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  • Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the Integration of Texas Football by Robert D. Jacobus
  • Andrew R. M. Smith
Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the Integration of Texas Football. By Robert D. Jacobus. Foreword by Annette Gordon-Reed. Swaim-Paup Sports Series. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2019. Pp. xx, 255. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-62349-751-4.)

At a glance, using a sport, which measures progress by the inch, strictly enforces its long list of rules by penalizing every infraction, and almost always anoints a victor at the end of a finite time frame, to view the long arduous process of racial integration in American education appears misguided. However, the nuances of American football require twenty-two players to perform specific tasks on every play, often in unequal two-against-one situations, and frequently push the boundaries of the rules as far as possible without committing an obvious penalty—while regularly stopping the clock. Football might be an appropriate lens to view desegregation after all. In Black Man in the Huddle: Stories from the Integration of Texas Football, Robert D. Jacobus traces the arc from Sweatt v. Painter (1950) to Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and through another decade of conflicting legal interpretations as desegregation happened to black student athletes in Texas. The collection of rich stories that make up the book illuminates the racial and regional nuances—and the significance of sport—in leveling the playing field of American education. [End Page 529]

Jacobus conducted more than 250 interviews to inform this oral history of integrating Texas football. The book is encyclopedic in nature, yet lightly editorialized, so that the book reads as a series of stories, often directly quoted, from those who participated in breaking racial barriers as high school or college student athletes. Through the chorus of voices a few refrains rise. Many remembered coaches hustling them from the field to the bus as spectators from another town hurled insults or threats. While virtually all the interviewees were denied seating, if not food, at restaurants when the team traveled, several shared the same experience of white teammates refusing to sit or eat without them, applying pressure on the bulwarks of Jim Crow mores.

However, the diversity of experiences and opinions is the strength of the book. Readers are swept across the state and must reckon with stark disparities between how school integration was implemented from the Gulf Coast to the Texas Panhandle, in urban centers and rural communities. The memories of Latino football players underscore how those racial lines blurred for Latinx students. Although football fields in Texas integrated with more “deliberate speed” than public schools in other southern states, as evidenced by a “fully integrated” game between Robstown High School and Refugio High School in September 1955, Jacobus’s interviewees remind readers that it was far from a seamless transition (p. 66).

After their high school careers, black Texas football players realized few opportunities to play in their home state, beyond historically black colleges and universities like Texas Southern University. An exodus of those seeking better scholarships and services from postsecondary institutions on the West Coast or in the North, especially in the Big Ten Conference, followed. These oral histories document both push and pull factors, including a network of coaches who began recruiting black student athletes from Texas high schools in an “Underground Railroad” to Big Ten programs (p. 182). But even at these integrated institutions, the persistence of racial conflict over issues from positional stacking—excluding black players from positions typically associated with leadership roles—to restricting facial hair resulted in team boycotts and player expulsions. These oral histories, without explicitly stating it, intersect with Harry Edwards’s The Revolt of the Black Athlete (New York, 1969) and make these Texas memories part of a national narrative. Black Man in the Huddle is a valuable resource for new interview material at the nexus of race, sport, and education in Texas that scholars and students can use to forge broader connections across time and space.

Andrew R. M. Smith
Nichols College
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