Forty Minutes of Hell (14 page)

McLendon then went to the head of the physical education department, who happened to be Phog Allen, the basketball coach. Allen claimed that the pool rules were simply for McLendon's safety. McLendon cut a deal on the spot with the KU basketball coach. Keep the pool open—for everybody—for two weeks. If violence or any ugly incident between races occurred, McLendon would retract his request.

McLendon had a plan. Rather than meet the Neanderthal segregationists head-on, he gathered KU's four dozen black students and instructed them
not
to go near the pool for two weeks.

At the conclusion of the allotted two weeks, McLendon returned to Phog Allen. Since no racial incidents had occurred, McLendon—with the help of Dr. Naismith—held Phog Allen to his word.

 

McLendon's gentle touch slowly
helped make room for more aggressive changes decades later. In 1987, the Black Coaches Association elected a popular assistant coach from Iowa, Rudy Washington, as their leader. One BCA goal was to increase the number of head coaching jobs being offered to African-Americans, especially assistant coaches. The BCA enjoyed enormous growth in the next seven years and wielded surprising power.

The group quickly established ties to Nolan Richardson, John Chaney, John Thompson at Georgetown, and George Raveling at USC—the most visible of the nation's black head coaches. Raveling would later retire to work in the gym-shoe industry, leaving the outspoken trio of Richardson, Thompson, and Chaney.

Another issue was Proposition 48, which called for rising requirements of SAT and ACT standards. Chaney—and many experts—insisted the tests were culturally biased against minority students. The issue of reducing the number of men's basketball scholarships
from fifteen was also a concern. Any reduction in scholarships in basketball would have profound effects on African-American high schoolers, who made up nearly two-thirds of the talent in major college basketball. With over three hundred member schools, the NCAA cutting a single scholarship from each team could affect as many as two hundred potential black students across the country.

On January 14, 1989, John Thompson walked off the court at the beginning of a game, protesting the exclusion of black kids from the game due to Proposition 48. Thompson's exit was broadcast nationally. John Thompson was, at that time, the country's most visible and successful black coach in any sport.

Richardson had an epiphany watching the replays of Thompson's exit. “I felt so bad,” he says. “I didn't know what to do. I might not have been a college player or coach if I'd have had to pass the SAT back then.”

Thompson's dramatic move—along with the police dogs incident—reinvigorated Richardson. By all measuring sticks, he had “made it,” but he was beginning to sense that success threatened to distance him from his own past. Thompson's protest somehow made him aware of what his choices might be.

Richardson grew more reflective about his own history. Decades removed, he didn't feel so very far from the Segundo Barrio, despite all his success. Clinging to the fence in the heat at a segregated swimming pool. Watching his Bowie teammates file into a no-Negroes hotel. Listening alone to the radio static of the all-white tournament in Shreveport. These events still felt very current to Richardson.

F
rank Broyles's willful
blindness in the 1960s became the stuff of legend in Arkansas black communities. The list of qualified black players who prepped in Arkansas
while
Broyles was coach—and refusing to desegregate—is damning. Dozens went on to star at other colleges.

Arkansas natives Willie Frazier, Eugene Howard, John Little, and Clarence Washington all had productive NFL careers. Still, the University of Arkansas clung to its backward policies. None of these talented players were allowed to play at the only major school in their state.

It wasn't just Broyles who was ignoring Arkansas black talent. The basketball coaches at the university were blinded, too. Eddie Miles was good enough to play ten NBA seasons but was ignored by Arkansas. Frank Burgess was not recruited by the Razorbacks but led the entire nation in scoring in 1960 when he racked up over 30 points per game at Gonzaga.

The University of Arkansas did not recruit Oliver Jones of Rowher. He went to Albany State instead, where he grabbed over a thousand rebounds, an incredible total, in the early 1960s. The repercussions of ignoring Oliver Jones were enormous, and expose recruiting cycles—or ruts—and the difficulties in overcoming them.

Albany State named Oliver Jones as head coach a few years after he graduated. He'd win nearly four hundred games at Albany State. And for
eighteen seasons
in a row, one of his younger brothers started at center for Albany State: Melvin Jones, Wilbert Jones, Caldwell Jones, Major Jones, and Charles Jones. The Jones brothers weren't just good college players. They would combine for over twenty thousand career points in the NBA or ABA.

