'69 Longhorns last all white national champs

[Loco 3752]

Just getting coffee this am and heard this Texas football related story...  Good listen IMHO.  But fair warning it's mostly about integration at UT but it's got a lot of football history. Chocolate Rocket.  

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2020/03/06/texas-football-segregation-marion-ford

 

ps I didn't know where to put this but thought some folks would find it interesting.  and also...  don't cloak this shit up.  Props to UT for taking this head on and not just shredding shit.

 

 

 

[mdmost 42868]

Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming is a good book on the subject as well. It's more about the Game of the Century but it does a great job describing the campus climate at the time and specifically the civil rights struggle on campus and intergration. 

Edited March 7, 2020 by mdmost

[texifornia 56558]

Oh that's why we wear the stormtrooper unis. Its so important to acknowledge your history.

 

 

 

(I'm kidding, obviously, but on this topic people tend to have a hair trigger) 

[Randolph Duke 4034]

1 hour ago, Loco said:

Just getting coffee this am and heard this Texas football related story...  Good listen IMHO.  But fair warning it's mostly about integration at UT but it's got a lot of football history. Chocolate Rocket.  

https://www.wbur.org/onlyagame/2020/03/06/texas-football-segregation-marion-ford

 

ps I didn't know where to put this but thought some folks would find it interesting.  and also...  don't cloak this shit up.  Props to UT for taking this head on and not just shredding shit.

 

 

 

If you are truly interested in this aspect of UT history, start by reading the Supreme Court decisions on Sweatt v Painter and in Fisher v University of Texas. Then look back on how even the most progressive navigated racial integration of post-secondary education. Sweatt’s attorney was, of course, Thurgood Marshall, and the decision in the case was precedent in Brown v Board. 

Sweatt lead UT to become the first major public university in the south to desegregate. History shows the gulf between segregation and racial integration. 

One major problem was that while some schools were integrating, others were still extremely resistant to racial integration. Baylor and A&M were two schools particularly recalcitrant. 

For example, Texas had recruited African-American track athletes in the early 1960s. At UT track track events, parents of athletes could sit with each other in the stands. At Baylor and A&M-hosted events back in the 1960s, school officials would demand parents of black athletes leave the section designated for parents of athletes and moved to the “negroes only” section to sit. 

The totality of how blacks were treated by “traditionally less enlightened” schools inhibited the progress of integrating athletics throughout the SWC. 

DKR had been coaching racially integrated teams since he first became a head coach in the early 1950s and he encouraged minority walk-ons prior to the first black scholarship recipient at UT and that was....wait for it....a gentleman named Leon O’Neal. Leon struggled with grades and transferred to SWTSU. He later lived and coached in Killeen. 

Julius Whittier was the first black letterman. Two thirds gs that helped Julius Whittier succeed was the change started by earlier minority’s athletes and the fact Whittier attended an integrated high school in San Antonio. 

While UT abolished segregated admissions in 1954, it took a while for southern society to change and for black high school education to improve to the point black student athletes were prepared for university-level academics. How blacks in general, and black student-athletes, were treated in the classroom is another discussion. 

Heman Sweatt went on to leave UT law before graduating and moved to Atlanta to work with the Urban League. He would eventually know Rosa Parks and MLK, being with King at the Lorraine Motel when King was shot. 

Edited March 7, 2020 by Randolph Duke

[Tex Pete 20184]

People make a big deal out of this, but times were much different. Our 1970 national championship team wasn’t all white. We were working towards it in 1969. 

[idahorn 26]

Leon O'Neal was a year behind me at Killeen High School; I think he'd been the QB but not sure.  I knew him a little and offered to help him with his classes, but he said he didn't need help.  He, if I recall, played freshman ball and did ok.  He told me he was leaving because the size of the crowds and the stadium intimidated him.  I don't know if there was some racial element in this. We had both grown up in the Army community which was integrated by the time we went to  grade school. Nice kid.

[texifornia 56558]

40 minutes ago, idahorn said:

Leon O'Neal was a year behind me at Killeen High School; I think he'd been the QB but not sure.  I knew him a little and offered to help him with his classes, but he said he didn't need help.  He, if I recall, played freshman ball and did ok.  He told me he was leaving because the size of the crowds and the stadium intimidated him.  I don't know if there was some racial element in this. We had both grown up in the Army community which was integrated by the time we went to  grade school. Nice kid.

I thought this was a long road to a joke about the transferring aggy safety for a sec, gotta admit

[Armybrat 40751]

1 hour ago, idahorn said:

Leon O'Neal was a year behind me at Killeen High School; I think he'd been the QB but not sure.  I knew him a little and offered to help him with his classes, but he said he didn't need help.  He, if I recall, played freshman ball and did ok.  He told me he was leaving because the size of the crowds and the stadium intimidated him.  I don't know if there was some racial element in this. We had both grown up in the Army community which was integrated by the time we went to  grade school. Nice kid.

Hah - you outed yourself as my peer.

When I started kindergarten in 1949 at Camp Hood (as it was known then), our school was integrated.

[ImissWallyPryor 9045]

It’s almost always better to self-examine things you wish didn’t happen because if you don’t, your critics (cough...aggy), will try to make it look like an exposé or - at the very least - something that you want to bury.

Aggy should self-examine their Kow-n-Kream Klub. 

Edited March 7, 2020 by ImissWallyPryor

[ztejas 43266]

2 hours ago, Tex Pete said:

Our 1970 national championship team wasn’t all white.

Well... title.

[NeverMarryAStripper 21781]

[aggy]Sips can’t claim 1970 because they lost they’re bowl game[/aggy]

[Helobious 9483]

It will always be correct to say that the Red Sox were the last MLB team to integrate, that can never change.

