Earl Campbell

by Asher Price

  “She was conciliatory in her grading,” he said.

  A few months later, in July, with Earl Campbell delivered, Royal arranged for Lyons to be hired full-time, as an assistant athletic director, even as he was finishing up at the University of Texas Law School. UT paid Lyons $25,000, more than the school’s head baseball coach earned. A jotted note by one of UT’s public relations specialists, charged with putting together a press release announcing the hire, reveals one of Lyons’s mantras that proved helpful as he faced pushback from black families—he was called an Uncle Tom, he said—for working for the university.

  “When people ask him about black and white,” says the note, “tell only color that matters is orange.”

  When Earl Campbell unfolded himself from young Henry Bell’s Chevy coupe after the four-hour drive from Tyler to Austin in August 1974, all his belongings fit into the supermarket bags he used as luggage. “When we first moved into dorms, some guys might take a half a day to get their stuff in their rooms,” Rick Ingraham, who would be a key lead blocker for Campbell at Texas, told me. “Earl had two pairs of jeans, a couple pair of underwear, and some T-shirts—and that was it.” The NCAA gave him $15 a month to pay for laundry. Reuna, putting herself through Tyler Junior College as a legal secretary, occasionally sent him a few dollars in her daily letter. He was so poor compared with his classmates—as the flagship state university, UT was the school of choice for well-to-do Texans—that he once walked into First City Bank to ask for a ten-dollar loan. “When school started, I was amazed at that many people,” Campbell told the university alumni magazine years later. “Where I came from, we didn’t have a thermostat on the wall where you could walk over and turn it to 60 and it’d get cold. I had my own bed. I had eaten good food before but not on a constant, everyday basis. I’d hear some of the guys whining about staying in Jester”—a dorm so massive it was said to have its own zip code—“but to me, it was Cadillac style.”

  He had declared the campus beautiful after a UT booster flew him to Austin for an earlier campus visit during his recruitment—his first plane ride. He was so nervous that he asked Dabbs for some of his Red Man chewing tobacco. Now he would learn that there were, in a sense, two Austins: the dreamy, blues-playing capital of Texas, the center of the counterculture in the Lone Star State, and the Austin of officialdom and tradition, whose emblems were the pink granite dome of the state Capitol and the Tower, the administrative headquarters of the University of Texas.

  For all its progressivism, Austin had (and continues to have) its own race problems. Covenants on the books since the early 1900s prevented African Americans, Latinos, and Jews from buying homes in well-to-do neighborhoods. In the early 1960s, a new city-owned power plant went online right in the middle of the town’s Mexican American neighborhood. When Tommy Wyatt, the publisher of the Villager, a weekly, black East Austin newspaper, moved to town in 1962, he could go to the Scarborough’s department store downtown, but—because he was black—he couldn’t try on a hat before buying it. “If it touched your head,” he told the Austin American-Statesman, “you bought it whether you liked it or not.” And a gentleman’s agreement that neatly skirted the Voting Rights Act held that powerful business leaders would decide which African American and which Latino won the unofficially designated minority city council seats. (That agreement remained in place until 2014.)

  Through the late 1960s, Don Weedon, owner of the Conoco Station at 34th and Guadalupe, just off campus, was known for refusing service to or insulting African Americans or people he deemed hippies. Weedon, thin and bow-tied, had played football for UT in the 1940s and was among a coterie of boosters for the program—Royal and his assistants often repaired to the filling station after practices for a few beers.

  One Saturday night, in late April 1968, only a few weeks after the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated, Weedon settled onto a bar stool at the Lemon Tree Club to watch a televised championship bout pitting the white boxer Jerry Quarry against the black boxer Jimmy Ellis. He started asking other bar goers whether they would like to place a bet on “the nigger”; he was willing to back the white fighter. He then began to direct his comments toward a black UT undergrad named Leo Northington Jr. Northington had just finished playing a set with an otherwise all-white band at the club. “Where you from, boy?” he kept asking Northington while making loud remarks about “dirty niggers.” Northington ignored him. Weedon, in a rage now, attacked. Northington flattened him. “He looked surprised after getting hit,” Northington said. “He looked like he didn’t expect me to retaliate . . . Like he expected me to say, ‘Please Mr. Weedon, don’t hit me no more.’”

