GAME, SET MATCH you stupid moron. Julius Whittier was a member of the 69 teamSunCoastSooner wrote:BULLSHIT!!! Texas first black football player on the varsity team was Julius Whittier in 1970!!! Fucking myopic, burnt orange shade wearing, moron.Vito Corleone wrote:BTW I'm not sure when Texas fully integrated but we had African American players on our 69 championship team, so kiss my ass.
http://richardpennington.com/index.php? ... 8&Itemid=1
http://www.statesman.com/sports/content ... lrace.html
Go explore that Adrian Peterson crack ring some more and stop sticking your foot in you proverbial internet mouth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/sport ... ner/rssnyt
Changing the Face of Texas Football
By JOE DRAPE
Published: December 23, 2005
AUSTIN, Tex., Dec. 16 - It was Dec. 6, 1969, and Julius Whittier was stretched before a television in the lobby of the jocks' dorm, Jester Hall, when the euphoria of a heart-stopping victory lifted him, and most University of Texas students, outside onto Guadalupe Street. Texas had just beaten Arkansas, 15-14, in Fayetteville in what had been billed as the Game of the Century.
Under Coach Darrell Royal, the 1969 Texas Longhorns team that won the national championship was the last all-white team to do so.
President Richard M. Nixon appeared in the locker room to declare the undefeated Longhorns as national champions. Whittier was a member of the Texas football team, but as a freshman he was not eligible to play varsity at the time.
He was also the only black football player at Texas. As Whittier pinballed amid the revelers on the main drag here, he had an epiphany, one about the unifying elements within football that he would lean on for years.
"I had never experienced the exhilaration and joy of celebration where I was participating with what looked like millions of other kids my age," Whittier recalled recently at his law office in Dallas. "It did not matter that they were almost all white."
Neither Whittier nor anyone else knew that the time-capsule moment they were celebrating would become an inglorious milestone: the 1969 Longhorns were the last all-white team to win a national college football championship.
When Texas was co-national champion with Nebraska the next year, Whittier was a backup offensive lineman and the Longhorns' first black letterman. He acknowledged that he had endured indignities, but said his life experiences were expanded as much as those of his white teammates.
By playing at Texas, Whittier received advice from former President Lyndon B. Johnson over lunch at his ranch, and learned to love the music of Willie Nelson.
"I was a jock, plain and simple," he said. "I didn't care about civil rights or making a mark. I just wanted to play big-time football."
Whittier, however, is intensely interested in the Jan. 4 Rose Bowl, the national title matchup between defending champion Southern California and Texas. He is proud that about half of the players on the Longhorns' roster are black, including the star quarterback Vince Young.
"It completes the circle from a team that had no blacks to a truly diverse one, one with a black athlete in the ultimate leadership position - quarterback - of the university's most prized institution," Whittier said.
William Henry Lewis was the first black player in major college football at Amherst from 1889 to 1891, then at Harvard from 1892 to 1893, when he was a law student. At the time, both teams played schedules of national prominence, according to the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind. Bill Willis, a tackle for the 1942 Ohio State Buckeyes, was the first black player on a national championship team.
In the South, however, all-white teams were the norm into the late 1960's as the region was slow to embrace civil rights, especially in something as cherished as college football. Jerry LeVias might have integrated the Southwest Conference in 1966 at Southern Methodist University, but on that December day in 1969 with Nixon in the stands, the top-ranked Longhorns were facing another all-white team in No. 2 Arkansas, a Southwest Conference rival.
"How's that song go?" said Darrell Royal, the Longhorns coach who won three national titles from 1957 to 1976. " 'Things they are a-changing. But they weren't changing that quickly around here at the time."
When Royal arrived here, he was 32 and fresh from head-coaching stints at the University of Washington and with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. He had coached black players at both stops.
The University of Texas admitted black students in 1956, but did not lift its ban on their playing varsity sports until 1963. Even then, Royal acknowledged, there was tacit pressure from university regents for him not to rush to integrate the football team.
In 1967, Royal and his staff recruited a local star named Don Baylor, who was also a gifted baseball and basketball player. He grew up in west Austin, knowing that downtown there were separate water fountains for blacks and whites, had integrated his junior high school, and dreamed of breaking the color barrier at Texas.
Baylor wanted to play all three sports, something universities like Stanford, Oklahoma and Texas Western would allow. Royal wanted him to play only football. Baylor would not say that Royal and Texas made a halfhearted attempt to lure him, but he said they were relieved when the Baltimore Orioles drafted him.
"The Southwest Conference and U.T. was not ready to break the color barrier," said Baylor, who had a distinguished 19-year major league career and later managed the Colorado Rockies and the Chicago Cubs. "The Orioles took the pressure off Texas."
