Muck City

by Bryan Mealer

  In Michigan, the wooden bunkhouses the farmer provided were crude and sparse. Seven boys squeezed into one room. The toilets were ripe, stifling outhouses, while showers were taken cold in a barn. The workdays were long and hot, spent mostly on hands and knees dragging bulging hampers of vegetables down the rows.

  To the boys, it was absolutely exhilarating. Not only were they earning $175 a week to work with their friends, but for once they could finally play some real football.

  “You wake up at five thirty and eat breakfast, then go to the fields and do laps,” said Cook. “All day, nothing but work and practice until you dropped. But we was gung ho, excited to be there.”

  Coach Vereen, a former soldier, cut the boys no slack. After lunch, he’d run the team through one-on-one pick drills in a dirt courtyard outside their dorms. A weight program was fashioned using rebar and concrete blocks. And when work was finished in the afternoons, the serious practicing commenced.

  “We had no proper field. We were on a pickle farm,” said Cook. “There was no boundaries. You had twenty yards of cucumbers this way and twenty yards that way. Out of bounds was that fifth row. We’d just run and dart between those rows.”

  “We had no pads and played barefoot, but we tackled,” remembered Dawson. “Coach Vereen was hard. He’d stand there picking the hair bumps on his face and shout, ‘Hey hamfat, the hell you thinkin, bwah?’ The man demanded respect and you gave it to him.”

  On weekends the team would travel to nearby Bay City or Saginaw to play softball, compete in fishing tournaments, or go clothes shopping with their pay; once they all bought matching mohair sweaters to wear on the first day back to school. During the week they conditioned their bodies with fieldwork and weights, the cucumber rows providing a natural obstacle course for agility. They developed such plays as “Coconuts,” “Sugarcane,” and of course “Pickle,” learned formations, and built the mechanics of a team.

  “We were in sync,” said Cook. “We bonded and got to know what each man was capable of doing. And when we finally got back to Belle Glade, we were unstoppable.”

  The teams on the Bobcat schedule were probably expecting just another rusty squad of beanpickers. What they got instead was four quarters of humiliation. That season the Bobcats went 9–0 before crushing the Pahokee East Lake Hawks 28–0 to become Southeast Atlantic Conference champions. Lake Shore would suffer no more losing seasons, but little did they know the program they’d worked so hard to resurrect would soon come to a contentious end.

  By the time the Bobcats staked their place as champs, the civil rights movement in the South had reached unstoppable momentum. Surprisingly enough, the roiling violence, murders, and intimidation happening in places such as Selma and Birmingham never manifested in the backwaters of the Glades.

  In 1961, Lawrence Chester and friends had staged a sit-in at the Rexall drugstore in Belle Glade, which ended without violence or arrests. There had been trouble in Pahokee following the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. A white movie house downtown closed rather than open for blacks, sparking a riot in the streets with boys throwing rocks and bottles through shop windows. Sheriff’s deputies then found themselves pressed between a group of black desegregationists marching downtown and the whites who raced to stop them, many clutching machetes and rifles and threatening war.

  Pahokee had integrated its schools in 1965 without great incident, but Belle Glade remained stubbornly defiant. Many whites simply pulled their kids out of Belle Glade High and enrolled them in the newly opened Glades Day School, which was private and solidly white. Others moved out altogether, relocating to predominantly white Clewiston and Okeechobee, or to West Palm Beach and its lure of gated communities and better services.

  In terms of day-to-day life, both blacks and whites in Belle Glade seemed to fear any grand upheaval or change. Blacks maintained their own city within a city, and rarely ever mixed with whites. Each side had its own groceries, restaurants, juke joints, churches, and beauty parlors. Black police officers patrolled the black neighborhoods, while whites saw to their own. Aside from the drugstore, one of the few places where athletes remember ever having to use a separate doorway was in the office of a local doctor who served as the team physician.

