Sweetness_ The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton - Jeff Pearlman [39]
Now, however, at a school where 98 percent of the student body was black, all Walter Payton had to do was pick up a copy of the Blue and White Flash, Jackson State’s monthly student newspaper, to understand how his world—and the world—was changing. “Before it’s too late, you had better start thinking for yourself,” wrote Jonathan Grant in a November 1971 editorial titled “Awaken Black Youths.” “Our fore-fathers [sic] were treated cruel, treated like animals, sold like cattle, drug up and down the streets, hung by the neck from an oak tree, tarred and feathered, and burned at the stake. Will you awaken, or will you let this kind of thing perpetuate continuously? Are you an animal or a human being? Are you a first class citizen, or a second class citizen?”
Grant’s piece ran alongside another column, “A Black Man’s Hope,” that began with the sentence, “I am a man of a darker color. My oppressor will not let me go any further.”
“We were all about making a statement,” said Coolidge Anderson, an editor at the Flash. “I wanted to be a revolutionary in the movement. We didn’t hate whites, but we hated what segregation had done.”
Less than a year and a half before Walter’s official enrollment, the Jackson State campus was home to great tragedy. On May 14, 1970, Phillip Gibbs, a twenty-year-old Jackson State student, and James Green, a seventeen-year-old senior at nearby Jim Hill High School, were shot and killed by state police during an on-campus protest over race relations. The altercation began when police mistook the sound of a dropped glass bottle for the unloading of a round. “They opened fire on the girls’ dormitory,” said Milton Webb, a Jackson State freshman at the time. “Students were in front of the dorm, innocently standing there, and the police started shooting away.”
“When you’re shot at by the police and state troopers for thirty seconds with automatic rifles, you don’t think about much except surviving,” said Eddie Payton, who witnessed the event. “I was out there bullshitting with some other football players, and when we saw the state troopers come we just turned to get back to our dorm. By the time we reached the dorm the whole sky was lit up from gunfire.”
Despite repeated assertions from law enforcement that race had nothing to do with the killings, most of Jackson State’s students and faculty found the explanation implausible. Even fifteen months later, as Walter and his fellow freshmen arrived, the pain from that day had yet to subside. “You don’t get over something of that magnitude,” said John Peoples, the college president. “Not in a month, not in a year, maybe not ever.”
Were Walter Payton compelled, he could have walked over to the Alexander Residence Center to run his finger over a bullet hole. He could have followed the lead of the small band of students who changed their last names to X. He could have grown out his Afro, penned angry editorials for the Blue and White Flash, marched across campus in one of the ongoing protests over the mistreatment of blacks throughout the state of Mississippi.
Any such acts, however, would have been out of character. Because Walter Payton, eighteen years old and as nice and agreeable a kid as one could find, was attending college in Jackson for three simple reasons: to play football, meet girls, and receive a quality education.
In that order.
Had Walter Payton been a member of the Kansas State student body, he would have found himself on one of the nation’s more beatific campuses, surrounded by grass and trees and dignified brick buildings with a Harvard-esque feel.
Jackson State was no Kansas State. Located on the western side of Mississippi’s capital, a mere five-minute drive from downtown, the 125-acre campus was your prototypical