Even decades later, the story of Chiefs’ Abner Haynes and race remains instructive
Sixty years ago, at the inception of the Chiefs’ organization as the Dallas Texans, Abner Haynes “was a franchise player before they talked about franchise players.” So proclaimed then-coach Hank Stram in words enshrined in the team’s Hall of Honor at Arrowhead Stadium.
Further amplifying the stature of the first AFL Player of the Year, the display about Haynes hearkens to words of the public-address announcer after one game at the Cotton Bowl: “As you leave, please drive carefully. The life you save may be Abner Haynes’.”
As it happens, the Texans/Chiefs enabled football to animate the life of Haynes.
Even if perhaps he had alternatives as a singer for cousin Sly Stone or in the church like his father, Bishop F.L. Haynes of the Northeast Church of God in Christ in Dallas.
And even if that came with a certain caveat in the end.
To be sure, Haynes was a self-made sensation who became a three-time AFL All-Star and retired as the league leader in all-purpose yards (12,065). With 19 touchdowns, he was instrumental in the 1962 AFL title run also memorable, alas, for his quirk of telling the referee the Texans would kick to start overtime in their 20-17 double-overtime victory over Houston in the last game they played before moving to KC.
But as one of the first Black stars in pro football, Haynes’ career also was framed by matters of race and grace and pettiness that echo today … including his poignant reverence for Lamar Hunt, Stram and many white teammates — particularly Chris Burford.
Ten years ago, Haynes nominated Burford for the African-American Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame (now known as the Multi-Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame).
“Chris is special to me because of the things he helped me through,” Haynes, now 82, said in a phone interview Tuesday from Texas.
For all the hatred he encountered as a prominent force with the Texans and in college at North Texas, where Haynes and Leon King became the first Black football players at a historically whites-only school, this is what Haynes thinks of first and foremost today:
“The way God brought me to some real special people,” he said. “You need people at the right time.”
The essential support and alliance of whites with actions profound and subtle not only assured new opportunity on and off the field but emotionally affirmed he belonged as much as any of them did.
The pivotal significance of that is abundantly evident now with the seismic force catalyzed out of the brazen killing of George Floyd, a Black man, beneath the knee of a white Minneapolis policeman.
The watershed moment galvanized a vast movement for long-neglected fundamental changes that have been bolstered by many whites engaged in affirming Black Lives Matter.
(For anyone reflexively bristling that “All Lives Matter,” please: The obvious point is Black Lives Matter, Too.)
It’s undeniable that meaningful change must be energized by those who have had the power to oppress — and with the vigorous participation of those who have the sway to make a difference.
Which, actually, is everyone in any gesture — to not be merely “not racist” but be anti-racist, as former Cleveland lineman Joe Thomas so eloquently put it.
Haynes’ football career was a snapshot of a difference to be made by whites standing up for and in solidarity with Blacks ... in a time and place where it was considerably more against the grain to do so.
It might seem long ago.
But it wasn’t so far away. And it’s plenty instructive today — including in terms of the small-mindedness illuminated at the end of his time with the Chiefs.
‘The ones who had my back’
When Haynes and King arrived by taxi as the first Black football players at North Texas in 1956, according to the Journal of Sports History, they braced themselves as three white players approached.
But reflecting the fair chance coach Odus Mitchell had declared they would receive, Charlie Cole, Vernon Cole and Garland Warren were on their way not to abuse them but to welcome them.
Their action set an important tone, with other players immediately coming over after that. “I wanted to kiss them … because we sure needed a friend,” Haynes once said.
While not all teammates were receptive, and some were hostile, what stood out was the ones who reached out: When someone whose locker was assigned next to Haynes moved across the room, another white player, John Darby, moved next to him.
And by the time the “Corsicana Incident” was over a few weeks later, Haynes felt embraced … literally and figuratively.
Before the freshman team’s game at Navarro Junior College in Corsicana, Texas, players opted to eat baloney sandwiches instead of at a restaurant that insisted Haynes and King would have to dine in the kitchen. That was just a prelude to the game, where rocks, bottles and racial slurs were hurled at them and four men beforehand told coach Ken Bahnsen the Black players “may die” that night.
Afterward, Bahnsen told the bus driver to come in close and the players to keep their helmets on as they hurried aboard.
The white kids from little towns all over Texas, as Haynes put it Tuesday, “surrounded me to make sure I got off the field … They were the ones who had my back.”
‘I’m with you’
Haynes felt the same way after signing with Dallas in 1960 against another backdrop of racism, accented in an unsigned letter sent that season to H.L. Hunt, father of AFL and Texans/Chiefs founder Lamar Hunt.
According to Hunt biographer Michael McCambridge, the letter alluding to such integration as a “sacrifice (of) the white race” apparently was passed on to his son without comment from H.L. Hunt — who was known to tell Stram “you got too many Blacks on your team.”
But Lamar Hunt and Stram certainly were their own men and progressives and pioneers in more ways than one.
That would become more apparent through the 1960s with the hiring of Lloyd Wells, the first full-time Black scout in pro football, the drafting and signing of numerous players from historically Black colleges and universities and the formation of the first team in the game to have more than 50 percent Black starters. That team won Super Bowl IV.
When it came to Lamar Hunt, such support was more nuanced early on, with only three Black players on that first team.
Even so, it wasn’t unusual for Lamar to take Haynes to lunch in places he’d never been or would otherwise have had access to.
