• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The Bulldogs scored late to make the final score 14–6, and when the final gun was fired the noise in the stadium was deafening. White fans and black fans, forever separated by societal rules, cheered together. Afterward, few in Columbia were discussing the snapping of the twenty-one-game losing streak, or Davis’ new offense, or the play of the poised black quarterback.

“Walter was the story,” said Forrest Dantin, a white lineman. “He was beyond belief.”

If you listen to many of Columbia’s white denizens, this is the point when peace and understanding commenced. Thanks to Walter Payton’s athletic brilliance, the narrative goes, whites and blacks merged as one, bound together over the beautiful game of football and the Wildcats’ newfound success. For the first time ever, they cheered together, laughed together, cried together. All because of high school football. All because of Walter Payton.

“Walter came along and started setting all these records,” said Hugh Dickens, the superintendent of Columbia schools. “And suddenly whites found themselves applauding the blacks. That made the black community feel proud because it was finally getting recognition, and it made the white community feel proud, too. Our success in football resulted in our success as a whole.”

Is this true? Much depends on who’s asked. On the one hand, Columbia’s whites were now infatuated with Walter Payton—slapping him high fives, shaking his hand, singing his praises, and bragging about “our” star. When he drove to school in his green Chevrolet pickup truck, people—black and white—honked and waved. The change of heart was remarkable, if not sadly predictable. The Progress, a newspaper that, for its first eighty-eight years refused to cover seemingly any event involving blacks, started hailing the senior back as a gridiron savior and claiming him as one of Columbia’s own.

Yet the majority of the town’s blacks surely saw through the façade. Now that the school was integrated, it cancelled all of the previously held dances and the senior play for the 1970–71 academic year. Just a few months earlier Columbia extemporaneously closed its town pool after an increasing number of blacks began to use it. “That shows what some thought of us,” said Michael Woodson, a black player. “We were second-class.” Walter Payton had been a marvelous kid long before integration. He was polite, intelligent, well-spoken, engaging. “After they saw Walter could run the football,” said Eli Payton, “everyone was yee-haw! and happy.” This was hardly a phenomenon unique to Columbia. As towns throughout the South experienced the positive athletic impacts of their new black stars, white Mississippians even came up with a phrase—“Give the ball to LeRoy”—to surmise their philosophy. As long as the black boy could play football, he was perfectly welcome. “White Mississippians said it all the time, thinking they were being funny,” said Charles Martin, a civil rights expert and the author of Benching Jim Crow. “ ‘LeRoy’ was a term, like darkie, like coon, like nigger. Only it had a little less sting.”

Thanks largely to Payton’s heroics, the integrated Wildcats were the kings of Columbia. They followed the opener with a 20–0 victory over Hazelhurst that included the most spectacular touchdown of Payton’s high school career. “It was a long [run], and I was hit three or four times,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The first guy that hit me nearly knocked me over. I spun around and put my hand out to keep from going down, but when I recovered my balance and straightened up I ran over another guy who tripped me up. As I started to fall forward a defender grabbed me from behind, which was just enough to keep me from falling. When I shook loose of him, I was gone.” (Recalled Emmett Smith, Hazelhurst’s head coach: “We spent our entire week working out a way to stop Walter Payton, and on Friday we learned we couldn’t stop Walter Payton.”)

After that victory, Columbia traveled 126 miles northwest to Vicksburg to face Warren Central High, which