Sweetness

by Jeff Pearlman

  “No,” Woodson replied. “Not yet.”

  “Well go out there and line up at quarterback and call a sneak,” Boston said. “Get that seventy! Get it!”

  Woodson jogged to the huddle and ordered Johnson to shift to receiver. He took the snap, cut left, and followed a guard. When he was but two yards from scoring, Woodson found himself bottled up. His legs were wrapped, and in front of him was a mass of prone bodies. “I had nowhere to go,” he said. “But then I felt this push—this incredibly strong push.” Woodson turned his head and saw Payton slamming into his back. “All thanks to Walter, I went over the pile and scored the seventieth point,” Woodson said. “And the ribs were great.”

  With his mounting success and a bevy of hundred-yard games, Payton began to evolve from shy and soft-spoken to gregarious and engaging. He had always possessed a mischievous streak; always enjoyed yanking down someone’s pants or prank calling a neighbor. Yet, outside of his tight comfort zone, Payton had been reluctant to show his inner child. Now, for the first time, that was changing. The bus trips were often long and miserable, but they provided Payton with a chance to play. He would sneak up behind Johnson and flick his ears. He would grab Woodson by the nose and yank his head. Most memorably, he would make music. With his helmet wedged between two legs, Payton whipped out his drumsticks and banged out one song after another. Teammates clapped and sang along, and Boston—a man raised with the idea that the two hours before a game was a sacred time meant for prayer and introspection—had no choice but to go along for the ride. If his superstar wanted to bang his helmet, who was the coach to say no?

  The week after scoring seventy against Marion County, Jefferson traveled to nearby Hattiesburg to take on Travillion High. By this point, word had leaked out that the Green Wave was awfully good, and that Payton was even better. As their bus pulled up to the field, Jefferson’s players and coaches found themselves surrounded by what looked to be the entire Travillion student body. The scowling faces and clenched fists were a classic attempt at pregame intimidation, at the time a regular part of the black high school football experience in Mississippi. If your team wasn’t threatened with death, it meant your team wasn’t especially good. “Came with the territory,” said Woodson. “Nothing noteworthy about it.” Led by Payton, the Green Wave filed off the bus. If Payton was even mildly scared by the surroundings, he wasn’t letting on. He walked with his chest puffed out, guiding his teammates through the mob without saying a word. Behind another three Payton scores, Jefferson took a 35–0 halftime lead, and won 46–0. In the closing minutes, as the heat rose and the tempers flared, a mob of fans made threatening gestures toward Jefferson’s sideline. “When the game is over,” Boston told the players, “we’re going to quickly walk to the bus as one group. Everyone stick together.”

  Jefferson escaped, and did so the following week, too, when a Bassfield High loyalist tossed a brick through the rear window of the Green Wave bus after another big win.

  For Payton, nothing could ruin what he would long consider to be one of the most joyful stretches of his life. He had developed as an athlete, and also as a person. Everyone at Jefferson High knew that the strapping kid from Hendricks Street was the real deal. That, if football offered bright futures to those who played it well, he was destined for greatness.

  And just then, when life was as smooth as could be, the steadfast town of Columbia, Mississippi, did the unthinkable.

  It progressed.

  CHAPTER 3

  BLACK AND WHITE

  THE ISSUE LINGERED.

  That’s probably the best way to explain what was going on throughout the state of Mississippi in regard to school desegregation in the late 1960s.

  It lingered.

  And lingered.

  And lingered.

  And lingered.

  In 1954, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the concept of separate-but-equal public schools was no longer legal; that, in the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, black children and white children would have to be educated in the same buildings, in the same rooms, by the same teachers. “Today I believe has been a great day for America and the Court,” wrote Justice Harold H. Burton in a private letter to Chief Justice Earl Warren. “I cherish the privilege of sharing in this.” Across the South, the ruling was not greeted with such magnanimity. In Virginia, Senator Harry Byrd Sr. organized the Massive Resistance movement, which committed itself to closing schools before integrating them. In Florida, the state legislature declared the decision null and void. And in Mississippi, a circuit court judge named Thomas Pickens Brady published a book, Black Monday, that called for the dissolution of the NAACP, the creation of a forty-ninth state for Negroes, and the abolition of public schools.

  But the implementation of new laws doesn’t occur overnight. In other words, Mississippi had time. One year after the Brown decision, the Court reconvened to consider the practicality of immediate desegregation. In a ruling known as Brown II, the Court delegated the task of carrying out school desegregation to district courts with an order that it occur “with deliberate speed.”

  For all of the decisiveness of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Brown II was a comical ode to ambiguity. To liberal politicians and civil rights advocates, “with deliberate speed” meant ASAP. Yet in states like Alabama and Georgia and Mississippi, the Court’s follow-up decree was accepted as a rare and precious gift. “With deliberate speed” could mean tomorrow. It could also mean next week, next month, next year . . . five years . . . ten years . . . never.

