Book Details TCU's Evolution on Race and Reconciliation

When then-student Aundrea Matthews and her peers of the Black Student Caucus needed power and influence in their bid to see that Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday was recognized as a holiday at TCU, she went as big as you could get.

The football team.

“We knew that the only way based on how this whole conversation got started, you had the power as a football player,” Matthews said. “That was the crux of this institution. I understood our power. I understood exactly what it meant when you put that TCU uniform on and you ran up and down that field and, it was time to cash in.”

Quarterback Leon Clay went to head coach Jim Wacker’s office to tell him he wouldn’t have any players at practice that particular day.

“They’re not coming,” Clay recalled telling the coach, who was initially taken aback by the conversation.

The story of TCU adopting the King birthday in 1991 as a school holiday is told in A History to Remember: TCU in Purple, White, and Black (TCU Press), by TCU professors Frederick W. Gooding Jr. and Sylviane Ngandu-Kalenga Grensword, and doctoral student Marcellis R. Perkins.

All three were present at the Dee J. Kelly Alumni and Visitors Center on Wednesday night for a book signing and panel discussion on TCU’s history with race and reconciliation, and the future as it concerns those concepts. Trustee Ronald Parker, a former football player and Class of 1976, was the evening's host. 

Said Gooding: “The book’s contribution is significant for three key reasons — it establishes how the Black presence at TCU has steadily grown in significance and size; it chronicles the Black experience at the university and provides an opportunity to measure the fulfillment of its Vision in Action strategic plan; and it charts TCU’s progression in diversity, which has local, regional and national implications due to its overall growth and position as one of the top 100 universities in the nation.”

Like society itself, TCU’s history with race has been complicated and makes for uncomfortable conversations today in retelling and considering a Jim Crow past that was without reason or kindness, and often quite ugly, hurtful to individuals, and harmful to the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of a whole segment of American people in the South, though not limited to that region. Not to mention quite embarrassing to the descendants of society.

How else to explain a Board of Trustees memo, which is published in the book, regarding the integration of TCU, which was made in 1964.

Even with integration, the memo read, “we will never have very many negro students enrolled. This is due to two or three different factors. Our admissions requirements and course requirements are being raised increasingly, and very few negro students could qualify for admission. Our tuition and fees will be raised from time to time, and relatively few negro people would have the funds necessary to finance the kind of education we offer here. The third factor grows in part out of my experience as a Trustee of a negro college and a negro university. No matter how much integration previously white colleges and universities might allow, almost all negro college students will want to attend their own institutions of higher learning.”

That is, HBCUs — Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Or the awkward encounter Ron Hurdle had as the first Black cheerleader not only at TCU but the Southwest Conference. At a competition, an administrator, trying to appease alums who had expressed concerns, asked that the squad not perform routines that included Hurdle touching or picking up any of the white cheer coeds.

His teammates stood up for him and the squad, which carried on and performed the routines it had been practicing, despite the administrator’s entreaty.

Hurdle, TCU Class of 1971, who as a 6-year-old in the latter part of the 1950s was one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit that challenged segregation in the Dallas school district, was one of five TCU “Living Legends” who sat for a question-and-answer session on various topics related to race and their experience at the university.

Zoranna Jones, TCU Class of 1998; Leon Reed, TCU Class of 2001, LaDainian Tomlinson, Class of 2000, and Matthews joined Hurdle as panelists.

To be sure, TCU has made amends for where it has fallen short, particularly through its more recent initiatives on diversity and inclusion, and has been a tremendous platform for minority students, who have been given opportunities for professional and personal growth through the university. The university was even a pioneer at times. In addition to Hurdle, TCU made James Cash the first Black scholarship basketball player in the Southwest Conference. 

The authors, though, make the point that no matter how awkward, these are the conversations TCU, and society at large, should be having as a way of growing an understanding and encouraging forgiveness.

That ultimately was what the campaign to have MLK’s birthday recognized as a holiday was about. Football also was at the center of the state of Texas’ decision to recognize the holiday in 1990. Arizona had been awarded the Super Bowl in 1993, but the NFL threatened to take it away if the state didn’t adopt the MLK holiday. Texas — Houston specifically — wanted that Super Bowl and realized it didn’t have a chance if it didn’t adopt the holiday.

According to A History to Remember, TCU was the only university in the region not to have adopted the holiday.

Clay, a captain on the TCU football team, recalled having a conversation with Matthews, but he was thrust into the MLK campaign by his own teammates, most of whom were waiting for him as he walked back from class to Moncrief Hall.

Clay, 53, who lives in the Houston area, recalled the “buzz” on campus over the controversy.

By his estimate, three-quarters of the team were standing outside the dorm. The first person he saw was teammate Tunji Bolden.

“I get there and it's like, ‘What's going on?’ And he’s like, ‘We’re waiting on you.’ ‘You’re waiting on me for what?’”

An unknowing Clay had been “elected” to inform Wacker that the team wasn’t showing up to practice. He joked that rather than volunteering, he had been “voluntold.” Matthews had been persuasive with his teammates, Clay recalled. By the time he had reached the dorm, “the other guys were already in an agreement to do it.”

Clay vividly remembers the encounter with Wacker, up to and including reaching into a candy jar that sat on his desk. Clay said he reached in to the jar for a few pieces while telling the coach that there was something he needed to talk to him about.

“He said, ‘What do you mean nobody is coming to practice?’ And I said, ‘Well, everybody is waiting across the street for me to come back and tell them that, you know, you released us from practice because, look, we want the King holiday, and this is our protest.’”

Wacker, one of the great charismatic figures ever to walk the campus at TCU, was in support of the King holiday, Clay said. But practice? Practice is critically important.

“He said, ‘We can’t do that.’ I said, ‘Coach, they’re not coming.’”

L. Michelle Smith, a cheerleader and columnist for the student newspaper, the Daily Skiff, had organized a march.

“We were on pins and needles looking across the quad, waiting to see if [the football team] would actually march from the stadium to the student center. And before long, there they were, arm-in-arm, walking alongside Jim Wacker, who agreed with their stance.”

The book can be purchased here or at the TCU Bookstore.