by Asher Price
Royal found the AP series confounding. He had given his blessing to interviews with the black players about race on campus, and now he was learning in newsprint about their unhappiness. The black players, either because they didn’t recognize themselves in the journalists’ work or because they were worried about their status on the team or for some other reason, quickly told Royal that their remarks had been taken out of context, and they apologized. But the whole thing was especially bewildering to him because it came just as his thinking about race—and, especially, his responsibility to push for equal opportunity—was evolving. Wearied by the inexorable expectations placed on his team, and privately weighing the prospect of retirement, he wanted to land one final recruit to rescue his reputation.
In football stadiums in the South, change came about not because the whites in power suddenly grew compassionate, but because they wanted to compete. Consider the parallel case of Alabama and Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant. From its inception through the 1970 season, Alabama football, like Texas, was all-white. If you visited a Dairy Queen in Tuscaloosa back then, said one Tide fan, there were two separate, unlabeled windows—one was for African Americans and one was for whites; everyone knew which one to use. Conventional wisdom holds that Bryant, like his friend Royal at Texas, had enough clout to integrate the football team. “Bear Bryant was big enough to have taken on [George] Wallace,” Howell Raines wrote in a 1983 reflection about the coach in the New Republic. “If he had offered one clear-cut public gesture of condemnation, who knows what might have been spared that benighted state?”
But their biographers paint Bryant and Royal as swimming against a strong segregationist current. “Bryant was a football coach,” Keith Dunnavant, the author of Coach: The Life of Paul “Bear” Bryant, said. “He was not the governor, not the king—he could not make segregation go away with the snap of a finger, any more than any businessman in Alabama at the time could have.” And as long as Bryant was winning, said Don Keith, another biographer, “I don’t think he saw a need for pushing that too hard.”
Through the end of the 1960s, it was almost as if there were two divisions in college football: the Big Ten and the Pac-8 had the Rose Bowl, and the southern schools had all the other bowls. The teams in the South “could never face a black player and win a national championship,” said longtime Austin sportswriter John Maher. During the 1970 season, Alabama hosted USC, the first integrated team to play the Tide on its home turf, and Alabama got hammered. Sam “the Bam” Cunningham, a seldom-used African American fullback, scored two touchdowns and rushed for 131 yards. Kentucky coach Jerry Claiborne, in what feels like a facetious swipe at the civil rights movement, said that Cunningham did more to integrate Alabama in sixty minutes that night than Martin Luther King had accomplished in twenty years. “They had never seen anything that big, that fast, that color coming at them before,” USC linebacker John Papadakis once told a documentary film crew. “And believe me, that’s a neon experience.”
As with Alabama, the prospect of losing prompted Texas to integrate. “Everything starts with winning,” Royal was fond of saying. “I don’t see how a competitor can enjoy the parties and things if he gets beat.”
Royal “came to realize he wouldn’t be as successful in his career if he didn’t get them,” said Kralj, the friend and adviser of regents chair Frank Erwin, speaking of African Americans. The regents figured it out, too. “Let’s face it,” Royal told the Boca Raton News in 1973. “It’s a fact that when I first came here, Texas wasn’t integrated. Then . . . the Regents said we could start integrating, but they meant that we didn’t have to push it or worry about it. After a few years, they were, ‘All right, we really meant it.’ Then they progressed to ‘Gawl-dog, let’s really go out and make the effort to integrate the school, totally integrate athletics.’”
But when Royal finally directed that African Americans be recruited, he found that his miserable record on race put him at a competitive disadvantage. The long delay in integration, he had to admit, had “become a stigma.” Mean Joe Greene, who, as a contemporary of Elmo Wright’s, went to high school in Temple, sixty-five miles up the interstate from Austin, and who is enshrined in the NFL Hall of Fame as the anchor of Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain defense, did not even consider UT because it appeared uninterested in black players.
