Forty Minutes of Hell Page 11

  State laws still prohibited integrated classrooms, so Hunt had to attend segregated classes—meaning that he was the only student in his classroom in the basement. In an odd subterranean show of support, a couple of white students decided to join him. Later, Hunt was allowed upstairs, with a single railing separating the wounded World War II hero from his classmates. He died a little over a year after enrolling, at age twenty-seven, likely from tuberculosis combined with complications of his war wounds.

  Although the University of Arkansas was the first major school in the South to enroll a black student, the college continued its policy of rejecting all applications from undergraduate blacks until the Brown v. Board of Education ruling by the Supreme Court in 1954. That led to the first black undergrads being admitted at Arkansas in 1955.

  Fayetteville High School, as well as the Hoxie District in the northeast corner of the state, immediately began implementing the Brown decision in 1954. Seven black students were admitted to Fayetteville High School, making it among the very first towns in the South to successfully desegregate without fanfare or controversy.

  There would be plenty of controversy, however, coming up in Little Rock.

  The Civil Rights movement targeted Little Rock as a city that could, potentially, quietly withstand the desegregation of its schools. Little Rock was not in the Deep South, the state was largely white, and Governor Orval Faubus was a moderate, so the town appeared to be a good bet. Little Rock had become a focal point in 1942, when Susie Morris, a black teacher at Dunbar High School, filed a lawsuit because she was paid less than white teachers. Morris won the lawsuit but lost her job.

  The plan was to integrate Central High School gradually, and only nine students volunteered, due to pressure, rumors, and fear. Yet that made the plan easier to implement. Nearly everyone—newspaper editors, businessmen, school administration—expected an easy and peaceful transition.

  During his reelection campaign in 1956, Faubus had hardly referred to race. In Arkansas, the law required the governor to go up for election every two years, and by 1957, Faubus was gunning for a third term. He had a stark choice: empower the tide of integration and lose, or challenge the feds and make himself a symbol of segregation.

  In the spring of 1957, Faubus pushed through four segregationist bills. He didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing. The segregationist bills passed, 81-1.

  With school and desegregation at Central scheduled to begin, Faubus could find no middle ground, the salvation for many a politician. That September he indirectly condoned mob violence by publicly claiming that he, the governor, could not maintain peace. Then Faubus decided to call out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent blacks from enrolling at Central High School. The National Guard found itself on the side of the white mobs, and despite specific orders from the district court, kept the nine black kids from entering the school.

  What happened in the ensuing weeks is well documented. Eight of the students who arrived were abused and threatened before being turned away by the Arkansas National Guard. The mob had its confidence bolstered, as did the segregationists. President Eisenhower reacted by sending in the 101st Airborne Division to aid the integration process, the first time since Reconstruction that federal troops were sent to the old Confederacy.

  Most compelling about the Central High School story was what happened to Elizabeth Eckford that first day. A fifteen-year-old, Eckford had not received the message about the detailed plan for the nine students to travel to Central together. Wearing the new dress she had made herself and bolstered by the morning prayers of her parents, Eckford walked to Central High School alone.

  The mob spotted her and mirrored her steps, taunting and spitting on her. Eckford had seen the National Guard ahead and figured she’d be safe. When she got to the guard, though, they blocked her path by raising bayonets to her throat.

  With the mob closing in behind with shouts of “Lynch her!” Eckford realized she’d have to reverse directions and walk the gaunt-let again. Soon she was surrounded on all sides, with the National Guard behind her. She turned toward a bus stop, and the crowd let her pass, giving her an earful the entire walk. After being encouraged by a New York Times education reporter and an elderly white woman, Eckford finally got on a bus and was out of harm’s way.

  Eckford returned to Central the next day and graduated on time a few years later.

  The genocide in Tulsa’s Greenwood district in 1921, of course, predated a national television audience. While the story of Central High School appeared in newspapers and magazines, it was the newer medium of the television screen where the meltdown in Arkansas had the most impact.

  Central High School was the first showdown between a rabid mob and the force of law to play out on national television. According to David Halberstam’s book The Fifties, “The images were so forceful that they told their own truths and needed virtually no narration. It was hard for people watching at home not to take sides…watching orderly black children behaving with great dignity, trying to obtain nothing more than a decent education, the most elemental of American birthrights, yet being assaulted by a vicious mob of poor whites.”

