Houston Leads the Way 

The University of Houston admitted its first Black students in 1962, and while major universities around the state were slowly permitting integrated classrooms, no major college football program had fielded a Black athlete. 

Houston’s head football coach at the time, Bill Yeoman, arrived in 1962 from Michigan State, which had been recruiting Black athletes from the South for decades. He wanted to ensure Houston had access to the best talent, which meant welcoming players of color to the team. 

Along with legendary Houston men’s basketball coach Guy Lewis, the University administration and coaches decided to integrate their teams in the summer of 1964, bringing in three outstanding athletes for summer school to help them adjust ahead of the school year.  

McVea, a standout from San Antonio’s integrated Brackenridge High School who had more than 70 scholarship offers from schools all over the country, opted to stay close enough for his parents to come watch him play in Houston. 

“My mother thought the world of Coach Yeoman,” McVea told longtime Houston Chronicle reporter Jerry Wizig for his book, “Eat ’Em Up Cougars.” “Coach Yeoman promised my mama that he would always take care of her son. And he did just that.” 

McVea was joined by Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney, who would go on to make two Final Fours and play in the “Game of the Century” in the Astrodome, when the Cougars beat powerhouse UCLA and Lew Alcindor— later known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — in the first nationally televised primetime college basketball game. Both Chaney and Hayes had long NBA careers and won NBA titles, with Hayes eventually entering the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame and Chaney becoming a longtime NBA coach. 

Back then, all freshmen played junior varsity their first year, so, in 1965, McVea became the first Black player on a scholarship at a major college football team in Texas and the South. Though some players were a bit uncomfortable with sharing a locker room with a Black athlete, Jacobus says that most of McVea’s teammates handled the team’s integration well. 

“I think the reason we had so little backlash is that people around here wanted to win, and if they thought Warren could help us, they didn’t care what color he was,” Yeoman told Jacobus for his book. 

But when Houston played other schools on the road, it was a different story. As an independent team, Houston traveled all over the South to find strong competition. Over the next couple of years, with games in Florida, Tennessee and Mississippi, McVea integrated many stadiums across the region, becoming the first Black person allowed to enter or play in them. 

A game his senior year, in Oxford, Mississippi, against powerhouse Ole Miss, stood out as a difficult place to play. McVea received death threats before the game, and his fears of violence changed the way he played. One threat warned that if he entered the end zone to score, he would be shot. “Ole Miss was rough,” McVea told Jacobus. “Their fans called me everything in the book from the stands.” 

Jacobus spoke with McVea and Yeoman and found newspaper accounts detailing how McVea let himself be caught from behind, which almost never happened due to his world-class speed. On another play, it looked like McVea was in the clear for a big run and seemed to fall to the ground with no one around. 

“There were a couple of times Warren had broken free, and he was wide open, and he just kind of fell down,” Jacobus says. “As it turns out, he was afraid he was going to be shot.” 

McVea feared that if he was all alone in the open field, or cruising into the end zone with no one close, he would make an easier target, so he made sure he stayed near the scrum. Houston lost the game 13–14. The racist threats had impacted the outcome of the game. 

Despite the hostility from fans, McVea said the contrary was true of the athletes they played against. “I never encountered anything racial from opposing players throughout my college career,” he told Jacobus, “including late hits, cheap shots or racial remarks.”