The Most Integrated Institution in West Texas
In May 1960, Canyon, Texas, was a bona fide, used-to-have-the-city-limits-sign sundown town. It had six thousand residents, and not a single one of them was African American. In Randall County, Black residents made up only 0.0016 percent of the population. West Texas State College (WT) was still segregated, still mostly a finishing school for aspiring teachers, and still a college that drew its student body from lily-white Panhandle towns. And the school was under a court order to desegregate.
Desegregating WT was always going to be a very different cultural experience than in other parts of Texas or the larger South. For the overwhelming percentage of its students, having regular encounters with a single African American would be a novel experience. The population of West Texas in 1960 was still 98 percent white and native-born. A third of West Texas’ 107 counties had a total Black population of less than 1 percent. Even in the handful of counties where the Black population approached 10 percent, strict residential segregation kept the populations separate. It was this homochromatic demography that contributed to the fact that many West Texas public school systems were among the first in the state to desegregate after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Places like Friona, the very first school district in Texas to integrate, were relieved to be free of the financial and organizational burden of maintaining a separate school system for six students.
In the six years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown, WT’s strategy had been to ignore or turn down without comment applications from African American students. But in February 1960, after its attempts to deny admission to a local African American man failed, WT admitted its first black students later that fall. Helen Neal, an Amarillo elementary school teacher just a few credits shy of her degree, became the school’s first African American graduate the next year.
Looking forward, WT’s administrators, somehow, arrived at the conclusion that they could perhaps offset the discomfort that parents, locals, and students felt about integration by recruiting talented Black athletes and building a winning football program. Which sort of makes sense in football-mad Texas. A 1957 study on attitudes among West Texas high school students toward integration revealed that 95 percent of white high school seniors believed that Black students should be allowed to play sports.
WT administrators found an eager accomplice in new head football coach Joe Kerbel. A barrel-shaped, three hundred–pound offensive genius, Kerbel was already a Texas high school coaching legend and an assistant coach at Texas Tech when WT hired him in 1960. In just a decade of high school coaching, Kerbel had returned both the Breckenridge Broncos and Amarillo Sandies back into state powerhouses. He had a record of 74-17-1 with five district titles, his teams had played in the state title game four times and had won twice. He also picked up two state track championships. He was considered one of the best young coaches in the state.
Kerbel was a popular choice; the press loved him; he was honest, funny, and quotable. Boosters loved him; he was accessible and enthusiastic. And WT had gone 1-9 its last two seasons. Kerbel surrounded himself with some of the best high school assistant coaches around. After a mediocre first season, the Buffalos new coach launched a recruiting blitz that heavily featured black players. He focused on recruiting junior college athletes, good football players looking to play big-time ball. He signed fullback Ollie Ross and end Bobby Drake out of California and the blazingly fast Pete Pedro from Trinidad College in Colorado. When the 1961 season opened, he had the fastest running back in the country.
The Buffaloes went 6-4 that season, defeating Brigham Young University and handing the 8-1-1 Arizona Wildcats their only loss. Pedro was an immediate sensation; he led the NCAA in scoring, finished second in rushing yards, and averaged 7.1 yards a carry. Coaching one of the only integrated college teams in Texas, Kerbel demanded that Pedro and the other Black players be treated with nothing less than equality and respect. And he ordered all his players to be responsible for one another, Black or white. Still, Black players were obvious novelties in an all-white school and town and were subject to drive-by epithets and discrimination in town. Sportswriters and boosters, for example, insisted that Pedro was Puerto Rican, not African American. For the most part, however, the players were accepted on campus and embraced by the team.
Kerbel recruited even more Black athletes and enjoyed a pipeline of Black high school talent in Texas who were still not allowed to play in the Southwest Conference, along with white players in the state considered too raw or wild to be a Longhorn or an Aggie or a Horned Frog. He promised, “If black players will win for us, we’re gonna keep recruiting ’em.” By 1967, almost every Black man on campus was a football player.
