Imagine the shit Abner Haynes and Leon King had to put up with. Interesting that a College in Denton, Tx was a leader in desegregation of college football in the South. DENTON â Ten years before Jerry LeVias and John Westbrook made history in the Southwest Conference and a half-dozen years before a Maryland player broke the Old Southâs color line, a cab pulled up at Fouts Field, home of North Texas Stateâs football team. Two Black Dallas teenagers got out, more than a little afraid of what to expect as three white men approached. One stuck out his hand. âWelcome to the team,â he said. On a glorious Saturday afternoon 66 years later, North Texas officials celebrated that handshake with the dedication of Unity Plaza, commemorating the courage of Abner Haynes, Leon King, a football team and a university. And courage it was, because the same month Haynes and King enrolled at UNT, a white mob in Mansfield, an hour south, hung an effigy of a Black male from a flagpole at the local high school with an inscription: This Negro tried to enter a white school. This would be a terrible way to die. Back in the heyday of Jim Crow, a federal desegregation order offered little in the way of security or comfort for anyone in Texas or the South in general thinking of crossing the color line. Under the cloak of a so-called âgentlemenâs agreement,â assuring complicity in maintaining a lily-white Southwest Conference, the stateâs most prominent athletic programs didnât dare buck a racist system in the â50s. What made UNT different? âThatâs the question everybodyâs always asked,â Haynes, 85, said Saturday. " âHow do you think those guys did that? How did they get away with it?â âThatâs a question theyâll be asking a hundred years from now.â King, Haynesâ old Lincoln High teammate, credited J.C. Matthews, UNTâs president from 1951-68, who saw change coming and embraced it. âAnd I donât know of a single incident that came because of it,â said King, who went on to a long career as a Dallas ISD educator. âIf anyone ever needed a blueprint of how to integrate a school, they had to get it from North Texas.â Only it wasnât quite as smooth as all that. As Jeff Miller writes in his fine book, âThe Game Changers,â one of Haynesâ new teammates confronted him after their first practice together and asked why Haynes and King didnât just go to one of the colleges intended for Black students and leave whites to theirs. Even after Odus Mitchell, UNTâs coach, asked his veterans to welcome the newcomers, a handful chafed. At least a couple were certain Haynes and King wouldnât play. But any lingering resentment dissipated after the freshman team got off the bus in Corsicana for a meal in the fall of â56 before a game against Navarro Junior College. A diner employee told the team that Blacks couldnât eat in the main dining room, at which point three of the white players â Charlie Cole, George Herring and Joe Mack Pryor â led the team out. The hospitality was no better at the stadium. An attendant asked Ken Bahnsen, the freshmen coach, if he really planned to use the Black players. Told he would, indeed, the attendant replied, âWell, they might die.â In the game that followed -- a 39-21 UNT victory, with Haynes scoring four touchdowns and King catching two passes â a bond was formedâŠâ https://www.dallasnews.com/sports/unt-mean-green/2022/11/07/north-texas-commemorates-most-important-legacy-of-mean-green-football-with-unity-plaza/