Theoretically, it may not always be correct to say UT was the last all white national champion, because an all white team could happen to win a future title though some miracle. Maybe once the sport is reduced to 7 on 7 flag football in 100 years. Point still stands. 

[Tex Pete 20184]

12 hours ago, ztejas said:

Well... title.

We won the 1970 national championship, douchebag. We have the trophy to prove it. 

[Armybrat 40751]

And Tricky Dick said so.

[EastTexan 662]

15 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

And Tricky Dick said so.

Tricky Dick's would be '69. Correct?

 That sentence sounds strange.

[Armybrat 40751]

16 minutes ago, EastTexan said:

Tricky Dick's would be '69. Correct?

 That sentence sounds strange.

You are correct. Brainfart on my part.

[Randolph Duke 4034]

6 hours ago, Tex Pete said:

We won the 1970 national championship, douchebag. We have the trophy to prove it. 

In reality, Texas was voted as #1 team in the nation by the sportswriters. It was their consensus decision. If anyone want to challenge the legitimacy of the decision of the sportswriters more than fifty years after the fact, they should discuss the matter with the sportswriters who voted in that poll. 

Edited March 8, 2020 by Randolph Duke

[Armybrat 40751]

48 minutes ago, Randolph Duke said:

In reality, Texas was voted as #1 team in the nation by the sportswriters. It was their consensus decision. If anyone want to challenge the legitimacy of the decision of the sportswriters more than fifty years after the fact, they should discuss the matter with the sportswriters who voted in that poll. 

A better chance to do that than trying to question anyone on the planet who can recall the last aggy MNC. 

[UDontKnow 10439]

2 hours ago, Armybrat said:

And Tricky Dick said so.

"I am not a crook."

[Randolph Duke 4034]

13 minutes ago, Armybrat said:

A better chance to do that than trying to question anyone on the planet who can recall the last aggy MNC. 

It shows how clueless aggys are when they claim the UT championship isn’t meaningful, yet they somehow convince themselves their 1927 “championship” is legit. 

In 1927, the ags were challenged to a post-season bowl game and they declined. 

I have yet to hear an agroid explain how the vote of the sportswriters in 1970 was somehow invalidated by the UT bowl loss, but their 1927 “championship” was unaffected by their decision to not even play in a bowl game to cap off their “championship season.”

 

Edited March 8, 2020 by Randolph Duke

[Armybrat 40751]

He wasn’t a crook, he was a sleazebag who happened to be a very astute observer.. 

[C-Man 27070]

Let’s be real honest — if aggy were the last all-white team to win a national championship they’d wear that shit like a badge of honor.

[Tex Pete 20184]

3 hours ago, Randolph Duke said:

It shows how clueless aggys are when they claim the UT championship isn’t meaningful, yet they somehow convince themselves their 1927 “championship” is legit. 

In 1927, the ags were challenged to a post-season bowl game and they declined. 

I have yet to hear an agroid explain how the vote of the sportswriters in 1970 was somehow invalidated by the UT bowl loss, but their 1927 “championship” was unaffected by their decision to not even play in a bowl game to cap off their “championship season.”

 

That and they weren’t “awarded” that championship until the 80’s or so. 

[Johnny Sack 8397]

We faced several integrated teams on our schedule.

Believe there was at least one black scholarship player that was on the freshman team in 1967 and 1968, but he or they left the program before 69.  Whittier was on the freshman team in 1969.  So our program was integrated.  Just not the varsity squad.

[Randolph Duke 4034]

4 minutes ago, C-Man said:

Let’s be real honest — if aggy were the last all-white team to win a national championship they’d wear that shit like a badge of honor.

Let’s not forget get that Gene Stallings famously refused to recruit minority athletes at Texas A&M because, as he put it, “going so would create disunity in the locker room.”

And in the fall of 1970, on the eve of the A&M/LSU game that would see Hugh McElroy become the first black athlete to start for the A&M football team, the aggys burned a cross in front of his dorm the night before the game. 

I wonder how many aggys point out the fact that A&M hasn’t won a single national championship in any major NCAA sport with a racially integrated team. Or that A&M has never won a single CWS game without a “racially pure” team, their school still fighting integration in that magical year of 1951 when A&M accumulated 50% of the school’s CWS victories, and racial integration still not having been practiced by the aggys in 1993, the other magical year for aggy baseball. 

 

[Randolph Duke 4034]

13 minutes ago, Johnny Sack said:

We faced several integrated teams on our schedule.

Believe there was at least one black scholarship player that was on the freshman team in 1967 and 1968, but he or they left the program before 69.  Whittier was on the freshman team in 1969.  So our program was integrated.  Just not the varsity squad.

Leon O’Neal is probably who you were thinking of as the first black scholarship football player and who preceded Julius Whittier. The track team had already integrated by the late 1960s. Because of the way parents of black athletes were treated by administrators at especially Baylor and A&M when Texas was playing at those schools, black athletes didn’t want to play for any SWC school. 

We see the stories of aggy fans spitting on PVAMU fans still today. Imagine how much worse it was for parents of black athletes going to watch their kids play at College Station Mack in the 1960s. 

I am friends with a gentleman who was an African-American student at UT at that time (there were fewer than 300). He has a lot of interesting stories to tell of what life was like on campus when he was a student. 

Edited March 8, 2020 by Randolph Duke

[Not a cat 5622]

22 hours ago, Helobious said:

 

Theoretically, it may not always be correct to say UT was the last all white national champion, because an all white team could happen to win a future title though some miracle. Maybe once the sport is reduced to 7 on 7 flag football in 100 years. Point still stands. 

I suppose it's theoretically possible that concussion concerns reduce the game solely to deep snapping, placekicking and punting.