Little Rock Central Tigers, 1957
Blindsided by History
Fifty years ago segregationists trying to keep black students out of Little Rock Central High inadvertently broke up one of the country's greatest football dynasties
Posted: Thursday April 5, 2007 3:36PM; Updated: Friday April 6, 2007 2:11PM
/Little Rock Central Tigers, 1957
Courtesy of Jack McClain
By Gary Smith
This picture shouldn't be published. It belongs in a moldy scrapbook in some old man's attic. Its time is done. Its way of life is finished. Even the school these 42 white boys played for a half century ago did away with it. Took it down one day to paint a hallway in the early '90s, and then....
What became of it? Some said it was stowed beneath the auditorium stage and destroyed in a fire. Some said that a black janitor threw it away along with four decades of other team photos from that hallway because no black faces appeared in them. No, others claimed, it was a black principal who decreed that the school's history began the day that all people became welcome there and that no image from its prehistoric past would ever be displayed.
Not even this one, the 1957 Little Rock Central Tigers, the best high school football team in America that year.
This story shouldn't be told. No one wants to hear it. They're all too busy celebrating another group at Central High that year -- the nine black kids. Too busy planning their 50th anniversary, building their museum across the street, getting ready for the crowds and the network news reporters and the two presidents, Mr. Bush and Mr. Clinton, who will fill the school's front yard on Sept. 25 to commemorate them.
No one wants to tell this story. Not even the white boys who lived it. It reeks of political incorrectness. It's sure to be misconstrued. They can't ask you to feel for them: They're Southern Caucasian males on the other side of 65, for goodness' sake. Born and bred not to feel for themselves.
Just 42 of the white faces on the wrong side of the saga of the Little Rock 9.
/Little Rock Central Tigers, 2006
Courtesy of Little Rock Central HS
This is the photograph of today's team. This is the picture that everyone coming to the 50th anniversary wants to see. Forty-four of the 67 players are black. One's a Turk. One's the son of an Iranian. One's parents are from Nigeria. One's a white country boy who hunts ducks at dawn on school days. Another's father is Korean, his stepdad black, his mother white. All playing for a school that owns the second-most state football championships -- 32 -- of any school in the U.S.
These kids know the story of the Little Rock 9 by heart. They've seen the plaques honoring them in their school's entry, the benches dedicated to them out front, the statues of them on the state capitol lawn. They've seen films, read books and written reports about what the nine endured so that Central High's team picture could look the way it does today.
But those white boys in that vanished photo, their Tigers predecessors ... who are they? What happened to them that fateful year and the even more wrenching one that followed? Today's team hasn't a clue.
What if Little Rock Central added a wrinkle to its 50th? Imagine if everyone in those two team pictures sat elbow to elbow at dinner in the school cafeteria and tried to understand what happened from both sides, what might be learned.
No, not Hollywood's or history's version. Not what happened to the heroes or the hatemongers, not the black-and-white version. The story of the gray, the people in between, the majority that ends up drifting toward one side or the other and determining history, often without even knowing why. The ones we need to understand most, because they're us -- the kids we likely would've been had we grown up white in the '50s in the South -- and because we, too, might drift when our moment comes. Just teenagers, so absorbed in their search for love and identity that they hadn't even begun to take stock of the injustices swirling around them, to understand the forces about to sweep them off their feet. Teenagers just hungry to feel part of a group, the one that gave their town its greatest pride: its mighty football team.
Sure, it would be awkward for everyone at first. It's a subject the old-timers barely talked about for years, and then only among themselves. Some haven't set foot on school grounds since everything splintered. But if they pulled up in front of Central High, they'd shake their heads and feel like 17-year-olds again ... because that grand old fortress looks just the way it did back then, when it was on postcards instead of the front page of The New York Times. Two long city blocks of edifice, seven stories of yellow brick and stone, 370 tons of steel, a 1927 castle gussied up in Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic: America's Most Beautiful High School. That's what the American Institute of Architects crowned her.
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Guardsmen stop black students, Sept. 4, 1957.
Arkansas Democrat/AP
The ol' boys would be anxious as they walked from their cars, the way the neighborhood's changed. Randy Rankin, the starting quarterback now, would assure them it's not that dire, but ... well, yeah, three of his buddies have been jumped by local thugs after games, and not all at once.
Guess there's a price to be paid for change, one of the kids would say. To which Bill May and his old teammates would glance at each other, shake their heads and begin to tell their tale.