The experience of Kirby Sams, a talented black running back from the coastal city of Corpus Christi, suggests how and why African Americans were suspicious of the UT program. In December 1966, about the time Royal gave Elmo Wright a once-over, the head coach invited Sams and one of his white high school teammates for a campus visit. It was Sams’s first time on an airplane. As soon as they landed in Austin, the teammates were separated. Sams was shepherded to a library on campus and left alone for a couple of hours to take the SAT. He didn’t even know what the SAT was, let alone that he would suddenly be sitting down to an exam during a football recruiting visit. And instead of tagging along with his high school teammate, who was hanging out with members of the all-white football team, Sams was assigned a black UT track athlete, James Means, as his escort around campus. Means, then a senior, an Austin native from a politically involved family, was UT’s first black letterman, but even as he clocked faster times than his teammates, he was the only member of the track squad to whom the university had not offered a scholarship.
“He was very, very, very angry,” said Sams. “It surprised me they set me up with him.” Means warned him not to come to UT. “He told me, ‘They just want the white boys. If you come here, they’re not going to give you a slot, they’re not going to give you a shake. It’s all just lip service. You’re going to be treated disrespectfully.’” UT put Sams up at the Villa Capri, a motel near campus, and when Sunday morning rolled around, he strode into the hotel lobby and finally met Darrell Royal.
The first word out of his mouth was “boy,” like a greeting, and right there, after hearing all of that anger from James, all I wanted to do was eat my breakfast and get home. I’ve thought about it since—maybe that was the way he talked to everyone, but the moment I heard that word come out of his mouth I wanted to get out of there. He said, “Boy, you’re set to be the first colored boy to play for the University of Texas.” I just wanted to get back to Corpus.
Sams ended up attending Michigan on a scholarship; an injury early on ended his football career.
Sams wasn’t the only black Texan picked up by a Michigan school. There’s a story that Michigan State coach Duffy Daugherty was in Beaumont, in southeastern Texas, to recruit the African American standout Bubba Smith. Michigan State not only was the first major college team to have more black starters than white, but also had a black university president about the same time UT had its first black varsity player. The story is that Daugherty, who led Michigan State to the national championship in 1965 and 1966, saw Royal in Beaumont and said, “Darrell, what are you doing in my neck of the woods?”
“This has hurt me in recruiting and has hurt me with just straight friendship of blacks,” Royal told Denne H. Freeman for his 1974 book Hook ’Em Horns. “It has made them very leery to be around me. They might like what they see and might like what they are experiencing when they are with me in person, but they still have it in their head that this is a devious, slick SOB we’re dealing with.”
The early black players he managed to land found the program to be cold, even hostile. Whittier said that his teammates would invite him to join them for a burger but never dared to ask him to go out with girls, and he was never invited to parties. They even refused to room with him—except for one, Billy Dale, a senior, who volunteered to be Whittier’s sophomore-year roommate and was promptly shunned by his own white friends. (“Senior years are supposed to be special,” Dale said, “mine was not.” He still today declines to elaborate on how his teammates betrayed him.) Whittier, who died in 2018 after suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, told the AP reporters that African Americans don’t get “chill bumps” when they hear the UT
fight songs. “Since when have you seen orange (or) red, white and blue doing us a favor?”
There was something tone deaf, history blind, and maybe a little defensive about Royal’s response. “How can he say that the orange has done nothing for him?” Royal said. “He’s been here on scholarship. He’s been exposed. He’s getting an education preparing himself where he can do something to contribute to his race. What has his country done for him? I wonder if he knows what other countries have done for blacks?”
Some Texas papers, in a show of Royal’s continued popularity, refused to run the critical AP series, instead publishing editorials in praise of his system. “These newspapers have faith in Coach Royal whom we know to be a man of the highest integrity, dedicated to his coaching career, and to the men who play football under him, regardless of race, color or creed,” read one. But the damage was done: in 1972, not one black player signed to play with the Longhorns.