Recognizing the nature of Kerbel’s racial broad-mindedness is important. There was no larger social project at play here, nor was his use of Black players steeped in some transactional cynicism. It was simpler than that. Joe Kerbel was consumed by winning. Black players helped him win games. So, he recruited Black players. For the first time in his coaching career, he was in control of choosing his players and program, and he took full advantage. He pushed West Texas State’s athletic budget and the administration’s patience to every limit. His spending was out of control; he ran up enormous long-distance phone bills and put coaches on planes to recruit rumors. His assistants spent weeks on the road recruiting, living out of motels, eating at drive-ins, and constantly wiring for more cash.
He took good care of his players once they were on the team. On the road, players enjoyed first-class treatment, staying in nice hotels and eating good meals. They took airplanes to far away games, and Kerbel always scheduled at least one game a year far out of state—Ohio, Tennessee, California, Michigan, Montana. (For most of his players it was the first time they had flown on a plane and, for many, their first time out of Texas.) He insisted that his players have the same equipment as professional teams.
That treatment came at a price. Kerbel’s practices were brutal hours-long exercises in working toward perfection and building an endurance few teams could match. Former WT running back Mercury Morris compared the program to the Marine Corps’s Parris Island (where Kerbel had done basic training in WWII). Kerbel roamed the field, watching his teams through his ever present blacked-out Wayfarers, yelling at players (“Hey, stupid, if you put your brains in a gnat’s ass it would fly backwards”), punching them in the chest, pulling their ears. A go-to Kerbel move was to angrily waddle onto the field, kicking players in the butt as he went. There were curfews and mandatory meetings and study halls. Players could not miss class or church on Sunday. Most of his players were convinced they hated him.
By mid-decade, the Buffs were one of the most feared teams in the country. With the collapse of the Border Conference in 1962, West Texas State became an independent program, and Kerbel wasn’t afraid of any school. He scheduled home and away games with teams like Memphis State, Colorado State, Bowling Green, Northern Illinois, East Carolina, Montana State Arizona State. His teams won the Sun Bowl and the Junior Rose Bowl. He ran a pro-style Split-T no-huddle offense, and his teams were high-scoring, high-yardage juggernauts. Over three seasons, the Buffs averaged almost thirty points and 400 offensive yards a game. Hank Washington, a rangy six-feet, four-inch signal caller with a bullet arm, was one of the few Black quarterbacks playing Division I football in 1966 when he led the nation in scoring, completing 261 passes for over 2,000 yards and 17 touchdowns. (Many predicted he would be the first Black quarterback to start in the NFL.)
WT had a reputation for more than just big offensive numbers. It was an “outlaw” program, one of the most unusual teams in college football, “a home for those who just didn’t fit anywhere else.” Forty percent of the team was Black, an unheard-of number for a college football team in Texas. It was the most integrated institution anywhere in West Texas. When on the road, Kerbel assigned rooms by position and had Black and white teammates room together, an unheard-of gesture in 1960s Texas. To the shock of some parents, Kerbel had both Black and white players helping him with his summer high school clinics. The players, both the good ol’ boys from Texas and the Black players from across the country, got along. The team reveled in its reputation for being tough and a little crazy. And Kerbel’s sole focus on winning gave his players the freedom to exercise a degree of individuality that few college coaches in those years could possibly comprehend. It’s perhaps one of the reasons that WT was considered not only a pipeline to the NFL—at one point in the early 1970s, more than fifty former Kerbel players were in professional football, rivaling the numbers of the big schools like Ohio State and Alabama—but also a wellspring of professional wrestling. Across the 1970s and 1980s, the top bills of wrestling cards were chock-full of ex-Buffalo football players. So many pro wrestlers showed up at the spring alumni game one year that they were able to sneak Dick Murdoch (Dusty Rhodes’ tag-team partner) into uniform. Legend has it he even scored a touchdown.
Kerbel was untouchable. He once told star running back Duane Thomas, “As long as I keep winning these sons of bitches can’t say anything to me.” He was wrong.