“It was wild, the places that he would take me,” Haynes said. “And … he would talk to you in so many different ways. You had to really pay attention to Lamar Hunt. Yeah, man, you had to be alert or else you were going to miss it.”
Meanwhile, the vivacious Stram commanded attention, and respect, in his own distinct way. While Haynes initially worried that Stram might signal he didn’t like him, what he got was … “Keep working, Abner” … “You can do that” … “Work through that pattern” … “I’m with you.”
All while Stram was receiving death threats for the role Haynes was enjoying with the team, Stram’s son Dale said.
Soon, Haynes said, “you believed because you had evidence.” Evidence, he added, that they were all “fighting this human battle” together.
‘We just became brothers’
While Haynes mentions Len Dawson, Cotton Davidson and others as always demonstrating friendship on those Chiefs teams, Burford provided evidence of fighting the human battle together in a way that deeply moves Haynes to this day.
Burford, a College Football Hall of Famer who’d played at Stanford, was the first player ever signed by the franchise (for a bonus of $12,000 and a $2,000 advance) and is believed by some to be the first man signed by any team in the upstart American Football League.
He also was the first man to catch a pass in the Super Bowl and retired after the 1967 season ranked first among franchise receivers with 391 receptions.
But Haynes’ nomination of him for recognition in the Africa-American Ethnic Sports Hall of Fame says something altogether different, and more, about Burford.
“We just became brothers, man, right away,” Haynes said.
Maybe it started with Burford, a native of Northern California, speaking up when Haynes and the few other Black players on that first team were relegated to traveling to Little Rock, Arkansas, for a preseason game on a smaller bus headed for an all-Black hotel.
“How can we let this happen? Aren’t we supposed to be a team?” Burford asked Stram, according to “Ten-Gallon War” by John Eisenberg. (Per Eisenberg, “Stram shook his head sadly, saying they couldn’t do anything other than pledge not to return.”).
Or maybe it began with simple conversations. As Haynes recalled, during the brief chats that came during breaks, “We’d say stuff that was interesting” to each other.
“I felt good about him because of that; that’s where it started,” he said, adding that they got “comfortable with each other. Liked each other. Trusted each other.”
But Haynes referred to one simple episode in particular when he nominated Burford to stand among a group of largely Black luminaries such as John Carlos, Curt Flood and Tommie Smith … not to mention Haynes and Wells.
What Haynes cited was Burford inviting him to dinner at his home, a kindness that Haynes once said led to being on the phone with his parents for two hours that night in part because they never had eaten dinner with a white person.
Reached by phone at his home in Reno, Nevada, Burford spoke fondly of Haynes and called it a simple matter of friendship.
One of many Haynes observed from him: Just before the team made the move to Kansas City, Haynes and Burford were among a small advance party sent here to meet some city officials and other VIPs.
At the event, a bartender refused service to Black teammate Curtis McClinton. According to MacCambridge’s book, “‘69 Chiefs: A Team, A Season and the Birth of Modern Kansas City,” Burford and McClinton complained about this to Stram.
In turn, that was overheard by then-Mayor H. Roe Bartle, who went to the bar and demanded they be served.
“I think we integrated several places in Kansas City,” Burford said.
But much work remained, here and beyond, then and now.
‘It was stand time’
When Haynes and his friend Clem Daniels of the Oakland Raiders arrived in New Orleans for the 1965 AFL All-Star Game, played after the 1964 season, they were taken aback when white cab drivers refused to pick them up at the airport.
But it was something more altogether, he said, when they went to check in at the hotel and the woman behind the counter said, “You monkeys get out of the way.”
The despicable Jim Crow treatment of Black players, there and all over town, led to a boycott that became the impetus for abruptly moving the game to Houston.
That decision was delivered after a meeting in which Haynes recalled many white players, “not just one of two,” supporting the decision to move the game.
“It was almost magical,” Haynes said. “And I’m sure the other Black players who were in the room were as impressed as I was.”
Some wonder if that came at a cost to his career. He calls it somewhat “the same game” experienced by Colin Kaepernick.
“‘I sure don’t appreciate your actions,’” Haynes said then-Chiefs general manager Jack Steadman told him.
In a Showtime documentary on the AFL, Haynes said he also received a letter backing Steadman’s point, “explaining to me how a football player’s role is not to help his people. All I’m supposed to do is to play football and keep my mouth shut.”
Haynes was traded to Denver less than two weeks later.
It’s unclear what voice Hunt and Stram had in that, though Haynes blames only Steadman for exerting his influence over them.
The Broncos discarded Haynes after the next season, and he retired after splitting time with the Jets and Dolphins in 1967.
Nevertheless, Haynes says now, “you can’t fear all that. It was stand time.”
A point of integrity he’s grateful he learned from his parents and is proud to have exemplified for his own family.
A point of integrity he’s forever grateful to have enjoyed with what he calls “true brothers” from seemingly improbable places back in the day.
A point that resonates to this day.
“It ain’t about getting mad,” he said. “It’s, ‘Who do you want to be? Who are we?’”
In the end, either you can be part of the solution or part of the problem.
All these years later, that’s what Haynes says “I want you to get out in your story.”
“Ain’t nobody watching you but you. You can violate who you are, or you can be real to it. And that’s who you are,” he said. “And that’s the journey that we’re on. And that battle.”
This story was originally published June 26, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Even decades later, the story of Chiefs’ Abner Haynes and race remains instructive."