  Therefore in Columbia—as with the entire Magnolia State—lawmakers hemmed and hawed and stalled as long as legally possible. A commonly utilized tool was something called Freedom of Choice, which allowed students of all backgrounds to select the local school of their preference. Columbia began the practice in the summer of 1967, informing all students who lived within the town limits that they could decide—regardless of race—where they wanted to go the following academic year. It was, of course, a gimmick. White government and school officials knew darn well that no Caucasians would opt to attend the black schools and that few—if any—blacks would risk the physical and emotional abuse of transitioning to a white school.

  In the fall of 1967, an eighth grader named Delores Dukes became the first black student to attend Columbia Junior High. Her parents had been approached during the summer by a local civil rights leader named Ida Grouper, who was looking for someone strong enough to break a barrier. Grouper knew Delores’ mother, Lucille, was passionate about the civil rights movement, and that she had three daughters attending Jefferson. When Grouper asked whether she would be willing to sacrifice one of her girls for the cause, Lucille volunteered her youngest.

  “But, Mom,” whined Delores, “why me and not Jean or Dorothy?”

  A devout Southern Baptist who never cursed, Lucille looked down toward her daughter and said, matter of factly, “Because you don’t take no shit.”

  For Dukes, the transition proved brutal. She recalled the September day when the superintendent of schools welcomed her to Columbia Junior High by walloping her across the legs with a fan belt. (“To discourage me from going to school,” she said.) When Dukes punched the man in the face, she was temporarily expelled. “My father (Willie Dukes) brought his gun to school the next day and told him, ‘If you ever hit my daughter again, I will blow your brains out,’ ” she said. Delores was reinstated, but her first few weeks proved nightmarish. Teachers refused to call on her. Classmates tagged her “nigger” and “coon.” The KKK telephoned her house, threatening to shoot her. “There’s this whole narrative of white Columbians accepting and embracing blacks,” she said. “Maybe some did, but that’s not the way I remember it.”

  In the next couple of years, a small handful of black students joined Delores in the white schools, only to be met with similar hostilities. Eli Payton, Walter’s distant cousin, jumped from Jefferson to Columbia Junior High as an eighth grader, hoping his warm dispositio
n would carry him through. “Didn’t work that way,” he said. “I got in a lot of fights. There was one guy, a kid named Mike Garrett, who would call me every name in the book and tell me I couldn’t sit in certain seats. There were teachers who thought you were stupid and didn’t expect answers from you. And there were other teachers who wouldn’t even speak to you.”

  Brenda Ellis, Eli’s older sister, also made the move. With the siblings’ shift to the white schools came threats and crank calls. Their father, John Payton, had worked alongside whites for much of his life. “He could always do things other blacks weren’t allowed to,” said Brenda. “But when we started going to the white schools, some of those same white friends stopped talking to him. They said, ‘You need to call me Mister now.’ ”

  With its April 10, 1969, staff editorial, titled “Race Differences,” the Columbian-Progress hit back at those pushing for full scholastic integration. Written by Lester Williams, the newspaper’s editor, the piece called for blacks and whites to accept and embrace their differences—beginning with the fact that blacks are clearly dumber: “Too many are afraid to admit citizens are obviously not equal in abilities or talents, that races have differences too. But those inequalities are normal and desirable. In fact, it would be tragic if we were all equal, wanted the same things and had the same talents and preferences.”

  Surprisingly, many of Columbia’s black residents shared the local paper’s opposition stance. While there was empathy for the individual plights of students like Delores, Eli, and Brenda, there was also a general belief that, when it came to integration, why rock the boat? To the blacks of Columbia, Jefferson was a perfectly fine school; the stores on their side of town were plenty suitable; their having to enter through the rear of most buildings was a mild inconvenience; the separate water fountains at the JCPenney was no real problem. So why damage the relatively peaceful relations between races?

  For the most part, Walter Payton’s parents, Peter and Alyne, concurred with this philosophical outlook. Although they certainly weren’t thrilled with some aspects of second-class citizenship, it was a matter-of-fact way of life. As far as they were concerned, Eddie had received an excellent education at Jefferson, sans the social pressures that would come with integration. “There’s this belief that blacks were outraged about life,” said Eddie. “Not true. We were comfortable. Maybe we were naïve—I don’t know. But we were, factually, comfortable and at peace.”

  Having waited long enough for Southern schools to comply with the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling, the government finally took definitive action. On November 19, 1969—two and a half months into Walter Payton’s junior year at Jefferson High School—the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that Columbia and Marion County schools had to be fully integrated by year’s end. In a blistering editorial, Thurman Sensing, a columnist for the Progress and executive vice president of the Southern States Industrial Council, echoed the sentiment of many whites when he wrote, “How can it be just to compel a student to attend a particular school in order to meet a fixed racial formula? The final say-so on a child’s education should belong to parents, not some bureaucrat whose mind is full of socialist notions regarding the way people’s lives should be managed.”

  To men like Sensing and Williams, forced integration was a disaster waiting to happen. At the very least, the men believed there would be hundreds upon hundreds of picketers and nonstop violence. More likely, there would be anarchy.

  It started with the toilets.

  During the two-week Christmas break, Columbia’s white parents and black parents were asked to offer their insights into the town’s new schooling setup. Beginning on January 5, 1970, the school system would, at long last, become fully integrated. Columbia High School would house black and white high school students, while Jefferson High would become the middle schools for both races.