In spring 1968 the racial climate at WT began to change. That semester, Black students, led by football players, stood up to challenge the mechanisms, symbols, and practices of white supremacy on campus and in the community. While most Black men at WT were on athletic scholarships, the African American student population had grown beyond just athletes. There were plenty of other students of color, who had been attracted to the school’s business and education programs. Two Black fraternities had been chartered, Omega Psi Phi and Kappa Alpha Psi.
The African American community grew close over that year, drawn together by the countless micro and macro aggressions its members faced each day. WT administrators’ scheme to change the local racial climate with a winning football team had largely failed. Canyon was still very much an unwelcoming environment for Black students. Local rednecks screamed racial slurs as they drove through campus. Black students were not welcome at local restaurants and were barely tolerated in stores. The drugstore kept its “black” makeup under lock and key. The only larger African American community nearby was in Amarillo, and sometimes WT students were not welcome there either.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. was the catalyst for change. As Mercury Morris remembered: “We raised our fists. And for the first time, Whites began to fear us … and listen.” There was no official recognition of King’s murder in either Amarillo or Canyon, where the flags still flew at full mast. As native son Buck Ramsey reported, “When news came to the Panhandle that Dr. King had been assassinated, the general reaction seemed to be one of rejoicing and celebration, a feeling of relief and, undoubtedly, of vicarious vengeance.” But it was different at WT, where local ministers and faculty, including a sociology professor who had gone to graduate school with King at Boston University, organized an informal march from downtown Canyon to the Episcopalian Student Center. It began with twenty parishioners from the Presbyterian Church and grew as it passed other churches: First Christian, First United Methodist, First Baptist, St. Paul Lutheran; congregants from some of the smaller chancels off 4th Avenue joined. Canyon police had denied a permit request to use the street and warned of arrests, so marchers kept to the sidewalks. Local police watched the procession carefully, as did military intelligence and the FBI, whose agents took photos of every participant. A dozen Black WT students joined, each wearing a black armband. The march ended on the lawn of the Episcopal Student Center, where a short tribute service to King was held.
Mourning and angry, WT’s African American community met informally and with great frequency over the next few weeks to talk about how race worked at WT and in Canyon. It was all ad hoc: there was no Black Student Alliance, no NAACP chapter on campus or even in Canyon, few obvious allies among the faculty or administration. Other than the athletes, most Black students didn’t even live on campus. There was, however, one solid bloc of students interested in forcing change at WT: football players, including several white players.
The big issue that spring was West Texas State’s official participation in “Old South Day,” an annual celebration of the Confederacy put on by the Kappa Alpha fraternity. The Kappa Alpha Order, founded immediately after the Civil War by a former Confederate soldier, was among the most important Lost Cause organizations in the South. Through its rituals, publications, and celebrations it pushed a narrative of southern history that painted the antebellum South and plantation slavery in a positive light and portrayed the Civil War as a fight for the noble and glorious cause of states’ rights, Reconstruction as a corrupt failure, and Ku Klux Klan terrorists as heroes who restored white supremacy to the South. Unlike most of the rest of Texas, its western half had largely avoided organizing its history around the Lost Cause, preferring to emphasize its own frontier mythology as a narrative structure and ideological framework. The first Confederate monument in West Texas didn’t go up until 1931 (in Amarillo’s Ellwood Park), and while there were plenty of counties named for Confederate officers, those counties had been named long before white settlers moved to the region. There were no schools named for Confederates until after World War II. Compared to the rest of Texas, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and Sons of Confederate Veterans were weak in the region.
But that began to change in the 1950s. In direct response to the Civil Rights Movement, Lost Cause mythology surged again; this time it reached West Texas. New schools were named for Robert E. Lee and other Confederate heroes. New monuments to Confederate dead appeared in front of county courthouses in towns that hadn’t existed in 1865. When all-white Tascosa High School in Amarillo opened in 1958, it adopted the “Rebel” as its mascot. A student dressed as a Confederate general roamed its sidelines at football games and took center court at basketball games. He slashed the air with his saber, leading students in a Rebel Yell as they waved the Stars and Bars. The school’s choir called themselves the “Dixieland Singers,” and “Dixie” was its fight song. The cutest and most popular girl in school was named “Southern Belle.” It was also in 1958 that the Kappa Alpha Order organized at West Texas State.
