Originally Posted by
Mr KLC
Elmo Wright was exactly the type of recruit Darrell K. Royal needed in 1966. He had only started playing receiver at East Texas’s Sweeny High during his senior year, but he was a natural; he once scored five touchdowns in a game. He had the talent to play anywhere, but he knew what his top choice was. “I’d love to go to the University of Texas,” he told his coach. “I’d like to be the first Afro-American to play there.”
As Asher Price writes in his deeply researched and reported biography, Earl Campbell: Yards After Contact (UT Press), Royal invited Wright to visit Austin and spoke with him in his office. “You’re going to have to be like Jackie Robinson,” the legendary coach told him.
After the meeting, Royal called Wright’s high school coach. “He’s the real deal, grades and everything,” Royal said. “But, unfortunately, at this stage of the game we’re not ready to take that step.” Wright ended up at the University of Houston, where he was named an All-American receiver and, among other things, invented the end zone dance, and then went on to play five seasons in the NFL.
Earl Campbell, as an eleven-year-old living in Tyler when Royal dashed Wright’s dreams, was no stranger to racism either. If Campbell wanted to buy a hamburger at the local diner, he had to get his food to go, served out of the back door. On his way home, he and his brothers often ran, to avoid trouble with white neighbors.
Both the Longhorns football team and the Tyler school system were finally integrated in 1970, sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education and a few years before Campbell got to join the team from which Wright had been barred. He was, in short, a target of some of the worst prejudice that America had to offer and a witness to the profound changes in race relations that occurred in the middle of the last century. Price, a longtime reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, makes the most of Campbell’s prominence at such a pivotal moment, using Campbell’s experiences to unravel the ugly history of integration in Texas—first in Tyler, then in Austin, and finally in Houston.