Bill May blinked as he approached the school. Sawhorses ... soldiers ... cops ... guns? At Little Rock Central, the lord and master of all high schools in Arkansas? One public high school, up till that year, for all the white kids in a town of 100,000, the same school most of their parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents had attended -- a city suckled by the same behemoth. A greenhouse for National Merit scholars, future Ivy Leaguers and Hollywood hotshots, for baseball Hall of Famers Bill Dickey and Brooks Robinson, for more state titles in team sports than any other high school in the continental U.S., for track teams that went 15 years without a defeat ... and, oh, my Lord, the gridiron. Bill May and his teammates didn't just dominate Arkansas football in the '50s -- their second string could've done that. They took on the beasts of the South on Friday nights, beat the best that Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana and Kentucky could muster in front of crowds sometimes as big as the ones at the University of Arkansas.
But now the crowds were right in front of Central High, staring at 270 Arkansas National Guardsmen who ringed the building that first week of school in 1957, wondering whether those troops would let nine black kids become the first in the South to integrate a city school. Some soldiers had just graduated from Central High.
None of the Little Rock 9 showed up the first day, advised by school district officials to stay away. On the third day 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford tried to crack the fortress, she alone figuring that those soldiers had to be there to uphold the 1954 Supreme Court ruling mandating an end to segregated schools. Wrong. Under orders from Governor Orval Faubus, the troops crossed their bayonets, closed ranks and turned her away.
Faubus wasn't preventing integration, he insisted. He was preservingthe peace, he said, because "blood will run in the street" if blacks attended Central. The crowd surrounded the girl, spitting and yelling, "Lynch her.... Drag her over to this tree!" Lord knows how she got home that day.
Bill? Hell, the all-state tackle was just trying to make it through the moil for the team's 8 a.m. preclass skull session for the season opener, just a few days away, in the Tigers' bid for a sixth straight state championship. Bill was like most of his teammates: white kids who'd grown up so separate from African-Americans -- even the wealthier players with black maids in their homes -- that they were surprised to learn that any black kid would even want to go to their school. White kids taught by elders that every human being was a child of God to be treated with respect, but don't touch the railing on the escalator at Blass Department Store because colored people had touched it.
Bill, at last, was wide awake. The superintendent of the school district, his dad's friend Virgil Blossom -- under death threats for being the architect of the integration of Little Rock's schools -- was sleeping in Bill's bedroom to throw his enemies off the trail. Good for Blossom, who had survived an assassination attempt a few months earlier, but not for Bill. Blossom snored.
/Little Rock 9 unveil Memorial, Aug. 30, 2005.
Danny Johnston/AP
He realized, too late, that he was approaching a police checkpoint, that students' cars were being searched and he'd never be able to explain that the brass knuckles and blackjacks in his trunk had been purchased by him and classmates on a lark during a school trip to New York City the previous spring, then left in his car and forgotten.
Just then, the Tigers' legendary coach, Wilson Matthews appeared outside the school. "Leave them alone!" he barked at the police, motioning toward Bill and the teammates carpooling with him. "They're my boys!" No cop dared defy Wilson Matthews.
But Coach Matthews couldn't protect all his brood. Four blocks away Buford Blackwell -- the affable 6'4" defensive end -- was crossing the 14th Street Overpass when the police flagged him down. From his car they pulled six screwdrivers, three claw hammers -- he was doing carpentry for a neighbor -- and a gun. It was only an air pistol, not even loaded with BBs, but that did it. Buford was spread-eagled, frisked and hauled off to the federal building, emerging with an FBI record.
The ol' boys, taking their seats in the cafeteria, would have the kids' attention now. What would Bill May tell them that he began learning that year about race in America? "If I was black," he'd say, "I'd have ended up a Black Panther."
So ... the '57 team took the Little Rock 9's side? That's what today's team wants most to ask the old-timers. "They must've been the leaders in this school, the way we are now," says lineman Quadel Foreman. "Did they step up and be leaders or were they influenced by what other people did?"
Well, boys, it's ... complicated....
It was a Monday morning, three days after the '57 Tigers had pulverized Texarkana High of Texas 54-13, to run their record to 2-0 and their winning streak to 23. A federal judge had just ordered the National Guard removed so integration could proceed. The Little Rock 9, any moment now, would enter Central High for the first time. The crowd of segregationists outside, fed by out-of-staters swarming to the battle's front line, swelled to several thousand, sorely outnumbering the 150 cops. There was no air conditioning. The windows were open. The hate blew in. "Two-four-six-eight, we ain't gonna integrate!" they chanted. "Let's go home and get our shotguns!" one man cried.
