Sweetness (7 page)

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 disposition 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 Columbia 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.”