President Richard M. Nixon appeared in the locker room to declare the undefeated Longhorns as national champions. Whittier was a member of the Texas football team, but as a freshman he was not eligible to play varsity at the time. He was also the only black football player at Texas. As Whittier pinballed amid the revelers on the main drag, he had an epiphany, one about the unifying elements within football that he’d lean on for years.

“I’d never experienced the exhilaration and joy of celebration where I was participating with what looked like millions of other kids my age,” Whittier recalled recently at his law office in Dallas. “It didn’t matter that they were almost all white.”

Neither Whittier nor anyone else knew that the time-capsule moment they were celebrating would become an inglorious milestone: the 1969 Longhorns were the last all-white team to win a national college football championship. When Texas was co-national champion with Nebraska the next year, Whittier was a backup offensive lineman and the Horns’ first black letterman. He acknowledged that he had endured indignities, but said his life experiences were expanded as much as those of his white teammates.

By playing at Texas, Whittier received advice from former President Lyndon B. Johnson over lunch at his ranch, and learned to love the music of Willie Nelson. “I was a jock, plain and simple,” he says. “I didn’t care about civil rights or making a mark. I just wanted to play big-time football.”

Whittier, however, was intensely interested in the 2006 Rose Bowl, won by Texas over USC. He’s proud that about half of the players on the Longhorn championship roster were black, including star quarterback Vince Young. “It completed the circle from a team that had no blacks to a truly diverse one, one with a black athlete in the ultimate leadership position — quarterback — of the university’s most prized institution,” Whittier says.

William Henry Lewis was the first black player in major college football at Amherst from 1889 to 1891 and then at Harvard from 1892 to 1893, when he was a law student. At the time, both teams played schedules of national prominence, according to the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend, Ind. Bill Willis, a tackle for the 1942 Ohio State Buckeyes, was the first black player on a national championship team.

In the South, however, all-white teams were the norm into the late 1960s because the region was slow to embrace civil rights, especially in something as cherished as college football. Jerry LeVias might have integrated the Southwest Conference in 1966 at Southern Methodist University, but on that December day in 1969 with Nixon in the stands, the top-ranked Longhorns were facing another all-white team in No. 2 Arkansas, a Southwest Conference rival.

“How’s that song go?” says Darrell Royal, the Longhorn coach who won three national titles from 1957 to 1976. “‘The times they are a-changing’? But they weren’t changing that quickly around here at the time.”

When Royal arrived in Austin, he was 32 and fresh from head-coaching stints at the University of Washington and with the Edmonton Eskimos of the Canadian Football League. He had coached black players at both stops.

UT began admitting black students in 1956 but didn’t lift its ban on their playing varsity sports until 1963. Even then, Royal acknowledges, there was tacit pressure from university regents for him not to rush to integrate the football team.

In 1967, Royal and his staff recruited a local star named Don Baylor, who was also a gifted baseball and basketball player. He grew up in west Austin, knowing that downtown there were separate water fountains for blacks and whites. He’d integrated his junior high school and dreamed of breaking the color barrier at Texas.

Baylor wanted to play all three sports, something universities like Stanford, Oklahoma and Texas Western would allow. Royal wanted him to play only football. Baylor won’t say that Royal and Texas made a halfhearted attempt to lure him, but he says they were relieved when the Baltimore Orioles drafted him.

“The Southwest Conference and UT wasn’t ready to break the color barrier,” says Baylor, who had a distinguished 19-year major league career and later managed the Colorado Rockies and the Chicago Cubs. “The Orioles took the pressure off Texas.”

In the fall of 1968, Royal believed he had found the right young man to integrate his team in Julius Whittier. The previous season, a black student named E. A. Curry walked on and made the freshman team, but he struggled academically and quit. Royal’s first black scholarship player in 1968, Leon O’Neal, stayed for only one year.

Royal believed Whittier had the will and the preparation to remain for four years. Whittier had been a star at an integrated high school in San Antonio. His father, Oncy, was a doctor. His mother, Loraine, was a schoolteacher and community activist who had led protests against a local grocery chain that prohibited black women from becoming cashiers.