  By that Friday, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society had organized a boycott of Weedon’s station. They handed out flyers: “We can no longer afford to see black people mistreated by honkies without retaliation.” In the early afternoon, more than 130 people gathered, aiming to prevent cars from turning into the gas station. The police showed up; thirty-three people were arrested. The local alternative paper, the Rag, declared that Weedon, a friend of Royal’s and a devoted Longhorn, “is a racist (as well as an all-around bigot who has attacked persons wearing beards).”

  It was a clash of two Austins, which were often divided generationally and culturally over issues of race and war. By the early 1970s, the vibe emanating from the university campus was decidedly tie-dye and granola. The LA Free Press described Austin as a “hippie Palm Springs,” and it grew famous as the birthplace of the cosmic cowboys, country-and-western fans who embraced the counterculture. Nothing Strikes Back was a black-light ice cream joint, open every day except for John Lennon’s birthday. At the Octopus Garden you could get cold fruit juices and “cosmic munchies.” The Delta Diner served up healthy helpings of vegetarian cuisine; “bring yer plate, bowls, glass & implements of destruction,” read an ad. The whole area around the campus had a brown-rice feel. The head shop Maharani sold meditation posters, wedding rings, and shampoos, and at the Whole Earth Provision Company you could get tent supplies and hiking equipment. On game days in the parking lot of Mother Earth, a club not far from campus, you could barter football tickets for weed. Saturday nights could be spent listening to Willie Nelson—for $3 in advance or $4 at the gate.

  Tom Swinnea, who was a teenager from a deeply Baptist suburb of Dallas when he was admitted to UT in 1972, remembered his older brother telling him: “You will not understand Austin till you see a woman breastfeeding on the Drag.” And sure enough, on virtually Swinnea’s first day in town, walking along the sun-drenched commercial strip on Guadalupe Street long known as the Drag, on the university’s western fringe, he saw, to his astonishment, just such a woman.

  That summer of 1974 saw the fifth Austin Gay Pride Parade—needless to say, there weren’t gay pride parades in Tyler. You could catch the psychedelic rocker Roky Erickson playing with the roots rocker Doug Sahm, or Townes Van Zandt, or the young bluesmen Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Van Morrison and Bruce Springsteen played at the Armadillo World Headquarters, a former National Guard armory that had been converted into a live music cavern; the ladies’ room had a mural painted by Royal’s late daughter, Marian. If you missed Sahm at the Armadillo, you could catch him and Clifton Chenier at the Soap Creek Saloon. Just off campus, the Bread and Roses School held courses on socialism: “We need more emphasis on local issues,” a school organizer announced in the Rag. “How banks control our city, who develops Austin and for what, utilities and how people can control them, what can be done about sexism and racism in our public schools, etc.” Seminars included “Marxist Theories of Women’s Oppression” and “Vietnamese Liberation Day Sing Out!” The Bertolt Brecht Memorial Guerrilla Theatre Troupe performed on the UT campus in January 1975—proceeds went to medical supplies for the Vietnamese. That year, university students helped elect one of the most liberal city councils in Austin’s history: the first Latino member; an African American; three women, including o
ne who campaigned on a “Think Trees” slogan; and a Jewish mayor in his thirties. Molly Ivins said it “looked like an affirmative action program gone berserk.”

  The Austin scene was a counterpoint to the sort of buttoned-down discipline that Royal required on the gridiron. Touring the Armadillo one night in 1970 with James Toback, the Harper’s journalist, the writer Bud Shrake, an investor in the club and a friend of Royal’s, explained, “The whole approach they’re into now is antipodal to football: to its competitiveness, its strict regulations, and its violence. They’re trying to be gentle, communal, passive. They’re after a more authentic experience.” Royal, in his way, tried to bridge countercultural and football values. Among his closest friends was Willie Nelson—he once described himself as a “kicked-in-the-head Willie Nelson fan.” He liked to hang out with and host house parties for what he called “pickers”—country-and-western singer-songwriters, among them Johnny Rodriguez, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, and Billy Joe Shaver. “They’ve experienced some of the same life I have,” Royal once said.

