Authors: Bryan Mealer
The team also had C. W. Haynes, a quarterback in the mold of Randall Cunningham or Vince Young: six foot six and powerful enough to launch eighty-yard bullets with either arm, while also running for eighteen touchdowns in a season. Teammates called him “the Mummy” from his insistence on wrapping his arms and legs entirely with brown tape, even when playing basketball.
The Bobcats of the early 1960s also had Lawrence Chester, a topflight receiver who later became the first black player from Belle Glade to go to the NFL (the first white player was Marvin Davis from Belle Glade High, drafted by the L.A. Rams in 1965). In 1967, after playing four years at Allen University in South Carolina, Chester was drafted by the newly formed Atlanta Falcons. When he arrived at camp, he was informed of a quota on black players—they could keep only five, he said. After spending a season on Atlanta’s minor-league team in Huntsville, Chester tried to play in Detroit. He ended up leaving football and spent the next twenty years as a manager at Ford.
In later years, without playmakers such as Chester, Haynes, and Hughley, the Bobcats struggled.
The team had ended the 1964 season with a dismal 5–6 record; the year before, they’d lost every game, partly due to increased academic standards that made certain players ineligible. Heading into the 1965 season and facing yet another autumn of incomplete rosters, head coach Willie Irvin had an idea. That year the H.J. Heinz Company—unable to find enough migrants to work its vegetable fields in the North—had started recruiting high school students in black neighborhoods across the South, offering attractive pay and a little adventure. Hearing this, Irvin contacted the company and signed up the entire Bobcat team. If his boys were going to leave town anyway, he reasoned, they might as well go together.
With defensive coach Alonzo Vereen serving as chaperone, twenty-seven members of the Bobcat squad squeezed aboard a bus in late May and headed up to Bay City, Michigan, where Heinz grew cucumbers for its pickles. Gazing out the bus windows were young Ronald Cook, a defensive end who was sixteen years old, Dawson, and a host of players with colorful nicknames such as Poochie, Scuffle, and Gatemouth, this last given the boy because he had no teeth.
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 the 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.