TEXAS -- I will now add that Jerry LeVias  was technically not the first black player in SWC history. Let’s return to the  summer of 1964, nearly a year before LeVias signed a scholarship offer with  SMU.

  John Westbrook, then entering  his senior year at Washington High School in Elgin, stepped into the offices of  the coaching staff at Baylor University and told them of his plans to enroll  there and perhaps play football.

  Westbrook, the son of a Baptist  minister, had been ordained at age 15, and Baylor was a Baptist school, so why  not? Well, for one thing, the BU Board of Trustees had only integrated the  university in November 1963, and no word had been said about athletics. Like  most white Texans back then, they did not want to think about a black guy  wearing the green and gold of the Baylor Bears.

  Coach John Bridgers and chancellor Abner McCall may not have been eager, but  they decided to let Westbrook walk on as a freshman in 1965. He was one of just  seven black students on a campus of 7,000, the large majority of whom were sons  and daughters of the South.

  Hostility and isolation were the  norm, although to be fair to those people, they were feeling their way in an  integrated world, too. Westbrook’s arrival on the Baylor football team was  utterly unheralded. His time in the 40-yard dash made him one of the fastest  players on the team, but he hardly got on the field that season.

  Freshman coaches like Milburn  “Catfish” Smith and Ramsey Muniz did all they could to discourage Westbrook  with verbal taunts and brutal three-on-one drills. He was ignored by most of  his teammates and goaded by a few others.

  And to make matters worse, some of the black people in Waco regarded him as an  Uncle Tom for even making the attempt to integrate Bear football. His lonely  fight, however, was made easier by the support and reassurance of Eucolia Erby,  a small black man who had known Westbrook’s father.

  Erby came to practices, watched  and encouraged him and told him repeatedly, “Don’t quit.” His coach, Bridgers,  made the decision, at the end of spring training, to award him a scholarship.  That alone permitted Westbrook to stay at Baylor.

  On September 10, 1966 (one week before SMU’s opener in which Jerry LeVias began  his fabulous career), Baylor hosted Syracuse. The Bears were ahead by 22 points  midway through the fourth quarter when Bridgers sent Westbrook into the game,  making history.

  His three years at Baylor were  not too productive, as he scored just two touchdowns and gained no more than  250 yards and suffered a serious knee injury and two concussions meted out, he  believed, by his own teammates and coaches on the practice field.

  Just as LeVias was the subject  of unimaginable abuse, so was Westbrook, but it was not as intense because he  was not nearly the star LeVias was. Nevertheless, he suffered mightily.  Westbrook once drove his ancient Studebaker to Lake Waco and contemplated  rolling it into the water, ending his pain. On another occasion, he swallowed a  fistful of aspirin.

  He graduated from Baylor with an English degree in 1969 and declined offers to  try out for the Cincinnati Bengals and Atlanta Falcons. Westbrook earned a  master’s degree from Southwest Missouri State, served as pastor at churches in  Tyler and Houston and spoke at several Billy Graham crusades.

  In 1978, he ran a shoestring  campaign for lieutenant governor and got 23 percent of the vote in the  Democratic primary. Westbrook died on December 17, 1983 of a blood clot in one  of his lungs. His funeral drew an overflow crowd and a list of eulogizers that  included Governor Mark White and Houston Mayor Kathy Whitmire.

  One of his teammates on the BU football team, Jackie Allen, recalled him thus:  “No one will ever know what all John went through. He took on the role of a  pioneer and should have known that they go into uncharted waters and that  difficulties will be encountered, and that is just what happened.”

  Westbrook described his four years at Baylor as the most miserable time of his  life. “I got such a bad taste of college athletics,” he said in a 1972 oral  history project with Drs. Thomas Carlton and Rufus B. Spain. “But because of  football, I got an education."

  "I learned how to live. I  don’t hate football. Football isn’t dirty. It’s some of the people in football  who make it dirty. I could talk for two more hours and get bitter. I’ve been  able to forget a lot of the bad, and it’s not fun to recall.”

  Having covered Warren McVea of Houston, Jerry LeVias of SMU and John Westbrook  of Baylor, I will now summarize the first black players at the other SWC  schools. First, however, I should add that having just one or two on a team was  not truly integration so much as tokenism.

  Still, the athletic directors  and coaches had to start somewhere, and I don’t mean to downplay the conflicts  inherent to the integration process. There were always problems, always  conflicts, always issues that had to be worked out over the years. It did not  matter whether it was a big state school or a small church school, integrating  the football team was never easy.

  Texas A&M, which only admitted its first black students in 1963, had a  black varsity player four years later. Receiver Sammy Williams, a walk-on from  Houston, made the team but evidently did not play in the Aggies’ championship  run in 1967.

  The next season, Hugh McElroy  was another walk-on receiver who was best known for catching a game-winning  touchdown pass against LSU in 1970. A&M did not have a varsity black  recruit until 1971, and his name was Jerry Honore. Emory Bellard deserves  credit for being the first SWC coach to start recruiting black players in large  numbers in the mid-1970s.

  Next up is TCU. The Horned Frogs had recruited James Cash to play basketball  shortly after SMU signed LeVias. Cash was an outstanding hoopster from 1967 to  1969 (followed by an equally successful academic career culminating with a spot  on the Harvard faculty), but it only happened after a serious power struggle in  the highest reaches of the TCU administration.

  The school’s first black  football player was Linzy Cole, a junior college recruit who caught 53 passes,  scored 12 touchdowns and averaged 20 yards on punt returns and 25 on kickoff  returns. Cole later played for the Chicago Bears, Houston Oilers and Buffalo  Bills.

