StarTelegram & NT Ex Bob Ray Sanders Today Touts

PlummMeanGreen · July 6, 2005

You who link please find Bobby Ray Sanders column today.

He writes about the NT Trailblazers which are some of NT's African Amercan alums and the trails of integration they blazed back in the mid 1950's and 1960's. He writes about Abner Haynes, Leon King, Mean Joe Green and the significant part they all played in integrating NT.

Harry · July 6, 2005

http://www.dfw.com/mld/dfw/news/12064789.htm

Posted on Wed, Jul. 06, 2005 R E L A T E D C O N T E N T

NORTH TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY YEARBOOK

Bob Ray Sanders' colleagues on the 1969 Yucca, the North Texas State University yearbook, conspired to keep him from seeing this photo until publication: It's his starring role on campus in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

Honoring the true trailblazers

By Bob Ray Sanders

Star-Telegram Staff Writer

As an editor for my college yearbook at North Texas State University, I should have seen all the pages before the '69 Yucca went to press.

But my journalism colleagues had deliberately kept one page from me, though not out of disrespect or as an act of youthful mischief. They simply wanted to surprise me.

The yearbook staff had composed a two-page spread covering, through words and photos, a few "firsts" and some milestones at the university during the academic year.

Those events included an outdoor rock concert that Denton police shut down for being too noisy, NTSU's first Negro History Week and a split in the Young Democrats that forced cancellation of a musical to bring students together to raise bond money for those arrested on marijuana charges.

The photographs on the page included one of "Mean" Joe Greene standing in a crowd of fans and one of me standing in a spotlight on a stage.

Greene, the school's first All-American, had his number, 75, retired that year, and I, as a favor for a classmate who was a speech-and-drama major, had accepted the lead role in a student-directed production of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones.

At the ceremony to retire Greene's number, the university's new president, John Kamerick, said of the football star, "You've done more for North Texas than North Texas has done for you."

He was right.

As for the theater production, it probably would have gone unnoticed except that it came a few months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the pre-publicity, featuring a photo of a fierce black Emperor Jones arguing with the mean white Smithers, caused a stir on campus.

Even though the play was staged in the drama department's small Studio Theater, the fact that a black student for the first time had a starring role, opposite one of the department's most respected actors, Bruce Saperston, meant that a record number of African-American students showed up. It was standing room only.

Keep in mind, this was just a few years after integration, and black students, whether they knew one another or not, felt a need to support one another. All of us were still breaking ground, and yet we didn't feel we were anything special despite someone pointing out a "first" or "only" every now and then.

Those of us on campus in the mid- to late-1960s understood that the true "trailblazers" had come before us, albeit just a few years before. They broke the color barrier at what is now the University of North Texas.

With all of his accomplishments and accolades, "Mean Joe" still appreciates Abner Haynes and Leon King, who in fall 1956 became the first black football players at UNT, although neither could stay on campus that year.

Haynes, of course, would become a leading rusher with the Kansas City Chiefs and earn a spot in the Chiefs' Hall of Fame.

Earlier that winter, Irma E.L. Sephas of Fort Worth had become the school's first black undergraduate.

The year before -- the same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus and two years before the showdown at Little Rock's Central High School -- Joe L. Atkins of Dallas had sued the school because it refused admission to black students. Although he won, Atkins had enrolled at Texas Western College in El Paso before the decision was handed down.

As word got around in the late 1950s that the university had quietly integrated, more and more black students enrolled.

By the time Thomas King and Dennis Dunkins got there in 1959, a little more than 250 black undergraduates were on campus.

King, a computer specialist who retired last year from the U.S. Department of Commerce, co-founded the UNT Trailblazers, originally made up of those early black students but now open to all graduates. Dunkins, an administrator with the Fort Worth school district, was a charter member.

The Trailblazers will hold their annual convention in Fort Worth this week at the Radisson Plaza Hotel.

Many of them are still blazing trails, and the focus of this year's reunion will be on how these ex-students can continue to be involved and give back to the institution that gave so much to them, even under sometimes trying circumstances.

Registration for the event begins at noon Thursday, with an opening reception from 6 to 8 p.m. at the hotel. The reunion will wrap up with a religious service from 9 to 10 a.m. Sunday.

Coincidentally, my I.M. Terrell Class of '65 will also hold its reunion this weekend.

As you do the math, you can understand that I'm feeling pretty old right now. Proud, but old.

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Bob Ray Sanders' column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. (817) 390-7775 bobray@star-telegram.com

PlummMeanGreen · July 6, 2005

Thanks for the link, Harry.

If you younger alums could only sit down with Abner Haynes and hear him tell stories about when NT took a train down to play the University of Houston, you would really appreciate who Ronnie Shanklin used to fondly call, Father Time, all the things Abner and Leon King had to put up with as integrating trailblazers at the University of North Texas.

I only wish the Texas Sports Hall of Fame officials could only sit down and listen to Abner Haynes tell his story and then (to quote Spike Lee) "do the right thing."

Edited July 6, 2005 by PlummMeanGreen