Caldwell Jones, who desperately wanted to attend the University of Arkansas, played seventeen years in the ABA and NBA. When Arkansas went cold on him, it sealed things for the next Jones boys in line. Charles Jones won two NBA championships in his fifteen years in the league.

There's no telling how good Arkansas could have been had they hauled in the best black players—especially the six Jones brothers, who surely would have started a basketball dynasty in Fayetteville.

Yet basketball was far ahead of Frank Broyles when it came to pursuing black players.

 

In Broyles's autobiography, which
was published in 1979, he dances around the issue of integration like Gene Kelly in a cloudburst.

“We did not recruit black athletes until the late 1960s,” he wrote. “When I came to Arkansas, there were no black players in the Southwest Conference…Nothing written in a Board policy stated that we were to avoid recruiting blacks, but it was very clearly (though informally) conveyed to me that we would not.

“It was a matter out of my hands and I didn't think about it a great deal.

“I assume there was a feeling on the part of some of our board members that if we unilaterally integrated our athletics program, SEC schools would use it against us and open recruiting strongholds in certain areas of Arkansas.”

It was the SEC's fault, as well as the enigmatic Board, whom Broyles, sadly, had no influence over. While future NFL players were denied a chance to play at the state's only major university, Broyles used the excuse of protecting his white recruits from those vicious vultures to the southeast.

“We fell behind,” Broyles wrote. “All of a sudden it became an issue and people wanted to know why we weren't recruiting black athletes. Our conference had an image to overcome.”

All of a sudden it became an issue.

Blacks within the state either resented the University of Arkansas or became apathetic. Broyles's deafness to the Civil Rights movement would come back to haunt him in recruiting.

 

Lyell Thompson was a
professor of agriculture at the University of Arkansas for years. Thompson, who is white, found himself on campus at the same time the new football coach arrived. An army veteran, he tried to spark a desegregation movement as early as 1958.

Working to end segregation at the University of Arkansas would prove to be a discouraging battle. Thompson was surprised to discover one summer that he would not be getting the raise everyone else in his position was entitled to. “I went four years without a raise, and I was told by the dean, and then the vice-president, that I should go north, where people looked on blacks in the same way.”

In fact, says Thompson, the president and board of trustees were all strongly against desegregation. So was the football coach. “Frank
Broyles was a Southerner, and he didn't want to integrate at all,” Thompson says.

It was his church affiliation, of all things, that got Thompson into hot water. “I had grown up a Methodist, but I had lost my orthodoxy. My Unitarian church group met in the university building on campus. I realize now that we shouldn't have met on campus.” Technically, the meeting was against school policy.

What kind of radical plots were these Unitarian zealots up to? “We came out with statements about desegregation,” Thompson says, and word soon spread around campus. “Frank Broyles brought up the fact that a religious organization was meeting on the university campus.”

The feared Unitarians were exiled and forced to meet elsewhere.

 

After Texas Western and
their all-black starters won the NCAA basketball title in 1966, even the Texas universities began recruiting black athletes. So did the mostly white colleges in the state of Arkansas.

Were they following the leadership in Fayetteville?

Not a chance. Not only would Frank Broyles be slower to desegregate than anyone in the Southwest Conference, the famous coach at the big university was slower than virtually all of the other colleges in Arkansas. Ten white-majority colleges within the state of Arkansas desegregated their sports teams before the University of Arkansas:

1. The College of the Ozarks, which dropped football in the years before they integrated, had a black basketball player in 1963.
   
2. Ouachita Baptist had a black basketball player in 1965, and had a black football player two years later.
   
3. Harding College had eight black basketball and football players in 1966.
   
4. Henderson State added two black basketballers in 1966, two footballers in 1967. (Henderson's Bill Lefear played four seasons in the NFL.)
   
5. Arkansas Tech had a black football player in 1966; in 1968 they added a black basketballer.
   
6. Arkansas-Monticello played a black basketballer in 1967; football in 1968.
   
7. Central Arkansas played a black basketball player in 1967; football in 1968.
   
8. Hendrix College (with no football after 1960) had a black basketball player in 1968.
   
9. Arkansas–Little Rock (who had no football team in the 1960s) featured a black basketball player in 1968.
   
10. Southern Arkansas desegregated basketball in 1967, football in 1969.
    

Only nearby John Brown University was slower than the University of Arkansas. They added a black basketball player in 1973. John Brown the abolitionist is not, obviously, the school's namesake.