  Before the plan kicked in, however, a handful of white parents made a demand: Every one of Jefferson High School’s toilet seat covers needed to be replaced. “That’s how screwed up the thinking was,” said Tommy Barber, a white student at Columbia High. “Like white people didn’t mess up toilet seats, too.”

  “It was interesting,” adds Fred Idom, a black teacher who transferred from Jefferson High to Columbia High. “When the schools were separate, whites insisted everything was equal and that we needed to stop our complaining. But as soon as the ruling came down, they renovated Jefferson and fixed it up so it would be ready for the whites.”

  The first physical act of integration took place on December 27, 1969, when four remaining members of Jefferson High’s varsity basketball team—including Walter—and seven remaining members of Columbia High’s varsity basketball team congregated in the Columbia High gymnasium to become one. The meeting occurred on an otherwise forgettable Saturday morning, and was—for lack of a better word—awkward. The whites mingled on one side of the gymnasium, the blacks on the other side. Ned Eades, Columbia High’s coach, forced all the boys to shake hands. They did so, but haltingly. A former minor league baseball player, Eades was—by Mississippi standards—open-minded about integration. If the black players could help win some games, he was all for it.

  The sounds that day were familiar ones—sneakers squeaking against a wood floor, dribbling reverberating off the walls—but the faces were not. Walter Payton, all of sixteen years old, was the only black kid some of the whites had heard of; a football supernova whose name was increasingly recognizable within the town’s borders. “When Coach pulled us together to tell us the blacks would be joining us to integrate, we were all very skeptical,” recalled Don Bourne, a white member of the basketball team. “I was a starter at forward, and my biggest fear wasn’t having to play with blacks—it was losing my position.”

  Much has been written about Walter Payton’s role in Columbia’s integration, and how his skills as a football player broke down certain barriers. What goes overlooked, however, are those early days on the court. An undisciplined ball hog lacking range and court savvy, Payton was hardly the best of the four blacks to come over from Jefferson (that honor belonged to the unforgettably named Myjelious Mingo, a six-foot-six center who owned the post). But his value as a disarming presence was invaluable. By the completion of that first meeting, Payton was cracking on white teammates he’d never before met and black teammates he’d known forever. “He was smiling the whole time—just a warm guy at a difficult moment,” said Roger Mallatte, a white basketball player. “If he was uncomfortable being there with us, it never showed. I think most of us left that first day feeling much more comfortable about what was happening. If all the black guys were like Walter Payton, we’d be OK.”

  Nine days later, on the morning of January 5, 1970, the town’s blacks and whites woke up to a new world. The sun officially rose at 7:03 A.M. The temperature would reach a high of fifty-seven degrees, with a slight breeze from the north and nary a cloud in the sky. Whether people liked it or not, beginning on that Monday, Columbia High School was an integrated facility of learning.

  Based upon a handful of highly publicized integration standoffs—most famously James Meredith trying to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1961 and Governor George Wallace blocking entrance to the University of Alabama in 1963—many Columbia residents feared/expected the worst. “You have to understand that within the previous seven years, we had a president assassinated, Martin Luther King was assassinated, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, and George Wallace was shot,” said Colleen Crawley, a white Columbia High student. “People were still reeling. And right on the heels of that, we’re integrating.” Though Marion County’s branch of the KKK wasn’t as loud as it once had been, there was always the threat of revitalization. More worrisome was the looming presence of Columbia Academy, a nearby private school that had been founded three years earlier when the inevitability of desegregation forced many white citizens into a state of panic. As soon as the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals announced its ruling, the phone at C
olumbia Academy began to ring nonstop. “It was a white flight school in every sense of the term,” said Thomas H. Blakeney, Columbia Academy’s headmaster at the time. “People were motivated by the fear of such cultural change. I knew some black people before desegregation, but only in limited settings. To go from that to completely desegregated schools was a huge upheaval.” Blakeney hardly exaggerates. Pre-desegregation, Columbia Academy had an enrollment of fifty-three students. By the completion of the 1970 academic year, that total had swelled to a hundred and fifty—all white. “Looking back, the school was a big mistake,” said Blakeney. “Clearly it was. But people—myself included—weren’t as enlightened as they are today. I guess we were sheltered.”

  Columbia High School’s doors opened at eight A.M. In black and white houses across the town, the apprehension was palpable. Black parents feared white violence. White parents feared the worst: savage black boys trying to impregnate their precious white daughters, brutish black girls lacking couth, mediocre black teachers dispensing flawed knowledge. “Exposure,” said Pat Bullock, whose son Lee was a white student at Columbia High. “Many of the whites in our town didn’t want their kids exposed. When I was growing up, my parents threatened to disown me if I invited a black person to our house for a party.”

  “There were a lot of rumors about how the blacks acted,” said Diane Weems, a white student whose parents forced her to transfer to Columbia Academy. “Stabbings and knives and things like that.”

  Anticipating hostilities, members of the local and national media camped out in front of the white, concrete brick, two-story building. Newsweek sent a reporter, as did the Associated Press, the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, and all three networks. A bushel of television cameras stood at attention, waiting for . . . something.