Black Man in the Huddle tells us Texas history we’d like to forget
Robert D. Jacobus is a skilled writer, but in Black Man in the Huddle he steps back and leaves most of the sentences to dozens of retired athletes he interviewed. It’s their story and they tell it well.
This is an important book, published by Texas A&M University Press, that unsparingly portrays the era of racial integration that followed, ever so haltingly, the groundbreaking Supreme Court decision in 1954, Brown v. Board of Education.
“Separate but equal is not equal,” the court stated. Seems obvious today, but it was a shocking revelation to most white Americans at the time Earl Warren and eight other justices made their unanimous ruling.
Jocobus, history professor at Stephen F. Austin State University, appreciates the significance of Brown, how it set in motion the rise of black athletes and ultimately the entire race.
But while some school districts obeyed the highest court, Jacobus points out that many in Texas dragged their feet like they were attached to ball and chain.
When I attended junior high in Orange, bordering Louisiana, there were no African Americans in my school in 1965. They had their own school, newer than mine, and I was envious. Theirs had air conditioning; ours did not.
The local government of Orange obtained agreement from black leaders to allow segregation to continue as long as blacks got superior, rather than equal, treatment.
The white rulers clung to segregation as long as they could, no matter the cost. This book shows the struggles of talented black athletes who refused to keep waiting. At great personal risk, oblivious to death threats, they blazed their trails into previously all-white Texas high schools and colleges and onto their football fields.
Consider Ben Kelly, the first African American to integrate a college football team in the Confederacy. He quietly and cleverly maneuvered his way into San Angelo College eight months before the Brown case was decided.
Kelly had led San Angelo’s Blackshear High to the state football title, and he wanted to play college ball in his home town. “We’d like to have you,” Coach Max Bumgardner assured him. “But we’re a segregated school, and there’s no way I could let you come here and play football for the Rams.”
Kelly asked him, “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 proceeded to Johnston’s office, was granted an audience and made a passionate plea. “If I felt as strongly about it as you do,” Johnston said, “I’d go over to the registrar’s office and enroll.”
Luckily for Kelly, none of the white people he encountered opposed his effort to integrate San Angelo College. A big, powerful running back with a serene disposition, Kelly was treated well by his teammates.
But road trips presented obstacles. No hotels would accept him, so Bumgardner would hand him $10 to obtain a room and food in the black area of town.
Opponents taunted him with racial slurs and made every effort to injure him, but Kelly stayed calm: “My mother told me to never let someone else’s problem become my problem. They have a problem, not me.”
Kelly exhibited the one remarkable trait shared by Warren McVae, Jerry LeVias and all the pioneers in this book: a Christ-like willingness to suffer without retaliation, which could lead to brawling and then suppression.
There’s an interesting cameo appearance by Jackie Robinson, who was stationed at the Army base of 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 the need to turn the other cheek.
In all the heroic young men who grace the pages of this book there’s a surprising lack of self-pity. Ben Kelly couldn’t eat in the dining room with his white teammates, but he figured he ate better being in the kitchen, where the cooks were his color.
Some athletes recall the first time they saw a water fountain with the sign “Colored Only.” They thought that meant Kool-Aid instead of clear water.
Jacobus provides accounts of young black people performing feats of civil disobedience that would make Gandhi proud. Percy Hines tells of a restaurant in Orange that posted signs directing “colored people” to the back. So he and his many pals walked to the back, ordered their burgers, but refused to pay for them 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 a group of black people jumped into the pool all at once, “and all the white people got out.” The next day the pool was integrated.
But of course, many injustices were not easily abolished. When Thomas looked for a job, he found that “80 percent of the help-wanted ads in the San Antonio paper requested Anglo applicants.”
Black football players were greeted with hate. A billboard proclaimed: “Welcome to Commerce – The Blackest Land and the Whitest People.”
Visiting teams were warned: “If any niggers run for a touchdown, they will be shot.”
Voices from the stands bellowed, “Stop the nigger, stop the nigger.”
A high-school athlete walks to his locker, and where his name is supposed to be there’s a strip of tape with the dreaded 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.”
Robert Jacobus has written about a part of Texas history we might like to forget. We shouldn’t.
