John Paul McCrumbly, Jeff Patton and Kim Wade attended Dallas’ Woodrow Wilson High School and graduated in 1971. They all played for the football team that was one game away from the state championship in 1969. There was one major difference: Patton and Wade were part of well-to-do white families (Patton’s father was a prominent doctor and Wade’s was a longtime Dallas County District Attorney) and McCrumbly grew up in a historically black neighborhood south of the high school that was integrated into Woodrow’s boundaries not long before he entered it. But in the late’60s, when both the city and the nation were awash in racial politics, all they knew was that they were friends.