith to bring an end to segregation and it should have some bearing with the courts in any attempt to postpone the admission of Negro students at the undergraduate level.” The committee observed that if 2,700 freshmen were admitted, 300 would be black, according to state population proportions—more than the administrators could stomach. The University of Texas had long admitted (nonblack) students based on how well they did in high school. But the report, laying the groundwork for standardized testing as a pillar of admissions, showed that UT freshmen had significantly higher aptitude test scores than incoming freshmen at three Texas black colleges. “Cutting point of 72 would eliminate about 10% of UT freshmen and about 74% of Negroes,” states one footnote, speaking of a standardized test cutoff. “Assuming the distributions are representative, this cutting point would tend to result in a maximum of 70 Negroes in a class of 2,700.” And so in 1957, UT became among the first public universities in the country to require entrance exams.

  Athletics, and football in particular, presented UT with a logistical conundrum: even as it was resisting integrating its student body, would the university bar other schools from bringing their black athletes to UT’s fields and tracks? In October 1954, UT was scheduled to play football against Washington State in Austin. Among Washington State’s players was Duke Washington, a black running back. No African American had played football in Texas Memorial Stadium, and a 1953 UT regents policy barred the “participation of Negroes in football games.” A few weeks before the game, UT athletic director Dana X. Bible called Stan Bates, his counterpart at Washington State. Less than a month earlier, Marion Ford and the other African American students had seen their admissions to UT rescinded. In the 1980s, Bates recounted the September 1954 conversation for a book on the history of Washington State athletics.

  He sort of hemmed and hawed around a little, and then said, “Ah, Stan, I understand that you have a black player on your team this year.”

  “That’s right,” Stan replied. “Duke Washington, our fullback. And he’s a good one.”

  “Well, ah, Stan, you know we don’t have black players in Texas, and we’d like you to leave him home when you come down here. It might be better all around.”

  Bates told Bible that if Duke Washington couldn’t play, Washington State wasn’t coming.

  With the matchup two weeks away, Washington State president Clement French, relaying a similar message, tried a cheery tone with UT president Logan Wilson. “I don’t know whether the Austin papers carried the account of our Southern California game of last Friday night, but if they did you know that we not only got walloped but that the outstanding bright spot for our team was the young man who has been the center of our discussion,” he wrote. “Therefore, unless he is injured and unable to travel, there is no question but that he will be in our traveling squad and will play.” UT acceded, but university officials in Austin drew up a memorandum of understanding. “Whether Washington State College plays the Negro boy here will be regarded by The University of Texas as their business and not ours,” the memo, which can be found in the UT archives, states. It continues: “There may be a hotel or housing problem. Mr. Bible and others will do what they can to assist in finding suitable housing, but the attitude of The University of Texas will be that the problem is essentially that of the visiting team.” Wary, once again, of the prospect of negative press coverage, the memo concluded: “Insofar as it can be avoided, there is to be no publicity at either end.”

  Ultimately, Duke Washington made the trip with the team and ended up staying at the home of a black family while the rest of his team checked into an Austin hotel. The Longhorns won, but Duke Washington scored a touchdown on a seventy-three-yard draw play. In his great memoir North Toward Home, Willie Morris, who graduated from the University of Texas in 1957, recalled the “entire student section rose spontaneously and applauded.”

  Two years later, with the University of Southern California, which had long been integrated, scheduled to play football in Austin,
UT officials deliberated over how to handle the prospect of black fans showing up to the game. “One can visualize (with a shudder) the disturbance arising because a Negro attempted to sit next to or near a white person who had definite adverse feelings in such matters,” Lanier Cox, the assistant to the UT president, wrote to the chair of the board of regents in early July 1956, two and a half months before the game. Warned Cox: “Since the University of Southern California has a star Negro fullback, it is entirely possible that his parents or friends from California may make the trip to Austin. It would be difficult to control the sale of tickets by visiting schools. Therefore, it would appear that little could be done other than to admit Negroes holding tickets in the visiting team section.” As for other African Americans seeking to buy tickets, he said: “It is recommended that the Negro section in the stadium be continued and that all Negroes who ask for tickets be sold a seat only in this section. This should reduce substantially the possibility of Negroes sitting among the white spectators in the west stands and thereby creating a situation of possible ill feeling or even violence.”

  In the end, USC’s Cornelius Roberts, nicknamed the Chocolate Rocket, ran roughshod over the Longhorns, racking up 251 yards and three touchdowns. UT lost 44–20 en route to a 1–9 season. Among the spectators at that game was Marion Ford. He had played for Illinois before coming back to Austin as a transfer student, among the first black undergrads admitted in 1956. After the game, Ford approached UT head coach Ed Price to again float the idea of walking on as the university’s first black football player. “Ed,” Ford said, “you need me. I can help you.” (“I was a cocky son of a bitch,” Ford later told Dwonna Goldstone for her excellent book Integrating the 40 Acres—the UT campus is nicknamed the Forty Acres after its original footprint.) Price, who had not had a winning season for several years and who must have known he was likely to be fired at the end of the season, gave no real consideration to Ford’s proposal. “He was very amiable,” Ford, who died in 2001 after launching a successful dental practice in Houston, later told a reporter. “He knew he needed help. But he said, ‘It’s out of my hands.’ . . . It would have been a good stroke for Texas, a beautiful opportunity for a premier university to forge ahead and a hell of a rallying point.”