Daugherty and Willie Ray Smith Sr. courted Jerry LeVias to board Underground Railroad
By TOM SHANAHAN Jerry LeVias is on the phone, a stationary moment unlike his 1960s trailblazing college football career. In those days, the Southwest Conference’s first Black scholarship football player left segregated Beaumont, Tex., a refinery town near Houston, for Southern Methodist University in Dallas. It was a time and place resistant to integration that kept him on the move outrunning racism. SMU students ostracized him, fans on the road taunted him with a noose (Texas) and black…