Coach Matthews poked his head outside. A block or two away white men were beating and kicking a black reporter and chasing another down the street. Matthews reeled back inside, telling people that it looked like blacks outside were being killed. In enlightened Little Rock, of all places, where African-Americans had already been hired onto the police force and quietly allowed into the public library, parks and zoo. Tigers tackle Bubba Crist, trying to get into school, saw whites shatter the car window of two black construction workers with a shovel just before they were dragged out and beaten.
Maybe football would take the students' minds off the lunacy outside. The morning bulletin asked everyone to chorus 15 hurrahs to inspire the Black and Old Gold for that Friday's game against powerhouse Istrouma High of Baton Rouge -- the last opponent to have beaten the Tigers, two years earlier, behind an All-America named Billy Cannon. The horde outside, hearing those roars and thinking that the Negroes had somehow sneaked in, went into a froth.
.Moments later the nine were inside, smuggled in through a delivery entrance by police. Some white kids leaped out of windows and screamed, "They're in! The n------are in!" The crowd surged, hurling itself at the police line. Rocks and bottles began flying at passing cars. Five more reporters and cameramen were attacked; they looked like Yankees. Women and girls outside sobbed and begged all the white kids to walk out of school.
Coach Matthews used to vomit before every football game, sickened by the faintest whiff of losing. All at once, four days before his team's biggest challenge, he was on the verge of losing everything: winning streak, football team ... maybe the whole school. Five weeks earlier, the day before two-a-days had begun, he'd gathered his Tigers in the empty bleachers, let it get real quiet, then said, "Boys, I want you each to go home tonight, get on your knees and give your soul to God ... because tomorrow your goddam ass is mine." Now events were loosening his iron grip: What if one of his starters got tangled up in this and got expelled? His quarterback -- future Razorbacks All-America Billy Moore -- would fight a buzz saw barehanded, and his teammates would follow him into the sawmill. His fullback, Steve Hathcote, was so wild he'd drill you with a 90-mph fastball in an American Legion game and scream, "Rub it and you're chickens---!" What about Central's 6'4", 220-pound tackle, John Rath? His old man, a moderate on the school board, was already receiving threats at home from bigots. The coach peered outside. White students were streaming out of school to the applause of the crowd. The black kids were getting bumped and berated in the halls. Matthews sent word through the building: All varsity football players were to leave their classes and report to him -- now.
Matthews, an ol' country boy from Arkansas, was shrewd; he'd glimpsed the future. One day, he'd warned his team, "there'll be black boys here so tall they can stand flat-footed and piss in a wagon bed, and you white boys won't even be team managers." But for now the school district wasn't even allowing the Little Rock 9 to hum in the school's a cappella choir, let alone tackle a white boy in front of 12,000 people, so nothing good could come of this.
"Sit down," the ex-Marine ordered as his players filed into a classroom. "Don't look out the window and worry about what's going on outside. If I hear of any of you getting involved in any of this, you're finished with football. You'll answer to me."
No coach on earth could make a player cry, crap and vomit all at once like Wilson Matthews could. Outside, the howling for the heads of the Little Rock 9 grew louder. Inside that classroom the Little Rock 42 sat in stone silence.
That silence is what today's players need to hear about. They understand the outsiders' pain, the loneliness that Minnijean Brown must've felt as she was about to enter her first English class that day 50 years ago. It's what occurs in the minds and hearts of the insiders that the kids need to grasp. It's Johnny Coggins whom they need to gather around, because if they don't understand the ambivalence that can take hold of even the good kids when the moment comes, they too one day might find themselves in quicksand....
Johnny wasn't sequestered with the varsity that morning when Minnijean and the other eight black kids entered Central. He was a junior defensive end on the B team -- not yet worthy of being summoned and supervised by Coach Matthews -- sitting in Miss West's English class in a corner room nearest to a mob outside begging police to turn over just one of those Negroes, just one to be lynched as an example to the rest. He didn't agree with what they were screaming, he'd tell the kids today. On the contrary, he was discovering that day that he was a closet liberal, that he felt sick for those black kids, embarrassed for the whole human race. And still....