Sweetness (8 page)

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.

Here was something: Eight teenagers, all white, paraded back and forth along the sidewalk, armed with signs reading HELL NO, WE WON’T GO and GIVE OUR SCHOOLS BACK and BIRDS OF A FEATHER FLOCK TOGETHER. They marched for approximately forty-five minutes, and were largely ignored. “They looked ridiculous,” said Archie Johnson, Walter’s friend. “You almost felt sorry for them.”

Once inside, the students were ushered into the auditorium, where Johnson, Jefferson High’s student body president, and Barber, Columbia High’s student body president, sat side by side on the stage. They took turns speaking to the students—590 in all; 180 black. “If everybody could just see everybody else as a human being,” Barber said, “it might just turn out all right. Be a big surprise to everybody.”

Barber’s words were greeted with a loud cheer. Then Johnson stepped to the microphone and flashed a peace sign. “There is no conflict between old and new,” he said. “It is a conflict between false and true. We can become a lighthouse in Marion County. Let it be said we, the students of our community, are trying to improve our conditions.”

The transition went well, though there were missteps. Columbia High’s administration completed the 1970 academic year by having blacks and whites situated in separate classrooms. Furthermore, with so many white students bolting for Columbia Academy, the school district didn’t need to retain all its teachers. Eighteen holdovers—all from Jefferson, all black—were fired. Backed by the NAACP, the dismissed staffers sued. “The court mandated that we all be offered our positions back, but we were badly manipulated,” said Idom, one of the dismissed. “Let’s say you were a principal before the lawsuit. Well, you’d be brought back as an assistant principal. Let’s say you were a head coach of some team. They’d bring you back, but to be an assistant. It was unconscionable.”

As they passed each other in the hallways, whites and blacks struggled to communicate. It had been one thing to initially accept integration—the students knew it wasn’t their decision to make, and to fight back made little sense. Now, however, a cloud of hostility loomed. Black students couldn’t help but notice that Columbia High’s facilities—the ones they had been told were equal to Jefferson’s—were fancy and clean. An immaculate science laboratory. Textbooks without eight or nine names scribbled on a weathered inside cover. There were angry glares and harsh words. “After we integrated, a bunch of students of both races were in a room and a teacher said, ‘Are there any questions people from one race want to ask the other race?’ ” recalled Michael Woodson, Walter’s friend. “This little white girl raises her hand and says, ‘Is it true black people have tails?’ ”

Laughter ensued, but the general mood was one of great distrust. In the cafeteria, the students segregated themselves. One would never sit at the table of the opposite race. “I got suspended three or four times that first semester for fighting the blacks,” said Wayne Phillips, a white student. “I was prejudiced. I called people ‘nigger’ and thought nothing of it. And I wasn’t the only one.”

So what inspired students of both races to let their guards down? The clichéd answer has long been “sports”—the ability of blacks and whites to come together on a field of play. Yet the simplicity of that reply demeans what actually occurred. From the depths of a student body uncomfortable with itself, a small handful of leaders emerged. Johnson and Barber, the class presidents, were two. But the most important—the most
influential
—was Walter Payton.

Whether you were black or white, the best athlete in school would almost certainly approach you with an extended hand or a high five or a pat on the shoulder. It was the Alyne in him—the need to please all comers, no matter the circumstances. Walter had no illusions that he could bring the school together. No, his goal was significantly simpler than that—to be righteous. Of all the white students at Columbia High, Phillips was one of the most vile. He started fights with blacks, called them names, condemned them to hell. Payton targeted him as a potential ally. Shortly after integration began, Phillips found himself in a fight with a black football player. A large handful of black students jumped in. Phillips said some of them had crowbars. Payton dashed toward the scrum and pulled people off. “Don’t start with Wayne!” Payton yelled. “He’s OK! He’s OK!” The fight ended.

“He came up to me one day and said, ‘Wayne, if any of my black friends mess with you, you tell me,’ ” recalled Phillips. “I couldn’t believe it. So I said to him, ‘Walt, if any of the white guys mess with you, you tell me.’ I ran with the bad guys, and he had no reason to want to befriend me. But he did. He befriended many of us. It wouldn’t be a lie to say he changed our perspectives.

“He really did.”

CHAPTER 4

THE EMERGENCE

FROM NORTH CAROLINA TO FLORIDA, FROM LOUISIANA TO GEORGIA, FROM Kentucky to Mississippi, there is a universal language of the South, and it is football. People enjoy basketball and respect baseball. But what takes place between the hash marks of a football field determines the true worth of an individual, of a school, of a community.

In most towns below the Mason-Dixon Line a quarterback reigns over a valedictorian; a halfback with 4.4 speed is far superior to a math whiz with a 4.0 GPA. If a high school graduates 99 percent of its students, the achievement is acknowledged. If a high school wins a state football title, the achievement is immortalized. “People have their heroes,” said Richard Howarth, the former mayor of Oxford, Mississippi. “Down here, they’re predominantly football players.” While the early days of Columbia’s integration went as smoothly as anyone could have hoped, nothing would be declared an official success until April 3, 1970, when Wildcat spring football practice was scheduled to begin.

If the Columbia school board had envisioned using its high school football program as a gateway to racial tranquility, it had a perplexing way of showing it. For the past five years, the Wildcats had been coached by Jerry Wilkerson, a fierce sideline presence who punished his players by whipping them with a thick rope that dangled from a loop in his belt. “Wilkerson would run us to death,” said Gerald Haddox, Columbia High’s quarterback in 1969, “and dare you to ask for a drink of water.” With the coming of desegregation, the set-in-his-ways Wilkerson was dismissed.