On top of that, Arkansas AN&M in Pine Bluff was sending players like L. C. Greenwood to the NFL. (At the time, three historically black colleges were in the state: Philander Smith College, Arkansas Baptist, and Arkansas AN&M, which today is UA–Pine Bluff.)

The Razorback basketball team finally would sign their first black player, T. J. Johnson, in 1967. When would Frank Broyles and Arkansas football follow the lead of virtually every team in the Southwest Conference and every other college in the state?

 

The plights of the
first African-American athletes in the 1960s Southwest Conference foreshadow the experience Nolan Richardson would have as the first person of his race in a leadership role. While the pressure on Richardson would not be nearly as dramatic, a quick
study of the SWC's most important recruit of the 1960s sheds light on the mindset of the league and Frank Broyles.

TCU played the SWC's first black basketball player, James Cash, during the 1966–67 season. Cash led TCU to the SWC title when he was a junior; he would later become a professor at the Harvard Business School.

It was an undersized speedster, however, who changed the face of the Southwest Conference. In 1962, Southern Methodist University hired an assistant named Hayden Fry to be the new football coach. Fry, the least experienced coach in the league, began working to sign an African-American player who perhaps could lift SMU football out of the cellar.

Fry found that player in Jerry LeVias of Beaumont, Texas. While he was not the first black football player to take the field, LeVias was the first superstar in the SWC.

A mere 5'9" and 170 pounds, LeVias was an electrifying halfback and receiver. Like every black kid in Texas at that time, he'd played in the Prairie View Interscholastic League, the Negro poor sister to Texas's all-white University Interscholastic League. Although highly recruited nationally, LeVias chose SMU, which was 1-9 in 1964. He signed with SMU in 1965, but since freshmen were not eligible to compete, LeVias would play for the first time in September of 1966.

Fry knew exactly what kind of impact LeVias would have and appeared to be challenging his SWC rivals. In SMU's press release announcing that LeVias had signed, Fry said, “I hope this signing will open the door for future Negro student-athletes in the Southwest Conference.” SMU claimed a total of five black undergraduates on their campus LeVias's first year. He was one of two African-Americans playing varsity football in the SWC in 1966.

LeVias became perhaps the greatest player in the league history up to that time, and without question the most influential. He caught 155 passes and scored 25 touchdowns in his career. On three occasions he was named All-SWC and would go on to play six years in the
NFL despite his small frame. LeVias was also named to the dean's list at SMU.

LeVias was the subject of abuse from students, and that included his teammates in his early days. He overcame myriad obstacles—hate mail, his teammates yelling “get that nigger” at a Purdue running back, and harassing phone calls.

Death threats were common. One game, LeVias was instructed by Fry to stand in the center of the SMU huddle the entire contest so a threatened assassination would be more difficult. The abuse took a huge toll on him. At a symposium in 2002, when asked if he would choose to do things the same way—sign at SMU, become the first African-American player in the league—LeVias said he would not.

SMU put together two 8-3 seasons with LeVias. They tied for the SWC conference title in his first season, and he led the league in points scored.

Jerry LeVias was a consensus All-American after his final season.

Yet Arkansas football still had not put an African-American player on the field.

And SMU's coach, Hayden Fry, had not come from some liberal Yankee school with progressive tendencies. Fry had been Frank Broyles's assistant at Arkansas.

 

The final two SWC
schools to desegregate their football teams were the most powerful programs—the University of Texas and their coach Darrell Royal, and the University of Arkansas.

Former Arkansas appellate judge and UA graduate Wendell Griffen likes to quote Dr. Martin Luther King when the subject of segregation in Arkansas sports comes up: “Cowardice is a submissive surrender to circumstance.”

“Had it not been for Jerry LeVias,” Griffen adds, “running rings around Royal and Broyles, heaven only knows when black athletes would have been allowed to play at those institutions.”

Fate intervened to permit Arkansas to continue their disgraceful segregationist policies. In 1963, the University of Arkansas Board of Trustees came out with a statement of policy. They were shrewd enough not to say “No blacks allowed.” Instead they instituted a gentler “Keep things as they are” policy. This was the biggest civil rights story in Arkansas since the Little Rock crisis, and it was announced on November 21.

On November 22, John F. Kennedy was killed, and the Arkansas story disappeared.