Royal laughed off the recruiting miscues. “We batted zero last year so anything we do is a gain,” Royal told a reporter in February 1973, just about six months before the start of Earl Campbell’s senior season at John Tyler. But evidence suggests he was deeply affected by the criticism, and now, in what turned out to be the dusk of his spectacular coaching career, his own thinking on his responsibility to affect race relations was changing, thanks to an unusual friendship that had lately developed with Lyndon Baines Johnson. During Johnson’s White House years, he and Royal kept up a kind of smiling, mutually beneficial benignity toward each other. Johnson wasn’t much of a football fan—“He couldn’t tell you who was playing left guard or tailback,” said Larry Temple, who served as Johnson’s White House counsel—but Royal’s popularity made him a useful ally. As early as January 1964, less than six weeks after JFK’s assassination, an influential Houston attorney wrote the White House to recommend Royal for vice president. The top Johnson aide Walter Jenkins wrote back, suggesting, playfully, that the idea was intriguing, but out of the White House’s hands. Of course, the notion was ridiculous, but the episode suggests how popular Royal was—and underlines the White House’s savvy with top Democratic donors. (Royal was on the list of dignitaries scheduled to meet Kennedy on his arrival in Austin, following his visit to Dallas; an invitation to Royal on White House stationery is among the material in his files on the UT campus.)
Mindful of that popularity, according to records kept at the LBJ Presidential Library, Johnson welcomed Royal and his wife aboard Air Force One in 1967. Their relationship deepened after 1968, when Johnson opted not to run for reelection and began spending far more time at his ranch outside Austin. In May 1971, Royal gave Johnson, now more than two years out of office, a gift of cuff links and a belt buckle. The following March, the Royals were guests of LBJ and Lady Bird during a vacation to Acapulco. And that November, Royal gave the president a watch. “You have been responsible for many enjoyable Saturday afternoons, but having lunch with you, and those fine young men you brought with you, was an exceptional and most enjoyable treat for me,” Johnson wrote Royal.
The conversations between Johnson and Royal were far from superficial. In some ways, Royal was Johnson’s final project—a last attempt at helping, in some small way, heal the great racial wound in America. In the quaint, uncomfortable phraseology of the time, patronizing in a way that suggests he genuinely thought he wasn’t a racist even as he had kept doing racist things, Royal told the journalist Jimmy Banks in 1973, “I think I’ve always had, basically, a lot of compassion and feeling for the blacks.”
But it’s like President Johnson told me: he said, “You know, I never had thought I was prejudiced, and I still don’t believe I was, but I just wasn’t as concerned about their problems as I should have been.”
That’s what got me to thinking. I hadn’t done anything to hurt ’em—but neither had I done anything to help ’em. Any fair-minded person would say that things had not been fair, and I knew they hadn’t been fair. I knew blacks weren’t being treated equally and I knew they weren’t being given an equal chance. But I really hadn’t worried about it, ’til then . . .
That feeling came partly from spending a lot of time with President Johnson. If there’s one thing he talked on, during the time I was with him, more than anything else, it was the race situation. Equal opportunity. The deprived. For many years, the deprived. Far too long, the deprived. This entered into our conversation a lot of the time when we were together.
The last time Royal saw Johnson was at a civil rights symposium at UT in December 1972. Johnson, concerned that his Great Society achievements would be overshadowed by his acceleration of the Vietnam War, had convened a meeting of civil rights leaders to commemorate passage of the Civil Rights, Fair Housing, and Voting Rights Acts. Staving off chest pains—he at one point popped a nitroglycerin pill before the audience—Johnson worried aloud that he had not “done enough” to promote equal rights. The moment must have resonated with Royal: Gary Shaw’s book had been published earlier that year, as had the five-part AP series about the alienation of black football players at UT. At the symposium, Royal would have heard Johnson say that the country’s objective “must be to assure that all Americans play by the same rules and all Americans play against the same odds.”
Yesterday it was commonly said that the black problem was a southern problem. Today it is commonly said that the black problem is an urban problem, a problem of the inner city. But the truth is that the black problem today, as it was yesterday, is not a problem of regions or states or cities, or neighborhoods—it is a problem, concern, and responsibility of the whole nation. Moreover—and we cannot obscure this blunt fact—the black problem remains what it has always been—the problem of being black in white society.