In a fair world, Wilkerson’s replacement would have been a no-brainer. Charles Boston had coached Jefferson for seven years with startling success. As the Columbia High program often floundered under Wilkerson, struggling to crack .500 in the mediocre South Little Dixie Conference, Boston’s Green Wave routinely contended for the Tideland Conference title. Even though it was significantly more difficult for black high school players to receive scholarships than white ones, Boston sent one player after another into the collegiate ranks. Three even landed in the NFL.

Instead of considering Boston for the job, however, Hugh Dickens, Columbia’s new superintendent of schools, decreed that Wilkerson’s replacement must have a master’s degree. The stipulation ruled out 99 percent of Mississippi’s black coaches—most of whom had to overcome merciless layers of racism merely to receive an undergraduate diploma. “I obviously knew I could handle the position and do very well,” said Boston. “But the times were difficult. People felt as if we had to take all these baby steps.”

Boston’s former Jefferson High players were outraged, as were many of the town’s black residents. Even Payton, the ultimate unifying presence, was taken aback. This was his hero. His role model. Sure, times were fragile. But if Charles Boston couldn’t earn a head-coaching position, what hope did the rest of the black community have? “It was such a joke,” said Fred Idom, a black teacher. “He was as qualified as anyone could possibly be.”

Boston’s initial instinct was to express his anger. Then he thought about his father, Peter Boston. “When I was a boy he farmed on a little place owned by a white lady,” he said. “I don’t think she ever charged my daddy a penny worth of rent. We had to keep the weeds, and we grew things we could eat. I never saw Daddy have trouble with anybody of another race, and that made an impact on me. There was good in the world, and it was important to try and find it. So I chose to ignore the bad and look for the positive. It was all I could do to survive.”

On April 27, 1970, Columbia High announced the hiring of Tommy Davis as the school’s new head football coach. A sturdy thirty-six-year-old white man with short brown hair, narrow shoulders, and no visible neck, Davis had spent the past six years coaching eighty miles away in Heidelberg, Mississippi. (“I don’t think I’d ever even been to Columbia,” he said. “Maybe I passed through once.”) As much as anyone, Davis grasped the delicateness of integration and sports. He departed Heidelberg not because of any nomadic stirrings, but because, with the coming of desegregation, nearly all of his players left to enroll in the nearby private school. “It was about an eighty percent black school district,” he said, “and I was losing every one of my returning guys.”

Upon accepting the Columbia job, Davis was told that, in order to win over the black players, he would be wise to reach out to Boston. The two met in early May, each man uncertain what to make of the other. Davis knew a handful of blacks, but he had never directly worked with one. Boston knew a handful of whites, but he had never directly worked with one. “I was a father of three kids and I wanted the extra income from coaching,” said Boston. “But I did have some pride. I told him I’m a sideline guy, and I’m not going to go sit in some press box.”

Davis named Boston the receivers’ coach, and unofficially, his liaison to the black players. It was badly needed. Because of the backlash to integration, Columbia’s roster was decimated, what with a mere seventeen players skeptically returning to the team. An additional twenty blacks signed on, meaning the Wildcats had a total of thirty-seven warm bodies. “I wanted to stay and play quarterback,” said Haddox, who departed for Columbia Academy. “But a lot of our parents didn’t want us on the same team as the black kids.”

As was the case in basketball, an air of caution choked the football team’s first integrated workouts. With Haddox’s departure, the leading contender for the quarterback job was Archie Johnson—Jefferson’s black signal caller. “Before practice began,” said Johnson, “I was told by some of the adult blacks that under no terms was I to allow anyone to change my position.” Many of Columbia’s returnees couldn’t fathom such an idea. Meanwhile, the team’s best defensive lineman was Steve Stewart—a white boy and the top holdover tackler for Columbia High. “Those first practices, I thought we were going to kill each other,” said Kim Fink, the Wildcats’ backup quarterback. “We played so hard, trying to prove our manhood and our worth. We did all we could to get our pads off and throw punches. We wanted to just destroy the other guys. We saw them as threats and as encroachers.

“But I’ll say this,” said Fink. “One kid stood out, and you knew—whether you supported integration or didn’t—that we had a chance to be pretty darn good.”

That kid was Walter Payton.

He was, beginning with that initial workout, different. Stronger. Quicker. More powerful. A five-foot-eight, 193-pound block of dynamite. Oh, Johnson could wiggle out of the pocket and throw a tight spiral downfield. And Edward Moses, aka “Sugar Man,” was as fast as anyone had ever seen. And Stewart pulverized opposing ball carriers. “We had a bunch of excellent athletes,” said Stewart. “But Walter was on a new level. My first impression of Walter was, ‘Holy cow—this kid literally has no fat on him!’ With his shirt off, his body was like a Greek god. I asked him that first day if he lifted weights, and he said he didn’t. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn’t believe it. He was a statue.”

Before that first practice, some of Columbia’s white players were under the illusion that Sherman Green, the Wildcats’ leading rusher from the previous season, would keep his job. Green was a tough kid who grinded out yards. By the time practice ended, however, it was clear Payton and Green resided on different levels. “Sherman was a big, strong white guy,” said Eli Payton, a black defensive back. “Well, one day Sherman spit on Walter. I don’t know if it was an accident or on purpose, but Walter screamed, ‘Shit man, look what you did!’ and slapped him. Just slapped him across the face. That was the only incident between the two, but it set a tone. Walter wasn’t going to take anything from anyone.”