Old South Day was started in 1949 at the University of Alabama as a celebration of the Confederacy. It kicked off every year with the fraternity “seceding” from the university and parading in confederate uniforms through campus. After that came the white-supremacist cosplay dance balls with hoop skirts and elaborate Confederate regalia. The event was, as historian Anthony James described it, a place where white male students “performed the drama [of the horrors of the Civil War and Reconstruction] from a position of dominance. They could glory in past defeat because, ultimately, they emerged victorious. White supremacy, albeit in a different form, was restored.”
Led by football players, WT’s protest of Old South Day began just a month after Martin Luther King’s assassination. A meeting on May 2 created a petition demanding that the administration refuse to participate in a grotesque celebration of the Slave South. The meeting also produced special committees that would articulate other grievances and plan demonstrations. Gary Puckrein, a freshman football player from New York, emerged as the group’s spokesman. He appeared before a student court and not only demanded that the Administration not take part in Old South Day but also called attention to the “Whites Only” signs at fraternity lodges, the fact that there were no faculty of color at WT, and that WT did not offer courses in either African or African American history. “Black people need to know about their history,” he said, and summed up the attitudes of the administration this way: “They don’t care about the Negroes; they are racists.” He concluded his remarks by comparing the Confederate flag to the swastika and promised the court that he would burn it if he saw the flag flown on campus.
The administration ignored the demand for an injunction, and student petitions gained more signatures. The Kappa Alphas kept preparing for their big weekend and seemed genuinely confused about the uproar (even though other chapters had discontinued Old South Day after facing similar protests). Fraternity president Dick Flynn promised that the Kappa Alphas meant no offense and tried to reassure the campus community by saying that the fraternity had no interest in the “revival of slavery.” As the hour of the parade approached, a nervous tension gripped campus. Canyon police had placed sharpshooters on rooftops and brought in State Department of Public Safety officers to help them secure the route. Campus administrators feared a riot. Protesters lined the streets, waving signs: “The war is over—You Lost!” and “To Hell with the Old South.” But they were peaceful. The Kappa Alphas nervously made their way to President Cornette’s door, where Dick Flynn read a greatly abbreviated version of his speech. Cornette snatched the order of secession and quickly shut the door. Flynn looked at the closed door for a moment before remounting his horse and leading the KAs away from campus. WT’s official involvement in Old South Day ended there.
Mercury Morris recalled the event as the day the fraternity exercised “its constitutional right to make a fool of itself ” and he and his teammates exercised “their constitutional right to protest their tasteless, not-so-hidden message.”
Local conservatives freaked. The Randall County Republican Party, led by longtime right-wing activist J. Evetts Haley, who had played football for WT half a century earlier, prepared a special resolution for the upcoming county convention. Among its various WHEREASes were scattered complaints about Kerbel and his players. In its official document that kicked off that campaign season, it decried the school’s “indiscriminate recruitment of Negro athletes” and “the moral principles involved.” The very presence of Black players, the resolution insisted, had “accentuated” social unrest, placed an undue burden on local police, and had offended the “moral sense of this community.” The Republicans labeled the Old South Day protests as “communistically-oriented agitation and anarchy” and an affront to “the exercise of a traditional wholesome rite on the West Texas State University campus.” They demanded that WT administrators recognize that the continued threat of “violence and bloodshed” was more important “than the winning of ball games.”
After the 1970 season, in which the Buffs went 7-3, with wins over East Carolina, Bowling Green, and Southern Miss, and had three players (all African American) selected in the NFL draft, WT declined to renew Joe Kerbel’s contract. Every single one of his assistant coaches quit on the spot. Kerbel died of a heart attack two years later; he was fifty-one years old. In 2020, less than five percent of WT’s is African American. The black population of Canyon was less than three percent. Kappa Alpha banned Old South celebrations in 2016.
This excerpt is adapted from The Conservative Frontier: Texas and the Origins of the New Right, by Jeff Roche, published by the University of Texas Press. © 2025 by the University of Texas Press.