To be black—to one who is black—is to be proud, to be worthy, to be honorable. But to be black in a white society is not to stand on level ground. While the races may stand side by side, whites stand on history’s mountain and blacks stand in history’s hollow.
As if speaking directly to Royal, there in the audience, Johnson called on a football metaphor:
Not a white American in this land would fail to be outraged if an opposing team tried to insert a twelfth man in the lineup to stop a black fullback on the football field. Yet off the field, away from the stadium, outside the reach of the television cameras and the watching eyes of millions, every black American in this land—man or woman—plays out life running against the twelfth man of a history they did not make and a fate they did not choose.
A few weeks later, Royal spoke with LBJ for the last time, following a New Year’s Day come-from-behind Cotton Bowl victory over mighty Alabama. “I get the feeling that you and Edith are waiting for an invitation before you’ll come out here to see me,” Johnson said, in his folksy way. “But I want you to call me just like you’d call your momma, and say, ‘We’re coming out to see you.’ If I’m busy, or have to be somewhere else, I’ll just say so and we can make it another time. But I don’t want you waiting for an invitation. I really think we ought to get together more often.” He yelled so much during the tight game, Johnson told Richard Nixon the following day, that he had suffered “heart pains all night” and had had to summon doctors.
Less than a month later—on January 22, 1973—LBJ was dead.
Royal was on the road in East Texas when he heard the news on the radio. He immediately steered the car back to Austin. As Johnson lay in state at the LBJ Presidential Library, Royal was among those who volunteered to take a two-hour shift to stand by the casket. He still had time to transform his own legacy on equal opportunity, to change his reputation from the man with three all-white national championship teams.
And so, in mid-August 1973, seven years after Royal had told Ken Dabbs he was not ready to offer a scholarship to Elmo Wright, Royal tracked him down to ask him for a peculiar kind of help. It was nearly one o’clock on a Sunday, a couple of hours after church. Dabbs was by then the head coach at the new football program at Westlake High, in a f
ast-growing suburb on Austin’s western fringe, and Royal asked Dabbs to come by his house. That old feeling of intimidation crept back. “I was nervous, I was scared, but I went over there,” Dabbs said.
Royal offered him a job as freshman backfield coach—and then he asked Dabbs to recruit in East Texas and South Dallas, areas with high concentrations of African Americans.
“And he asked me, ‘Do you have any questions?’ And I said, ‘Yes, sir, I have one: When you can hire anybody in the United States of America, why would you hire a nobody coach from Westlake?’”
“I’ll be real honest with you,” Royal told him. “If I had listened to you in 1966, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now.”
Read generously, the line amounts to a private confession. Less charitably, it was a weirdly self-involved and self-pitying sentiment coming, as it did, from a powerful white man considering issues of race and equity. Thinking back on it, a black coffee in hand in the corner of a café north of UT, a leaky heart valve recently replaced and his nose sounding stuffy, Dabbs said that Royal, intent on recruiting African Americans in the sunset of his coaching days, turned to him for a simple reason: “I don’t think anybody on that staff had even coached blacks in high school.”
Royal’s final instructions for him were these: “There’s a kid in Tyler, Texas, named Earl Campbell, and I want you to get him for us.”
When Royal called him that August, Dabbs had not heard of Earl Campbell. But after catching one of his early games that season, he remembered thinking: “That’s the most dominating running back I’ve ever seen.” Campbell was fast becoming the most hotly recruited football player in the nation—during his senior year, more than 250 scouts would travel to Tyler to see him play—and Royal had told Dabbs to do whatever it took to get Campbell to commit to Austin. Campbell had been offered bribes (“inducements,” the recruiters called them—a brand-new shotgun stuffed with hundred-dollar bills, a suede coat, a car, a job—these were the sorts of goodies offered to players or their relatives), but had rejected them: “I’m not going to be any sold black boy,” he told a reporter in January 1974, less than a month after he led John Tyler to the state championship and two months before signing day. “I won’t be bought. Money doesn’t excite me. I don’t have a car, and a car doesn’t excite me. I’m interested in what schools can do for me in the classes. Can I get any help? I’m going to college for an education first and football second.”