  If there was one institution in which blacks took the most pride, it was their schools. Their equipment and teaching materials were largely secondhand and tattered, textbooks arrived from the state missing covers and held together with tape and rubber bands, yet administrators could still boast of the many graduates—the kids of poor, uneducated migrants—who’d become doctors, lawyers, and teachers. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court had cleared the way for black students to attend the better white schools, but it wasn’t until the Civil Rights Act of 1964—and the threat of losing federal funding—that Palm Beach County began to comply. Integration was mainly voluntary, and in Belle Glade only a handful of parents dared take advantage. Johnnie Ruth Williams was one, and her decision was pivotal in the way Belle Glade would handle the sea change barreling its way.

  A cafeteria cook at Lake Shore High and the daughter of Georgia migrants, Johnnie Ruth wanted more enlightenment for her children. In 1968, when her three oldest reached junior high, she sat them down and took a vote. “Who wants to go to the white school?” she asked. Only Anthony, the youngest of the group, kept his hand down. Anthony, whom everyone called “Pearl,” wanted to go nowhere else but Lake Shore. His father, Herman, a World War II vet who worked as a school custodian, would often bring him onto the practice field to watch Poochie, Gatemouth, and the Mummy. The scene was always one of violence and shouting, with players running headlong into bare metal sleds, and coaches clearing the field for two-on-one gladiator drills that drew fists and blood.

  “I was so intimidated, but I got the big picture,” he said. “If you could fight your friend in the trenches, no telling what you could do in a game.”

  Anthony wanted to be a Bobcat, but he’d lost the vote. That fall, he and his brother and sister walked across the Fifth Street bridge, out of the familiar arms of Belle Glade’s black quarter, and into a cruel, unwelcoming world. At the time, Williams remembered only half a dozen black students attended Belle Glade Junior High, and their numbers provided no safety. Harassment was constant. Students stole Anthony’s textbooks and returned them with the word “NIGGER” scrawled through the pages. They painted it across his locker and reminded him at lunch, adding, “We just don’t want you here.”

  The harassment was more pointed in the afternoons once they crossed back over the bridge. Black kids lashed them with “Uncle Tom” and “honky lover” and shouted, “What, our school aint good enough for ya?” Back at junior high, white teachers were slow to defend them, only asking politely, “Weren’t yall happy in your own place?” And when her kids would come home wounded and crying, Johnnie Ruth would always preach the high road, reminding them, “There’s meanness in every race.”

  Around this time, Johnnie Ruth discovered she had cancer.

  She’d been feeling sick for months and was growing concerned about a knot that had hardened under her arm near her breast. But with Herman’s pay as a custodian, and hers as a cook, there was no affording a doctor. Finally, one morning while she was taking a shower, the tumor burst. Anthony and his siblings stood frozen with fear as Herman helped Johnnie Ruth to the car, a bloody towel under her arm, then sped off to the hospital. Doctors immediately removed her breast and started her on crippling rounds of radiation.

  The treatment ravaged Johnnie Ruth’s body. She lost weight and became weak, and her skin developed large black spots. At night the children would hear her retching in the bathroom. Yet she was up every morning to make breakfast and send the kids to school, never lacking the energy to fetch a switch if homework wasn’t finished.

  Not wanting to add more stress, the children started keeping quiet about the problems at school. In fact, Anthony and his brother Lawrence used their mother’s resolve to stage their own little insurgency into th
e heart of the white institution. They tried out for the football team.

  “I wanted to play sports so bad I wasn’t going to let the local blacks who called me Uncle Tom stop me from my little dream,” he said. “Nor was I going to let the whites who hated me keep me from participating.”

  His first season, Anthony remembered, coaches referred to him and his brother only as “niggras.” One afternoon in practice, a coach kicked Lawrence so hard in the backside it sent him to the hospital. Johnnie Ruth, when urged by black leaders in Belle Glade to press charges, took the high road and asked only that the coach be dismissed.

  By season’s end, Williams had earned a spot in the starting lineup and a little compassion from the coaches, who were at least calling him by his name. It helped that he’d become pals with the team quarterback, a tall, skinny kid named Mark Newman, who’d eased his entry into white circles.