  But my ambitions and goals are opposed to some of my picker friends . . . I envy them that they can have the attitude they do. Listen to the words in this song: “Movin’ is the closest thing to bein’ free.” I can’t move to the point where I can’t take care of my responsibilities. How does that Kristofferson song go? “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” What they are saying is that they aren’t willing to sacrifice their freedom for material things. I’m opposed with some of their lifestyles . . . it’s not offensive . . . I just can’t live that way.

  In the same vein, he had told Toback in 1970 that hippies would “like nothing better than to turn on my football players, get them to quit the game and go over to their side.”

  You know why? Because football is the last bastion of traditional American values. It’s the last institution where you have rules to obey—in bed at ten, lights out at eleven, breakfast at seven. Hell, it’s no fun living a Spartan life, but if you want the rewards, the eighty thousand fans cheering for you, the glory, the money, the satisfaction of achievement, you’ve got to do the hard things first. You think I like everything I have to do? I’d say forty per cent of my job is a pain in the ass. But in order to get the sixty per cent, the joy, the sense of fulfillment, I’ve got to put myself through the mill. That’s the kind of thinking the hippies are trying to pull us away from. They’re promising one hundred per cent for nothing. But in the end the only thing nothing will get you is nothing.

  In a sense, Royal, the colossus of the city, bestrode progressive Austin and official Austin. And despite his dig at hippies, he had the whole city—much of the black and Latino East Side, the pols at the Capitol, working-class grannies who had never foot on campus, and, yes, long-haired students—cheering for Longhorn football.

  During this period, the Capitol and the university, the city’s two touchstone institutions, were still slow-walking the implementation of US Supreme Court decisions that were one or two decades old. In 1964, the Court found the state was violating the one-person-one-vote principle—an electoral district in Dallas had a population of 951,527, while an adjacent rural one had 216,371 people—and ordered a redrawing of districts by the state. And so, two years later, in 1966, three African Americans, one of them the famously eloquent, deeply moral Barbara Jordan, became the first black members in the Texas Legislature since 1896. Further reforms ahead of the 1972 election led to changes en masse—at least 70 of the 150 Texas House members were women or people of color, the most diverse freshman class in the history of the legislative body. Mickey Leland, a brilliant, politically skilled antipoverty activist from Houston, shook up the Capitol with his shoulder bags and African garb; he was a “badass—he was the baddest son-of-bitch who ever set forth on the earth,” said Ron Wilson, a classmate and friend of Campbell’s at UT who went to work for Leland.

  The University of Texas had changed in the wake of the Brown decision, but only reluctantly. As late as 1971, three years before Campbell arrived, UT’s entering law school class was absolutely devoid of African Americans. “We have found continued lip-service to non-existent action on the part of the administration,” John L. Warfield, chair of the university’s newly established African and Afro-American Research Center, confided in October 1973 to state representative Senfronia Thompson, a Democrat from Houston: “The failure to aggressively recruit and admit Black students is the most visible failure; however, the micro-presence of Black faculty . . . is a criminal offense in itself. Likewise the university’s failure to demonstrate any positive administrative intent regarding Black curriculum has made what might become an outstanding academic achievement in African and Afro-American affairs a mediocre referral agency of questionable tokenistic value.” That year, 1973, out of 1,600 faculty members at the university, only 13 were African American—and they made, on average, less money than similarly ranked white counterparts.

  When Earl Campbell arrived on campus in the fall of 1974, 12 percent of the state’s population was black—but at the University of Texas there were only 600 black students out of 41,000 (1.5 percent of the total). Out of more than 1,500 students at UT’s law school, only 10 were black. “Sometimes I get the feeling I could go all day without seeing another black face,” one student told the Daily Texan in 1972. The previous year, Ernest White, a black freshman accounting major, told Daily Texan reporters for a story titled “Social Life Called Deficient; UT Blacks Afforded Little Mixing” that he frequently felt “out of place, like when you walk up to someone, and he acts like you’re not there.” “Sometimes you get the feeling you’re naked,” another student said. Gary Bledsoe, a law student who would later lead the Texas chapter of the NAACP, reported in 1975 that a bit of graffiti in one restroom was changed from “niggers don’t graduate from UT law school in three years” to “niggers don’t graduate from UT law school at all,” and then to “we don’t want niggers at UT law school.”