Whittier says his uncle, Edward Sprott, was head of the NAACP in Beaumont and hadn’t been intimidated when his house was bombed. His older brother, also named Oncy, had his head cracked open by police officers for his involvement in a guerrilla theater troupe that performed pointed skits about prejudice in the streets of San Antonio, Whittier says.

Royal’s take on Whittier was that he was “smart and tough and a heck of a football player.” He adds, “I knew he could play for us and handle any difficulties off the field.”

Whittier says he turned two personal flaws into powerful tools of perseverance. He not only was confident to the point of cockiness but also had a gift for oratory that continues to serve him well as a trial lawyer. “I had a mouth that I ran a lot and coherently,” he said. “It sounded like I knew what I was saying, and that protected me.”

Whittier also struggled with attention deficit disorder. “It kept me so wrapped up in the events of each moment, each class, each workout ... dinner, study hall, practice, game, each new friend I made, each new football play I learned, each paper I had to turn in,” he says. “I had no real time or hard-drive space in my brain to step back and worry over how potentially ominous it was to become a black member of The University of Texas football team and all of the horrifying things that, from a historical perspective, could happen to black people who dared to accept a role in opening up historically white institutions.”

Whittier recognized slights by teammates. He was never invited out drinking or to parties with them. And though racial slurs were never directed at him, Whittier heard them when his fellow Longhorns forgot he was in the room.

Before Whittier’s sophomore season, Royal had trouble finding him a roommate. He called in some of his seniors, explained the situation. One of them, running back Billy Dale, volunteered. The year before, Dale scored the game-winning touchdown against Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl to keep alive Texas’ winning streak, which eventually reached 30 games. He was also among the most popular players on the team — until then.

“I lost all my friends,” says Dale, now a manufacturer’s representative in Austin. “I chose to live with Julius because I believed it would add that much more dimension to me as a person.”

One night as the two readied for bed, Whittier engaged Dale in an argument about mortality. “Billy, I’m never going to die,” Whittier told Dale, “and you are.” The longer the exchange went, the more Dale became frustrated. “I crossed the room and put a finger in Julius’s eye and said, ‘It’s people like you who give your race a bad name,’” Dale recalls. “You think I’m serious, Billy?” Whittier responded with a smile. “I’m just trying to make you think.”

They never exchanged cross words again.

It was Whittier’s engaging personality that made him one of Royal’s favorites and got him on LBJ’s guest list. Johnson was crazy about Texas football and occasionally asked Royal to take players to his ranch. It was Johnson who suggested that Whittier continue his studies at The University’s new school of public affairs. He earned a master’s degree there before he became a lawyer.

Whittier’s success on and off the field — he was a three-year letterman and a starter his junior and senior year — paid immediate dividends for Texas. Roosevelt Leaks came to Austin in 1971 and Earl Campbell in 1974, and they became all-American running backs. Soon, one of the set pieces for prospective players was Johnson’s landing by helicopter on the lawn of his presidential library on campus to tell them why they should play for Texas.

Forty years after Whittier watched his white teammates defeat Arkansas, much has changed in the Texas football program. Jester Hall remains, though it’s no longer strictly an athletic dorm. Royal, now 85, remains a campus fixture, though one who concedes he could have been more aggressive in integrating his team earlier.

And Dale remains active in the Longhorn letterman association. “All those people I’d lost as friends by rooming with Julius are friends again,” he says. “We’ve all grown.”

Whittier, too, remains in touch with Royal. He now has a far easier relationship with his former teammates than he had when he was a college student. “When I see guys from my era, I feel a sense of comradeship,” Whittier says. “I never was going to hold on to any of the bad stuff, and neither have they.”

He watched Vince Young and the Horns upend the No. 1 Trojans in 2006 from his couch at home in Dallas with the same anticipation and joy he had as a pioneering Texas freshman. Whittier rooted for another championship, another time-capsule moment, but one that wasn’t marred by a footnote about race. He’s hoping his role in Texas football history is now further diminished.

“You know that football is a religion in Texas,” he says. “God and The University had the right people in the right places to handle my situation. It turned out to be a small event in the long and luminous life of a great and valuable institution.”