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By Root 1548 0

emerge from a bitterly racist society to accomplish their goals. “Mr. Boston was the perfect example of the strong black male who was comfortable with himself because he never needed a white person to lean on,” said Edward Moses, Walter’s classmate and friend. “He didn’t need a title, and he didn’t need anyone to anoint him a leader. He led by nature. It was his gift.” Born in the impoverished town of Laurel, Mississippi, in 1933, Boston was one of ten siblings in a family renowned for athletic excellence. An older brother, Peter, was perhaps the best wide receiver Laurel had ever produced. His little brother, Ralph, would go on to win a gold medal in the long jump at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. For one remarkable twelve-year stretch, there was always a Boston brother playing on the Oak Park High School varsity football team. “People accused the school of using the same guy for all those years,” said Charles, who excelled in football and basketball. “We all punted, so that raised suspicions. But when Peter was in high school, he weighed a hundred eighty pounds. I was one-forty.”

If Boston took one thing from his prep football experience, it was that brutal coaching methods—at the time a staple of black Southern football—were unnecessary. From the sidelines, Boston watched opposing coaches smack their players, punch their players, kick their players. Although Russell Frye, Oak Park’s coach, occasionally laid his hands on others, he never touched Boston. “I told him I’d do the absolute best I could,” he said, “but that I wasn’t going to be abused.” Boston was a good enough player for Frye to comply.

In 1959, following four years of football at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later known as Alcorn State University), Boston was hired as a gym teacher/football coach by (tiny) Carver High School in (tiny) Bassfield, Mississippi. He was twenty-two years old, and he was greeted on his first day by a team with twenty-two players and seventeen ragtag uniforms. “We won three games that first year, and I was sure I’d be fired,” Boston said. “I’d played on two championship teams in Laurel, and I was used to winning. But the people in Bassfield were so happy with me winning three games that they wanted to name me mayor.” The following year, mighty John J. Jefferson High traveled eighteen miles to Bassfield to face Boston’s team, which now only had seventeen active players. “Somehow we whipped them, nine to six,” said Boston. “And everything changed.”

In 1963, Jefferson High was led by a sports-crazed principal named W. S. MacLauren. Though the black schools could never match their white counterparts in scholarship winners or academic achievement or future college graduates, there was an unspoken goal of stepping ahead in athletics. Columbia High would, of course, never acknowledge Jefferson’s on-field achievements. But Jefferson’s staff and players knew they could be the better program. Hence, in the aftermath of the young coach from Bassfield showing up his team, MacLauren presented Boston, a married father of two, an offer he could not refuse: a four-hundred-dollar raise and the chance to continue teaching P.E.

Boston accepted—and the blacks of Columbia quickly turned against their new leader. The previous coach at Jefferson was Scott Jones, an ornery, unpleasant little man who wore a pair of spiked-toed shoes to practice in order to kick players who made boneheaded mistakes. Jones also kept a two-by-four piece of wood in hand, and never thought twice about slamming it into backsides. Such was what parents in the black communities expected of their leaders; a tougher-than-dirt approach to discipline. If your son came home from practice with black-and-blue welts across his arms and legs, well, he surely deserved it.

Boston never physically abused a player at Bassfield, and he would not do so at Jefferson. “I thought I was doing right,” he said. “To get a guy in front of eight hundred people at a game and kick him . . . that has to be degrading.” Boston won four games in his first season at Jefferson, and fared little