Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [20]
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