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How Don Meredith helped keep Cowboys together amid segregation, strife

First full-length book on the quarterback details the struggles of his Black teammates.

Editor’s note: This story is an excerpt from the new book Dandy Don Meredith — The First Dallas Cowboy, by News staff writer Dave Lieber.

You can’t recount the early history of the Dallas Cowboys without examining a contentious and embarrassing issue that bedeviled the team — and also quarterback Don Meredith’s role as team leader.

In the early 1960s when the new team was launched, white players lived in North Dallas, close to team training facilities. Black players had to live in or around Oak Cliff. This added an extra 20 minutes to the drive to practice.

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Wide receiver Bob Hayes recalled how when he joined the team, white players weren’t allowed to room with Black players. He said no such limitations existed on the U.S. Olympic team.

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“If we wanted to go out at night, the Blacks and the whites lived too far apart to go out together. So the team split into white and Black cliques,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Segregation was rampant in Dallas during the early years of the Dallas Cowboys.
Segregation was rampant in Dallas during the early years of the Dallas Cowboys.(File Photo / African American Museum of Dallas)

Going into the 1962 season not one Dallas hotel welcomed Black players from visiting teams. Cowboys General Manager Tex Schramm lobbied white business leaders for help and convinced the Ramada Inn near Love Field to integrate. But there was a condition. Other hotels couldn’t spread the word because that could lead to a boycott of Ramada.

Dallas had a restaurant problem, too. Black players had a difficult time finding places to eat. They couldn’t even stand on the street without police hassling them.

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Away games, especially in the South, were troublesome. Once, in New Orleans, Hayes noticed a homemade banner near the top of the stadium showing Meredith and him (identified by their jersey numbers) with nooses around their necks. The Saints organization wouldn’t take the banner down.

Wide receiver Frank Clarke, one of the first Black Cowboys, recalled: “You could walk into a 5-and-10 cent store and see drinking fountains marked ‘Colored’ and ‘White.’ I had never seen this. It kind of takes your breath away. You go, ‘Holy smokes. How far away are we from lynchings?’ Though we didn’t have any cause to be threatened, I could not divorce myself from the fact we were in Texas.”

“It’s not easy for a Negro athlete to live in Texas,” Cowboys running back Don Perkins (43)...
“It’s not easy for a Negro athlete to live in Texas,” Cowboys running back Don Perkins (43) complained to a reporter. “The Negroes on the Cowboys can only find roach-infested houses."(File Photo / Dallas Cowboys Official Weekly)
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‘Not easy for a Negro athlete’

Running back Don Perkins recalled being invited to lunch with vice president for player personnel Gil Brandt and Meredith at Highland Park Cafeteria. A waiter walked up to Perkins and said, “Hey, you can’t get served here.” The group walked out.

Cowboys running back Don Perkins said Black athletes had trouble finding housing in Dallas.
Cowboys running back Don Perkins said Black athletes had trouble finding housing in Dallas.(File Photo)

Perkins called a real estate agent about a listed apartment vacancy, but once they met, the agent said the apartment had already been rented.

“It’s not easy for a Negro athlete to live in Texas,” Perkins complained to a reporter back home in New Mexico, where he lived with his family in the off-season. “The Negroes on the Cowboys can only find roach-infested houses. Right now, I don’t have a place to stay for this season. If I don’t find something soon, I’ll be camping on Tex Schramm’s doorstep. I think he should know of the places that have been offered to us, and also the places where we have been refused.”

Schramm told reporter Steve Perkins that Don Perkins (no relation) didn’t have to camp outside. “He can move into my house with me.”

Addressing “the Negro problem,” Schramm gave his take: There were problems in housing in Dallas and in jobs and schools. “The same is true all over. It’s not something unique to the Cowboys.”

He added, “I wish he’d [Perkins] kept his mouth shut until he got to training camp.”

Then Schramm added: “Who integrated Dallas hotels? We did, when we brought in NFL teams. Who started integrated seating in Dallas? We did, in the Cotton Bowl, and nobody even noticed it. … But we’re ending segregation. Can anybody name another line of work, another profession, where skin color doesn’t mean anything?”

Schramm was meeting with apartment owners and had eliminated the roommate rules. From now on, rookies would be assigned roommates based on alphabetical order and not skin color.

Landry addressed the issue with his team, saying: “Fellas, we know what’s going on here. We don’t particularly agree with it, but that’s the way it is, so we have to do what we can do, so we don’t create unnecessary problems.”

Renfro’s lawsuit

It all sounded good, but it was hardly enough. Segregation, although illegal, was rampant. In Dallas the method whites used to keep Blacks out of neighborhoods was firebombing their homes. It was a terrifying time for Black families.

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Gratitude goes to future Hall of Fame defensive back Mel Renfro for making a difference.

