Southern Methodist University football is enjoying an extraordinary competitive boost with its incredible success in the Atlantic Coast Conference leading to a championship game on Saturday. In its first year in a Power Four conference, SMU is ranked 8th nationally in the latest Associated Press poll.

SMU has a history of moral and ethical success that goes far beyond the remarkable accumulation of victories and defeats. The football program is a core part of the school’s successful Methodist mission for a moral and just world.

Most Americans are aware that anti-black racism in the form of legal segregation held a strong hold in the country, particularly throughout the American South, in the mid-20th century. SMU’s football program, along with the Methodist seminary and the president’s visionary leadership, fought segregation in Dallas long before similar successes were seen at places like the University of Mississippi, Emory University and Duke University.

In the early 1950s, SMU President Umphrey Lee and Perkins School of Theology Dean Merrimon Cuninggim worked together to break the color barrier. Cuninggim refused to accept his role as dean unless SMU promised to allow racial segregation. And Lee convinced the board of trustees to vote to repeal the segregation guarantees.

SMU had dented Segregation through its football program by hosting the first integrated football game in Texas at the 1948 Cotton Bowl – only the second integrated game in the entire South. SMU overcame Dallas’ black housing ban by housing its opponent, Penn State, at the Dallas Naval Air Station. The legendary Doak Walker was on the SMU team and warmly congratulated black players on the Penn State team like Dennie Hoggard. The two teams finished third and fourth nationally. The historic game ended in a 13:13 draw.

Cuninggim had bigger plans for the SMU campus and recruited five black students for the seminary. He implemented an unusual communication strategy with students to counteract the natural isolation that pioneering black students faced on Southern campuses. Cuninggim met weekly with the five students to strategize what social barriers they wanted to overcome – housing, swimming, sports at school, food and more. A major plan was to integrate the student section into SMU football games. Cuninggim and Lee partnered with the athletic program to ensure that random student tickets to these football games were given to white students who had positive attitudes toward integration. The plan worked.

A decade later, the University of Mississippi campus was integrated for the first time with the presence of James Meredith—another Methodist—along with 30,000 federal troops. A journalist from France died in the violent melee that rocked the campus in Oxford, Mississippi. Decades later, Chancellor Gerald Turner removed Confederate flags from stadium events at Ole Miss. Turner is now president of SMU.

SMU’s deliberate sabotage of anti-black segregation defines its moral leadership on such issues and was a major factor in why SMU students visited the march in Selma in support of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1965. This also laid the foundation for King’s decision to attend SMUs McFarlin Auditorium in 1966.

The dangers and struggles of integration are well explained by other heroes like Jerry LeVias, who attended King’s Speech. LeVias’ journey as the first black football player on scholarship at SMU and throughout the Southwest Conference brought hardships that he would describe as “hell on earth.”

Football coach Hayden Fry conspired with LeVias’ grandmother to assign LeVias the number 23 in deference to the 23rd Psalm. LeVias’ grandmother Ella saw her grandson as fighting like David against Goliath. LeVias suffered tremendous racial abuse on the football fields and was regularly compared to another Methodist legend: Jackie Robinson.

Today, SMU football players will be honored to wear LeVias’ number 23 on the field as a symbol of their own high moral character.

All too often, the history of SMU football goes no further back than the “death penalties” imposed for recruiting violations in the 1980s. These unfortunate events would be far overshadowed by the great courage of heroes like LeVias, Cuninggim and Lee, as well as other Mustangs who fought for equality like James Arthur Hawkins, John Wesley Elliott, Negail Rudolph Riley, Allen Cecil Williams and James Vernon Lyles.

Many of their courageous deeds were undertaken under the auspices of the Methodist social gospel, which is composed of the teachings of Jesus in Matthew 25. From this theological perspective, the greater test of goodness and justice is how the most vulnerable in society are treated. These events at SMU are stories that inspire and encourage future generations to make the necessary sacrifices for a more just society.

The current successes of SMU and its storied football program are a good time to reflect on the challenges we have overcome and the sacrifices necessary to get us to this moment.

Ben Voth is an author and professor of rhetoric and debate director at Southern Methodist University.

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