Angelo State University: Integration and the West Texas Underdog
Texas
The campus you're passing through opened in nineteen twenty-eight as San Angelo Junior College, and the story of how it came to exist says something essential about the West Texas character.
In nineteen twenty-three, San Angelo lost a fierce statewide competition to become the home of Texas Technological College. The winner was Lubbock. Rather than accept defeat, the citizens of Tom Green County decided to build their own institution from scratch. They passed a self-imposed county tax, pooled local donations, and raised enough money to open a two-year college on North Oakes Street. When the doors opened that fall, one hundred twelve students enrolled. City residents paid seventy-five dollars in tuition; out-of-towners paid one hundred fifteen. The following May, six students crossed the stage at the school's first commencement ceremony.
The institution grew steadily, upgrading from junior college to four-year college status in nineteen sixty-three and earning full university designation in nineteen sixty-nine, when it took on its present name.
But the moment that secured Angelo State's place in Texas history came in the fall of nineteen fifty-three, when a young man named Ben Kelly walked onto the football field at Bobcat Stadium. Kelly was an African American running back from San Angelo. He had briefly attended the University of Illinois on a football scholarship before being drafted into the Army. When he returned home after his discharge, he enrolled at San Angelo College and won a spot on the roster.
On September nineteenth, nineteen fifty-three, Kelly suited up against Phoenix College and became what historians consider the first Black player to compete for a previously all-white college football team in the former Confederate South. The milestone came more than a year before the Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation ruling.
Kelly's path was not easy. He was denied on-campus housing. Opponents fouled him with deliberate roughness. Hostile fans hurled slurs. During road trips, he was sometimes turned away from hotels and restaurants that welcomed his teammates. His white teammates, to their credit, largely stood by him.
That same year, Kelly was voted class favorite by his peers. He would go on to be inducted into the Angelo State Athletic Hall of Honor and the Texas Black Sports Hall of Fame. The university later renamed its Center for Human Performance in his honor.
Angelo State today enrolls roughly twelve thousand students, offering degrees in everything from agriculture to nursing against a backdrop of juniper-scented West Texas rangeland. But the formative act was a community refusing to take no for an answer, and a young man who carried that same refusal onto a football field in nineteen fifty-three.
