Free Sweetness by Jeff Pearlman

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