In the fall of 1968, Royal believed he had found the right young man to integrate his team in Julius Whittier. The previous season, a black student named E. A. Curry walked on and made the freshman team, but he struggled academically and quit. Royal's first black scholarship player in 1968, Leon O'Neal, stayed for only one year.
Billy Dale, who scored the winner against Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl on Jan. 1, 1970, said he lost his friends by rooming with Julius Whittier.
Royal believed Whittier had the will and the preparation to remain for four years. Whittier had been a star at an integrated high school in San Antonio. His father, Oncy, was a doctor. His mother, Loraine, was a schoolteacher and community activist who had led protests against a local grocery chain that prohibited black women from becoming cashiers.
Whittier said his uncle Edward Sprott was head of the N.A.A.C.P. in Beaumont, Tex., and had not been intimidated when his house was bombed. His older brother, also named Oncy, had his head cracked open by police officers for his involvement in a guerrilla theater troupe that performed pointed skits about prejudice in the streets of San Antonio, Whittier said.
Royal described Whittier as "smart and tough and a heck of a football player."
He added, "I knew he could play for us and handle any difficulties off the field."
Whittier said he turned two personal flaws into powerful tools of perseverance. He was not only confident to the point of cockiness, but also had a gift for oratory that continues to serve him well as a trial lawyer.
"I had a mouth that I ran a lot and coherently," he said. "It sounded like I knew what I was saying, and that protected me."
Whittier also struggled with attention deficit disorder.
"It kept me so wrapped up in the events of each moment, class, workout, dinner, study hall, practice, game, new friend I made, new football play I learned, and each paper I had to turn in," he said. "I had no real time or hard-drive space in my brain to step back and worry over how potentially ominous it was to become a black member of the University of Texas football team and all of the horrifying things that, from a historical perspective, could happen to black people who dare to accept a role in opening up historically white institutions."
Whittier recognized slights by teammates. He was never invited out drinking or to parties with his teammates. And though racial slurs were never directed at him, Whittier heard them when his fellow Longhorns forgot he was in the room.
Before Whittier's sophomore season, Royal had trouble finding him a roommate. He called in some of his seniors, explained the situation. One of them, running back Billy Dale, volunteered.
The year before, Dale scored the game-winning touchdown against Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl to keep alive Texas' winning streak, which eventually reached 30 games. He was also among the most popular players on the team - until then.
"I lost all my friends," said Dale, now a manufacturer's representative in Austin. "I chose to live with Julius because I believed it would add that much more dimension to me as a person."
One night as the two readied for bed, Whittier engaged Dale in an argument about mortality.
"Billy, I'm never going to die," Whittier told Dale, "and you are."
The longer the exchange went the more Dale became frustrated.
"I crossed the room and put a finger in Julius's eye and said, 'It's people like you who give your race a bad name,' " Dale recalled.
"You think, I'm serious, Billy?" Whittier responded with a smile. "I'm just trying to make you think."
They never exchanged cross words again.
It was Whittier's engaging personality that made him one of Royal's favorites and got him on Johnson's guest list. Johnson was crazy about Texas football and occasionally asked Royal to take players to his ranch. It was Johnson who suggested that Whittier continue his studies at the university's new school of public affairs. He earned a master's degree there, before he became a lawyer.
Whittier's success on and off the field - he was a three-year letterman and a starter his junior and senior year - paid immediate dividends for Texas. Roosevelt Leaks came here in 1971 and Earl Campbell in 1974, and they became all-American running backs. Soon, one of the set pieces for prospective players was Johnson's landing by helicopter on the lawn of his presidential library on campus to tell them why they should play for Texas.
Thirty-six years after Whittier watched his white teammates defeat Arkansas, much has changed in the Texas football program. Jester Hall remains, though it is no longer strictly an athletic dorm. Royal, now 81, remains a campus fixture, though one who concedes he could have been more aggressive in integrating his team earlier.
And Dale remains active in the Longhorns letterman association.
"All those people I had lost as friends by rooming with Julius are friends again," he said. "We've all grown."
Whittier, too, remains in touch with Royal. He now has a far easier relationship with his former teammates than he had when he was a college student.
"When I see guys from my era, I feel a sense of comradeship," Whittier said. "I never was going to hold on to any of the bad stuff, and neither have they."
He will watch Vince Young and the No. 2 Longhorns try to upend the No. 1 Trojans from his couch at home in Dallas with the same anticipation and joy that he had as a pioneering Texas freshman. Whittier will root for another championship, another time-capsule moment, but one that will not be marred by a footnote about race. He is hoping his role in Texas football history is further diminished.
"You know that football is a religion in Texas," he said. "God and the university had the right people in the right places to handle my situation. It turned out to be a small event in the long and luminous life of a great and valuable institution."