  The UT regents appeared to have little interest in the isolation of black students. In 1974, Allan Shivers, the former governor who had appointed the regents during their resistance to the Brown ruling and who now chaired the board, led his fellow regents to approve $400,000 over four years for scholarship funding, ostensibly to increase diversity at the university; by comparison, they also allotted $500,000 to resurface the freshman football field with synthetic turf. That fall, in a struggle over power at the university, the chancellor ousted the UT president, a botanist who had tried to promote the recruitment of minorities to the faculty, student body, and staff. The following year, in the spring of 1975, UT’s new president, Lorene Rogers, who had been scolded in the school newspaper for pronouncing the word “Negro” as “Nig-rah,” rebuked a group called United Students Against Racism at Texas over its demands regarding the treatment of minorities on campus. The group had asked for the elimination of standardized admissions tests; the creation of a division of minority affairs; departmental status for the Afro-American and Mexican-American Studies programs; funding for black and Chicano newspapers; and the establishment of a grievance committee to hear complaints of racist practices by the faculty and administration. “You convinced us so well to integrate,” Rogers responded, “and now you want to separate.” First they would ask for a department, she told the students, then they would want a school—and finally they would want the entire university.

  Two decades after the Brown decision, the university was dragging its feet so much that some African Americans not even born in 1954 decided to go to UT specifically to hasten the integration of the university. “Coming to UT was a sort of pioneering thing,” Stephanie Friggin, a sophomore from Wichita Falls, told a reporter in 1975. “You came and then other blacks followed. I’m getting the best education in the South and may as well get used to prejudice now and learn to cope and adapt quickly here.” Michael Hurd, who entered UT as a twenty-seven-year-old US Air Force veteran in 1976—Earl Campbell’s junior year—and who had bunked wit
h whites while serving in Vietnam, said it “felt funky walking across campus” as an African American. Students who were friendly within the classroom wanted little to do with him outside it, he said. In a poignant essay, Erna Smith, then an undergraduate interning at the Austin American-Statesman, wrote that being black at UT meant “hoping the next class will have at least one other black person”; “trying to keep a straight face when the classroom discussion turns to American blacks and your white classmates automatically turn to you for expert testimony”; “feeling hollow inside after passing a crowd of whites and overhearing several off-hand racial slurs”; “trying to keep your temper when a well-meaning instructor sympathetically asks if you’re a ‘slow learner’”; “hoping your white roommate’s parents won’t object or create a scene if he or she rooms with a black”; “walking alone across the campus at night and trying not to look suspicious.” “Peer counseling,” she wrote sardonically, “is one black student telling another who are the ‘redneck’ professors.”

  More than four decades later, those four years are seared in Smith’s mind. Now teaching courses in journalism and social justice at UT, she opted to meet me at a crowded café called Thunderbird on the East Side of town—a mile or so on the other side of the interstate from campus. Once the area was dominated by African Americans and Latinos, but today, at this café, at the epicenter of gentrification, she is the only black person around. She said that in the mid-1970s, at the time Earl Campbell was wearing UT’s burnt orange jersey, students had to take a swimming test to show that they could tread water for five minutes. “It was my only class that was predominantly black,” she said ruefully. “I’ll never forget all the kids hanging by the side of the pool.” A freshman-year roommate told Smith that university administrators had asked whether she was willing to room with a black woman—as late as 1972, UT kept dorms segregated by asking future residents to indicate their race on housing contracts. “One black senior spoke of being assigned to live with a black freshman,” Goldstone reports in Integrating the 40 Acres. “‘We have nothing in common,’ the woman said, ‘except our both being Negroes.’” The pressures of being on a predominantly white campus manifested themselves in other ways. Erna Smith’s friend Thomas Collier, an African American student, was stopped several times by campus police because he had a fancy bike. And if more than three African Americans sat outside on the steps of Jester—the dorm that also housed Earl Campbell—the campus police would start swarming around until the students waved their IDs as they continued talking. “It took all my confidence,” Smith said. “It was only getting out of there and getting away from it that I realized I could achieve. I thought I was a second-rate person.”