  The two had established a quick rapport on the football field, mainly because Williams could catch just about anything Mark threw at him. Later, an invitation to Newman’s birthday party acted as a blessing. “When he started talking to me, it opened the doors for others to talk to me,” Williams said. Before long, Newman was just like one of the family, sitting down in Johnnie Ruth’s tiny kitchen and putting away three plates of chicken.

  As the boys prepared to enter Belle Glade High, determined to make the varsity cuts, they began meeting each afternoon for drills and conditioning. With Williams acting as receiver, a tight chemistry developed. Weeks later, when the starting quarterback of the Rams came down with mononucleosis, Newman was called to take his spot. Not long afterward, the starting tight end broke his ribs and coaches pulled up Williams.

  The coach of the Rams was a Mississippian named Eulas “Red” Jenkins. In his second year at Belle Glade High, Jenkins was a quiet and deeply religious man, probably most content floating across Lake Okeechobee in a johnboat fishing for bass and perch.

  Jenkins didn’t seem to have a problem with having a few black players on his team. Williams even remembered the coach reminding the squad one afternoon that God had created everyone equally, and on the Rams, the only difference came down to each boy’s assignment on the field.

  “There were still some problems with some of the white kids,” Williams said. “But by addressing it directly early on, Jenkins really made our lives easier. I felt like we could finally play football.”

  The Rams were coming off a dreadful season and ranked last in the area standings. Whatever animosity existed seemed to fade away once Newman and Williams began connecting for touchdowns. To the surprise of many, the team went 10–1 in the regular season. After beating Pahokee in the season finale, Williams looked up into the stands and saw whites hugging one another. Even after the team lost in the playoff game to Leesburg, strangers still cheered his name. When Williams went for his checkup at the team doctor’s office, he was shown the door for white patrons and assured it would never be a problem.

  “After that season, the town just seemed to love us. They seemed to understand we were just young men who loved to play football,” he said. “But then integration happened, and all that came tumbling down.”

  In 1970, court-ordered desegregation came to Palm Beach County. Chaos and violence ripped through the coastal schools that were forced to comply. Bombs were discovered at Twin Lakes and Suncoast High Schools. Bus boycotts, riots, and mass arrests plagued the system throughout September. As Lake Shore and Belle Glade High merged into one, black students staged walkouts in protest of beloved teachers and administrators being relocated or replaced. Fights between blacks and whites took place in the school’s parking lots and at popular hangouts, such as the Royal Castle hamburger joint on Main Street. White families were moving out of town and hostility was high. As the month unfolded, people held their breath and waited, and one thing they seemed to be waiting for was football.

  Gone were the beloved Golden Rams and Bobcats, their fight songs swept into the dustbin of dark history. The new integrated school was named Glades Central Community High, and Jenkins was selected to lead its new football team, the Raiders.

  The school was now predominantly black. On the first day of tryouts for the new Raider squad, many of the Rams’ former starters were absent, having transferred or just refused to take part. “They’d played with a few blacks like myself,” Williams said, “but this was just too many.”

  Even so, about seventy-five players now stood on the sidewalk because the locker room was too small to hold them all. Two sides of town, two storied programs, two radically different histories, now stood facing each other, chests puffed, eyeballing.

  “Yeah, we here,” someone said. “It don’t mean we gonna like you crackers.”

  One of the Bobcats turned to Williams. “I know you been playin this light football with these boys,” he said. “But we about to see what kind of real men yall are.”

  “Both sides felt they were being forced,” said Newman. “No one had made us party to the decision-making process. There was a lot of tension that day.”

  The Lake Shore boys had brought with them a giant chip on their shoulder. The Rams had always had the better equipment, the better schedule that allowed them to play the bigger teams in bigger venues along the coast. For years they’d tried to schedule a public game against the Rams, but with no luck. They’d played only once in the mid-sixties, when the two teams met in secret on a muck patch near the fire station, but the police had broken it up. It was now the Bobcats’ chance to prove something they’d felt all along.

