A book Drew Brees should read: ‘Black Man in the Huddle’
LLANO, Texas — When Texas A&M University last September published Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the Integration of Texas Football, I considered it a profoundly important book and reviewed it for this website. Now, with America awakening to racial injustice, after four centuries of slumber, this book by Robert Jacobus is more important than ever. It was timely in September, more timely now, when even NASCAR, the last bastion of Jim Crow, is calling for drastic reform.
Until George Floyd took the worst sort of knee, white America did not care to know why black Americans are chronically dismayed. When Colin Kaepernick kneeled to call attention to unarmed black people slain by police, white America reacted in horror. Not because young men were being slaughtered but because a flag was being “disrespected.”
We’re not talking about burning this flag, just kneeling before it, instead of standing during the playing of a song written by a slave-owning bigot. Some might wonder when kneeling became a sign of disrespect. What religion? Are white folks overly sensitive or what?
This book will open eyes that must be opened. It could help the suddenly conscious Drew Brees, New Orleans Saints quarterback who played high school ball in Austin, oblivious to what had happened in neighborhoods not so far from his.
Black Man in the Huddle tells the stories, mostly in their own words, of African American pioneers who seized an opportunity that followed the 1954 Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education) that “separate but equal is not equal.”
While some school districts promptly integrated, others in Texas dragged their feet as if they were attached to ball and chain like those of early African immigrants.
Jacobus, a history professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, details the struggles of black athletes who refused to keep waiting.
Ben Kelly, the first African American to play college football in the Confederacy, cleverly maneuvered his way into San Angelo College eight months before Brown was decided. Kelly had led San Angelo Blackshear to the state championship, and he wanted to play college ball in his hometown.
“We’d like to have you,” Coach Max Bumgardner assured him. “But we’re a segregated school. There’s no way I could let you come here and play football for the Rams.”
“Who would have the authority to allow me to go out for your team?”
“The president of the college, Rex Johnston, would be the one.”
Without calling first, Kelly walked into Johnston’s office and made a passionate plea. “If I felt as strongly as you do,” Johnston said, “I’d go to the registrar’s office and enroll.”
Luckily for Kelly, the white people he encountered supported his effort to integrate San Angelo College. A big, powerful running back with a serene disposition, Kelly was treated well by his teammates.
But on the road no hotels would accept him. So Coach Bumgardner would hand him $10 for room and food in the black area of town.
Opponents taunted him with racial slurs and made every effort to crush his bones, but Kelly was indestructible and unflappable. “My mother told me never let someone else’s problem become my problem,” he said. “They have a problem, not me.”
Like Warren McVae, Jerry LeVias and the other heroes of this book, Kelly had a Christ-like willingness to suffer without retaliation.
There’s an interesting and instructive cameo appearance by Jackie Robinson, who was stationed at Fort Hood in Killeen in 1943 and the following year coached basketball at Samuel Huston College in Austin.
Jacobus quotes Texas athletes who knew Robinson attesting to his volatile temper – “why he got kicked out of the military.”
In fact – though Jacobus only hints at it – temperament almost disqualified Robinson from breaking the racial barrier in Major League Baseball. Branch Rickey was afraid he would explode under the relentless pressure of bigotry. The Dodgers’ boss lectured Robinson on turning the other cheek.
The men Jacobus interviewed showed no trace of self-pity. Ben Kelly couldn’t dine with his teammates, but he figured he ate better in the kitchen, where the cooks were his color. Some athletes recall the first time they saw a water fountain under the sign “Colored Only.” Their spirits soared, as they anticipated Kool-Aid instead of clear water.
Jacobus portrays young black people devising feats of civil disobedience that would have made Gandhi proud. Percy Hines punished a restaurant in Orange that posted signs directing “colored people” to the back. He and his many pals walked to the back, ordered their burgers and refused to pay when they were ready. Sudden loss of appetite.
“Within a week, they took down the signs that told us to go to the back and order. From then on we were able to order from the front like the whites.”
Ed Thomas, who helped integrate the San Antonio Jefferson football team, disapproved of a public swimming pool being restricted to whites only.
So he led a large group of black people who jumped into the pool together, “and all the white people got out.” The next day the pool was integrated.
There’s much humor in this book, but of course, many injustices could not be laughed off or easily abolished. When Thomas needed a job, he found that “80 percent of the help-wanted ads in the San Antonio paper requested Anglo applicants.”
Black athletes were met with hate. A billboard proclaimed: “Welcome to Commerce – The Blackest Land and the Whitest People.” It warned visiting football players: “If any niggers run for a touchdown, they will be shot.” Voices from the stands bellowed, “Stop the nigger, stop the nigger.”
A high-schooler walks to his locker, and where his name is supposed to be there’s his number and a strip of tape with the N-word.
And how’s this for the introduction of John Westbrook, the first African American to play football in the Southwest Conference? “Ladies and gentlemen, another Baylor first: colored football for color television.”
Jacobus has written Texas history we’d like to forget but shouldn’t. Now that we’re interested, we cannot hope to comprehend the miseries of black people unless we learn some of the history we were not taught in school. This book is as good a place to start as any.
