The accepted narrative in football-crazy Texas is that racial integral
came to the state's "national sport" in the mid-1960s, generally
associated with Jerry LeVias' celebrated arrival at SMU in Dallas. But
the landmark achievement actually took place quietly almost a decade
earlier only about an hour north of Dallas. In the town of Denton, two
black football players from Dallas' segregated public school system
boldly walked on to play for what was then called North Texas State
College--known today as the University of North Texas. Abner Haynes and
Leon King didn't know what to expect, and neither their dozen or so
teammates on North Texas' freshman team.
The players' arrival came only a few months after North Texas first
welcomed a black undergraduate student in February 1956. The school
worked its way through both that episode and the integration of its most
public face--the football team--with no fanfare and without the
hostility on campus that accompanied similar events at many other
colleges and universities across the South. There were, though, tense
situations when a racial integrated football team played road games in
small, segregated Texas towns. Jeff Miller, a veteran Texas sports
journalist, has visited with those who lived through it--from the mixed
welcome that Haynes and King initially received from their white
freshman brethren to those same teammates standing with them after the
two blacks were denied service at eateries on the road to a squad that
grew into a Bowl team.
In The Game Changers, Miller ties the tale of what happened at North
Texas beginning in 1956 to contrasting events that took place not far
away that reverberated into national relevance. He also chronicles the
continued racial integration of major college football in Texas
throughout the 1960s.
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