  The 1971 TCU team was full of  racial dissension; there were black players like Raymond Rhodes, Larry Dibbles  and Danny Colbert, but they were not pleased with dreary social lives nor with  the authoritarian ways of the coaching staff. Some quit or transferred, while  others stayed in Fort Worth but without enthusiasm.

  Danny Hardaway, quite a high school star in Lawton, Oklahoma, had no shortage  of scholarship offers, so some people were surprised when he chose Texas Tech.  Besides playing on the Red Raiders’ freshman football team in 1967, he scored  14 points per game for the frosh basketball team.

  He was 6-foot-3, weighed 206  pounds and ran the 40 in 4.7 seconds, and some fans expected Hardaway to  replicate Donny Anderson, the recently departed two-time all-American. It was  not to be, however. Hardaway led Texas Tech in rushing in 1969 but lost his job  in 1970 and played mostly as a kick returner. He developed academic troubles  and soon left school.

  No other Southwest Conference institution had such difficulties integrating as  Rice since its founder, William Marsh Rice, had specifically limited the  student body to “white males from Harris County.” While women and non-Harris  County residents were gradually admitted, the racial clause remained in force  until 1965 when the Rice administration went to court to have it overturned.

  Three years later, the Owls  signed three black players: defensive back Mike Tyler, linebacker Rodrigo  Barnes and quarterback/running back Stahle Vincent. Tyler and Barnes were  assertive and independent, while Vincent was the opposite, a guy who practiced  hard, played hard and never complained.

  Coach Bo Hagan had the courage  to start him at quarterback in 1969, a decade before some other schools would  consider such a thing. By 1971, Vincent had been moved to running back, where  he gained 945 yards and was named all-conference. He played briefly for the  Pittsburgh Steelers.

  The last two SWC schools were, in terms of football, the most significant --  the University of Arkansas and the University of Texas. I will start with the  Razorbacks. Darrell Brown was a freshman walk-on running back at Arkansas in  1965, the same year Jerry LeVias was starting out at SMU and John Westbrook at  Baylor.

  Brown’s story is fairly  dramatic. On the practice field and in the few games in which he played, his  offensive teammates sometimes refused to block for him and even engaged in  racist group chants. Thus he never made it to the varsity. But he might have if  head coach and athletic director Frank Broyles had made it clear to everyone  that Brown was to be treated fairly.

  One assistant coach, in  particular, took it upon himself to harass and discourage Brown as much as  possible. Brown had the last laugh, though, graduating on time from UA and then  its law school before becoming a prominent attorney in Little Rock.

  As a result, Arkansas delayed integration for five more years. That was with  Jon Richardson, a fast and flashy runner who played from 1970 to 1972. In his  first game, on national television against Stanford, Richardson caught a  37-yard TD  pass, the first of 11 scores his sophomore year.

  A broken leg in 1971 slowed his  progress and made him primarily a kick returner the rest of his career.  Richardson, like so many others before him, felt pressure from all sides --  whites who hated and feared what he represented, and his own people who called  him an Uncle Tom. Richardson died of a heart attack in January 2002.

  And that brings us to the University of Texas. There is plenty to admire about  UT and plenty to criticize. Texas’ flagship institution before A&M rose to  that level, the wealthiest, the biggest, the one with the most alumni, the one  just a mile from the state capital, could have and should have been the first  to integrate its football program, and the others undoubtedly would have  followed suit.

  Marion Ford, who had been a star  at Wheatley High School in Houston, was among UT’s first black undergraduates.  In the 1956 season, the Longhorns were horrible, en route to a 1-9 record. So  Ford went to coach Ed Price and volunteered to come out for the team. “I was a  cocky son of a bitch in those days,” Ford recollected. “I said, ‘Ed, I could  help your team. You need me.’ And he said, ‘Listen son, it’s out of my hands.  The policy is just too strong.’”

  Ford went on to roll up an  impressive list of academic honors, graduating magna cum laude in chemical  engineering, with two advanced degrees and a Fulbright scholarship. If nothing  else, Marion Ford obliterated the SWC coaches’ lame excuse that they could not  find academically qualified black players.

  Ford’s encounter with Ed Price  was in 1956, ten years before Jerry LeVias and John Westbrook integrated the  SMU and Baylor football teams. What a difference it would have made if Price  had taken a stand and let Ford be the first black Longhorn.

  Price got fired after that awful season and was replaced by a more familiar  name, Darrell Royal. Royal, of course, would be the dominant figure in Texas  football for the next two decades, during which the Horns won 164 games and  three national championships.

  While Royal is alleged to have  made racist statements in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they were never  substantiated. Furthermore, many things in his private life indicate a  self-made man who went out of his way to befriend and help black people. But he  did not integrate when he had the chance. Royal’s 1963 team won the national  title, he was voted national coach of the year, he had been given a  professorship with tenure by the UT administration (an unheard-of move at the  time), and Oklahoma, his alma mater, wanted him to come home.

  In other words, Royal was in a  very strong position. But he dithered and waited and found reasons and excuses.  He sat on his hands and let others, such as Hayden Fry and John Bridgers, do  the hard work of integrating SWC football. He claims to have tried to recruit  Bubba Smith, Warren McVea and Jerry LeVias, but I am doubtful. During those  crucial years when his supposedly racist image was being made, Royal failed to  act, and that remains the biggest mistake of his coaching career.

  In retrospect, Royal admitted, “If you’re saying we should have done it sooner,  I agree with you. All of us should have, not just the University of Texas. When  LeVias hit in 1966, that was when people began to change their attitudes, and  let me say a lot of us needed some attitude changes…. Some people did question  the old ways, and that’s the reason we had the change. Now, today, I can look  back and wonder why I didn’t question it.”

NEXT: More  trailblazers and the impact of Sam "Bam" Cunningham.