Abner Haynes last donned a North Texas uniform in 1959, yet he’s ever-present in its football program. Mean Green players trot past the Unity Plaza before every practice, erected in November 2022 to commemorate Haynes and teammate Leon King, who broke Texas college football’s race barrier. 

“We’ve talked about him in the past, what it meant to this University, and then on a bigger scale, what it meant to college football overall,” head coach Eric Morris said. “We were almost ten years ahead of anybody in the Southwest Conference in breaking the racial barrier. Just a huge tribute to this place being ahead of its times.”

Before SMU’s Jerry LeVias, Warren McVea at Houston and Texas’s Julius Whittier, there were two Black freshman walk-ons at North Texas State College in the fall of 1956. Playing for a program transitioning to the Missouri Valley Conference, Haynes and King weren’t as famous as the SWC players that came after them. But the impact of what they endured, and what followed because of it, is felt over 60 years later. 

“He (Haynes) was a trailblazer for guys like me, being the first of one of us,” linebacker Jordan Brown said. “It’s really an honor to be here. Guys like him had the first foot forward to open up a door for us.”

Abner Haynes passed away on July 17 at 86 years old, but his legacy lives on in every Black player in Texas.

Haynes was a star football player at the all-Black Dallas Lincoln High School. He was heavily recruited by the University of Colorado, which had integrated its football team. But his family, entrenched in the community through his father Fred’s pastoral duties, didn’t want him that far from home. So his older brother, Samuel, took Haynes and his teammate King up to North Texas State that summer to meet with coach Odus Mitchell. 

Two years earlier, May 1954, the Supreme Court mandated public school integration through Brown v. Board of Education. That July, a 41-year-old African-American man named Alfred Tennyson Miller enrolled in doctoral classes at North Texas State College. The school’s undergrad enrollment, however, wasn’t open to Black students until a federal court ruled in favor of Dallas Lincoln graduate Joe Atkins in Dec. 1955. In February 1956, Irma Stephens became the North Texas State’s first Black undergraduate. That fall, Haynes and King were part of the first integrated freshman class. 

But the courtroom battles did not win the war. Haynes and King still needed to fight for equality, as detailed by Jeff Miller, the author of “The Game Changers: Abner Haynes, Leon King, and the Fall of Major College Football’s Color Barrier in Texas.”

A lineman named Mac Reynolds from East Texas confronted Haynes in the locker room, saying he wouldn’t shower with Black players. In a Texas Monthly piece, Miller wrote about a 1956 freshman team trip to Corsicana for a game against Navarro Junior College where the restaurant hosting the squad’s pregame meal said the Black players had to eat in the kitchen instead of the dining room. At the stadium, an attendant told freshman team coach Ken Bahnsen the Black players might die if he played them. After winning, the North Texas State players ran to the bus in full uniform with helmets strapped for protection.

“I had to go through so many scary moments at North Texas that I learned how to trust God and put things in his hands, instead of trying to deal with all of those problems,” Haynes told The Kansas City Star in 2003.

But Haynes and King had the character required to overcome those moments. They came from strong family backgrounds that had blended together. Hayne’s brother, Neaul, had married King’s sister, Vivian, in October 1955.

“The two of them kept their poise and proved their collective worth on the football field,” Miller said. “At the same time, there were enough teammates who were accepting of them.”

As freshman, the team’s quarterback, Vernon Cole, used to deliver Haynes and King food when they were barred from the team’s athletic dining hall. By 1959, Haynes’s senior year, North Texas State went 9–2 with a trip to the Sun Bowl and a ranking in the AP Top 25. Haynes was named an All-American running back by Time Magazine. 

Haynes enjoyed an illustrious professional career. He won the AFL’s Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year with the Dallas Texans (now Kansas City Chiefs) in 1960. In 1962, he became the franchise’s first 1,000 yard rusher. Both the Chiefs and Mean Green have retired his No. 28 jersey. 

"There ought to be a law," wrote the heralded sports columnist Dan Jenkins, "Once a week, a writer has to rave about Abner Haynes."

Haynes continued his role as a trailblazer in the professional ranks. In January 1965, he led a group of 21 Black players threatening to boycott the AFL All-Star game in New Orleans after being refused entry into nightclubs and cab rides in New Orleans, the game’s host city. The league moved the contest to Houston.

While his gridiron feats were impressive, his advocacy earned his memorialization at North Texas’s Unity Plaza. 

“Abner (Haynes) had enough of a confidence in himself that he was up to the task,” Miller said.

And countless athletes are better off for it.