Mel Renfro (20) played in 10 Pro Bowls and four Super Bowls, but his biggest victory may...
Mel Renfro (20) played in 10 Pro Bowls and four Super Bowls, but his biggest victory may have been in the courtroom.(File Photo)

His father warned him not to get involved, saying, “Melvin, don’t make a scene. It will only cause you trouble.”

Renfro didn’t follow that advice. He and his wife, Pat, tried for two years to find a place in North Dallas. In one case, an apartment manager told them over the phone that they could rent a place for $350 a month. When Pat went to set it up, she was told the apartment was now up for sale and not a rental.

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“I was so upset I could hardly play the game,” Renfro wrote in his autobiography, Forever a Cowboy. “I later shared with my teammates what had happened. They weren’t surprised by it. Many of the Black players admitted they had experienced the same thing themselves.”

After the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Congress passed and President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, national origin or gender.

Dallas lawyer and former state Sen. Oscar Holcombe Mauzy heard about Renfro’s problems.

He called Renfro: “Mel, do you want to fight this?”

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“You bet I do,” Renfro replied.

“I’ll represent you for free.”

Cowboys great Mel Renfro filed a civil rights lawsuit under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
Cowboys great Mel Renfro filed a civil rights lawsuit under the Fair Housing Act of 1968.(File Photo)

They filed the first civil rights suit in a Texas federal court under the new housing law.

When the Cowboys learned Renfro was taking the matter to court, Schramm called Renfro into his office where “for 35 to 40 minutes he hammered me.”

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“Mel, you can’t do this! This is going to hurt you.”

“But I’ve been hurt by being denied housing,” Renfro replied.

Mauzy petitioned the court to allow the Renfros to move into the Executive Duplex Apartments in North Dallas.

Opposing lawyers badgered Renfro, and some real estate people tried to block the case, fearing it would turn the Dallas real estate market upside down.

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Sarah T. Hughes, the federal judge who swore Johnson in as president on the plane after the Kennedy assassination, presided over the case.

Renfro won the case along with $1,500 in damages. The apartment complex owner told him he could have his pick of any vacant duplex. But because the address was well known and Renfro feared for his family’s safety, they took another apartment in the neighborhood.

Renfro always believed that Schramm punished him by paying a lesser salary than other players in the league who played the same position.

Renfro played in 10 Pro Bowls and four Super Bowls. But his biggest victory almost surely came in the courtroom.

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Meredith’s leadership

As for Meredith’s role in healing racial wounds, wide receiver Hayes wrote in his autobiography, “Even though Don was one of those good old boys from East Texas and SMU, he was fair to everyone on the team, not just to the white guys. I would say that the Black guys felt more comfortable around Meredith than we did around any other white players on the team.

Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith (17) was known for being fair to both white and Black...
Cowboys quarterback Don Meredith (17) was known for being fair to both white and Black players and keeping the team united during a tumultuous time amid the civil rights movement.(Joe Laird / File Photo)

“The bottom line was that we won with Meredith. We were happy with Meredith. We were comfortable with Meredith, and Meredith was a leader on the team. He may not have been the all-out serious leader. But leadership is leadership.”

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Star fullback Walt Garrison agreed: “When Meredith was with the Cowboys, the locker-room atmosphere was always great. The team spirit, the camaraderie between the players, Blacks and whites, was the best.”

“Most of that was due to Joe Don. He was the undisputed team leader. And just because of the way he was — friendly, up front, easygoing and fun — we were always a happy team.

“After practice we’d go down to the beer joint and work out any problems we had. Meredith set that up. Thursday afternoon was officially ‘Beer Joint Day’ because that was the last day of hard practice for the week. And most of the team would go down to the VIP Lounge, a bar off the Central Expressway. Meredith would get up and sing and drink and talk and drink and just generally hold court. ‘OK, what’s wrong? Who’s got a beef?’”

Final note: In his autobiography, Cowboys tight end Pettis Norman, who is Black, writes: “I began thinking about the rent I paid while leasing apartments. I looked at the quality of housing available. Then it dawned on me that I should build an apartment complex and become a landlord of affordable, quality apartments.

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“With what became approximately a half-million-dollar loan — an extraordinary amount of money back then — I worked with architects, engineers, and construction companies to build 74 units in South Dallas.”

He named them the Golden Helmet Apartments and opened them with great pride. The Golden Helmet still exists today, operating under a new name.

The author, Dave Lieber, is the “Watchdog” columnist for The Dallas Morning News. His book, Dandy Don Meredith — The First Dallas Cowboy, was released July 4, 2024. Get copies at DonMeredithBook.com.

Author event

Dave Lieber, the author of Dandy Don Meredith — The First Dallas Cowboy, will discuss the legendary quarterback on July 18 at 7:30 p.m. at the Allen Public Library. Admission to the program is free, and the presentation will also be streamed live at actv.org and youtube.com/AllenCityTV. The library is at 300 N. Allen Drive in Allen. For more information, call 214-509-4911.