  “We knew we could beat them,” said Wayne Stanley, the Bobcat starting quarterback. “Our attitude was that we were going to come in and take all the positions. We were going to take that team.”

  In the first days, fistfights broke out between the two sides. A favorite target of black players was a leathernecked lineman named Dan Griffin. The son of a sod farmer and local businessman, Griffin had grown up working alongside blacks in the fields and at his father’s grocery store, the Chicken Shack, located in the heart of the migrant neighborhood. Now among the few whites on the Raiders, Griffin was not intimidated by his new teammates.

  “I wasn’t but 180 pounds,” he remembered, “but I was strong.”

  When Jenkins commenced one-on-one drills, the biggest black players lined up to challenge Griffin. One by one, they found themselves flat on their backs and staring into the sun.

  “To Dan, it was just football,” said Williams. “He never backed off and the black guys loved him for it. After that, they started calling him ‘Wildlife.’ ”

  If the new arrangement was to work, Jenkins’s biggest test was choosing a starting quarterback. Wayne Stanley was already a superstar across the canal. He was handsome, bright, and exceptionally athletic. His father was the foreman of a 4,600-acre farm outside of Belle Glade, a position that offered the family status and a life of relative comfort. During the summers, Wayne helped his father turn the soil on the farm for a daily wage, but he’d never had to endure the rigors of the migrant road.

  Wayne drove around Belle Glade in a souped-up metallic ’56 Chevy, so slick it had its own name, “the Rooster,” on account of its tail fins. As a player, Stanley was blessed with a superb arm, but he was even better at running the ball. At Lake Shore, he’d doubled as a tailback.

  Newman stood six foot five and weighed 165 pounds. “If you can imagine a stick, that was me,” he said. But his height allowed him to scan the entire field, then drop back and launch bullets. Both quarterbacks had only two losses between them and, more important, the loyalty of their teammates and communities.

  Both white and black players remembered Jenkins being quick to address racial tension early on. At the same time, players said that Jenkins’s Mississippian upbringing, plus pressure from the white community, may have prevented him from fully embracing equality on the football field. When it came time to choose a starting quarterback, Jenkins went with Newman.

  “I started most of that year,”
said Newman. “I feel that was because Coach Jenkins probably felt like a black quarterback couldn’t do it. If that was the case, he was really wrong. Wayne was an unbelievable quarterback. No one on the team was happy about it.”

  Black students at Glades Central were definitely not happy. Dan Griffin remembered a group of students, led by a local black activist group, interrupting a team film meeting one afternoon to inquire why Stanley was not getting more playing time. “Jenkins pretty much let them have it,” Griffin said.

  The disharmony in the locker room and hallways of Glades Central was also reflected in the home crowd, which was starkly divided down the color line. It even manifested in the Raider uniform. The new maroon and gold outfits had yet to arrive, so players dressed in a raggedy patchwork of purple, blue, and gold from both the Rams and Bobcats. Despite these problems, the sheer athleticism of the combined forces made the Raiders fierce contenders.

  By Thanksgiving the team was undefeated and headed into the playoffs. After victories in the district and regionals, Glades Central met Hollywood Chaminade for a berth in the state finals. But here the experiment finally fell short; the Raiders dropped the game 28–13.

  In February, a race riot rocked the campus of Glades Central. What began as a protest led by dozens of black youth—many of them non-students—erupted into a massive brawl that spread throughout the school. White teachers and students were pulled out of classrooms and beaten. Police were called en masse. In the midst of the chaos, someone even phoned in a bomb threat.

  The explosive atmosphere of race and politics seemed too much for Jenkins. That April, the coach resigned.

  The Palm Beach Post later reported that intimidation may also have played a factor. At one of the games, Jenkins’s daughter had been pushed by a group of black teenagers. Others said whites had threatened his family if the team dared to win a championship. Whatever the reason, Jenkins soon took a job as an assistant football coach at Cocoa Beach High School.