Long after Jackie Robinson smashed the color barrier in baseball, these Southern college football pioneers desegregated a more violent sport, in a more violent place, at a more violent time

	Page, who was signed as a defensive end by Kentucky, was fatally injured in a practice in 1967 before ever playing a game. Courtesy of University of Kentucky

By Alexander Wolff

The University of Mississippi didn't lose a thing in the fall of 1962. Oh, the history books might say something different, telling as they do of a black man named James Meredith and the failed, violent efforts to keep him from enrolling at the school, and the beginning of the end of segregation in the depths of the South. But posterity also records that after the gun smoke and tear gas had blown from the campus, the Ole Miss football team went 10-0, even as it shared its practice field with the federal troops bivouacked there. It was no small balm to white Mississippians, who watched what they called "our way of life" come forcefully to a close. In his autobiography the coach of that undefeated team, John Vaught, described the effect in a chapter titled "Football Saves a School."

But for most white Southerners it was one thing to integrate their classrooms and quite another to desegregate their football teams. In the Southeastern, Atlantic Coast and Southwest conferences, and at such major independents as Houston, Florida State and Georgia Tech, to do so was to mess with the sacraments. To be sure, in the late '50s coach Bud Wilkinson had brought a black receiver named Prentice Gautt to Oklahoma; Abner Haynes, a black running back, had starred at predominantly white North Texas State; and Leford Fant had briefly caught passes for Texas Western. But the Sooners played a largely Midwestern schedule, and North Texas and Texas Western cut only mid-major profiles on the regional margins. That left an unbroken swath of the South playing segregated football well into the 1960s, James Meredith be damned.

Not that most people put their defiance quite so indelicately. "What we need is a team that will work and pull and fight together and really get a feeling of oneness," Texas A&M coach Gene Stallings said in 1965, 27 years before he would win a national title at Alabama with a team on which every defensive starter was black. "I don't believe we could accomplish this with a Negro on the squad."

Meanwhile, blacks weren't exactly lining up for outrider duty. Those who'd heard tales from other parts of the country knew how Fritz Pollard, the black All-America at Brown during World War I, had learned to spin on his back and thrust his cleats in the air when tackled, to protect himself from late hits; how Iowa State's Jack Trice was trampled to death during a 1923 game against Minnesota; and how in 1951, on the first play from scrimmage, an Oklahoma A&M player broke the jaw of Drake running back Johnny Bright, forcing Bright to abandon football and causing his school to withdraw in protest from the Missouri Valley Conference.