This dissertation traces the racial desegregation of major college football in the states of Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas from the end of World War II through the mid-1970s. Moving beyond the realm of sport, it links these events to the larger Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic changes in American race relations during this period. As a much-loved part of twentieth-century Southern culture, college football resisted racial change longer than many other institutions in the region. The overthrow of the color line in the Cotton Bowl beginning in 1947, the University of Oklahoma’s signing of Prentice Gautt in 1956, and the recruiting of Jerry LeVias by Southern Methodist University in 1965, all marked gradual, but halting, steps toward the goal of athletic desegregation. Well after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 signaled the zenith of the peaceful Civil Rights Movement, Jim Crow on the college football fields of the Southwest finally collapsed in the late-1960s. By the early-1970s, even the most staunchly segregated universities gave in and began accepting African Americans into their programs. Ironically, after desegregation, the tremendous talent of black athletes coupled with an overwhelming desire to win football games among the general populace turned the college gridiron into one of the most thoroughly integrated social spaces in the region. As such, these spaces reflected both the potential and the limitations of a newly emerging racially desegregated social order. At the same time, they also played an important role in shaping these new patterns of race relations.