  It was hard for people at home not to take sides. While surely not everyone in Arkansas had a television, everyone in Arkansas had to make a decision. Especially its leaders. They had televisions. The white students at Central decided mostly to accommodate the nine black kids, especially as the year progressed.

  Black teenagers from Little Rock, without the least bit of power, were acting with tremendous courage. How would the state’s leaders, with all the power, act?

  Frank Broyles arrived as football coach at the University of Arkansas in the late winter of 1958. Fayetteville High School had successfully, if modestly, desegregated, as had the university’s law school, medical school, and undergraduate student body. Of course, none of those events were nationally televised.

  Broyles, no doubt, took note of the fortunes of Governor Faubus, who during the previous summer had looked unlikely to win a third term. But the Central High School crisis ignited his popularity among the majority, the white voters. A white person of voting age could no longer be for segregation yet against Faubus. In the next election, Faubus beat his two opponents handily—their combined votes didn’t amount to half of his total.

  It wasn’t just Frank Broyles who was watching, of course. Future presidential candidate and segregationist George Wallace also learned from Little Rock, according to Halberstam, “…how to manipulate the anger within the South, how to divide the state by class and race, and how to make the enemy seem to be the media.” A decade later, George Wallace would win Arkansas in the presidential election as an independent. Wallace won only five states, and Arkansas was the only one not in the Deep South.

  Some moderates felt the “lessons of Little Rock” meant that violence would scare away business. That would prove to be true. The negative publicity again set Arkansas back in the nation’s eye. Not a single new industrial plant opened in either Little Rock or its surrounding Pulaski County in the year following the crisis. Winthrop Rockefeller, who had championed Arkansas as a great business location, resigned.

  But another lesson of Little Rock was that clinging to a racist past at the institutional level could be a popular policy.

  Desegregating a high school in the biggest city in the state was one challenge. Getting anyone else to follow suit was quite another. By the autumn of 1963, less than one percent of African-American public school students in Arkansas attended classes with whites. As late as 1967, 83 percent of black students still attended segregated schools.

  Any leader interested in keeping the world segregated had to make the enemy seem to be the media. But it could be taken in a different direction—befriending and controlling the media could be a smart step, too. Nothing in Arkansas received the same media attention given to the University of Arkansas football team.

  In 1963, Governor Faubus announced that he opposed li
fting the racial restrictions on athletics at the University of Arkansas. The University of Arkansas Board of Trustees agreed with Faubus, instituting policies that excluded blacks from university sports and dormitories.

  “When I heard the board of trustees made that ruling,” longtime UA psychology professor Phillip Trapp recalls, “I said the faculty should go on record.” They did. The college faculty, as well as the student association, officially endorsed the integration of Razorback athletics.

  Trapp was asked to serve on the university’s faculty athletics council in 1962. What better place to integrate, he thought, than the place where most of the attention was? “The board of trustees was still solidly against integration,” Trapp says. “That’s why Frank Broyles was so against it, he’d be going against the board.”

  Trapp’s embracing the ideals of integration didn’t sit well with one board of trustees member, Pete Rainey. When Trapp was introduced to him, Rainey turned his back on the professor.

  Delbert Schwartz chaired the faculty athletics council for years, and Trapp says that Schwartz wanted to groom him to someday chair the group. Just before a meeting, Trapp cornered Schwartz and told him he was going to make a motion that Arkansas should integrate their athletic teams. “I want it to go into the record,” Trapp told him.

  “Oh, my God,” Schwartz said, “if you do that you’ll never become my replacement.”

  “I knew the committee was handpicked by Frank Broyles,” Trapp says, “and I didn’t have much aspiration that it would pass, but our students had voted that way.”

  Knowing his proposal was likely doomed, Trapp still made the suggestion that Broyles integrate his team. “I can see this giving us a national title in short order,” Trapp said. “We’ll be the first major school in the South, and we’ll have our pick of black athletes.” Black athletes were already dominating on the national stage, and that meant bigger crowds, Trapp reasoned, more money. Many of the top black athletes were from the Old South, but Arkansas was now embracing the principle of segregation at the expense of their basketball team—as well as their balance sheets. Arkansas football was certain to be harmed as well, when the SWC integrated, if they didn’t follow the trend of sports being at the forefront of racial progress across the country.

  Two board members voted for integration; nine voted against it.

  But that was not the most disheartening aspect. “I heard [Broyles] say when I made that proposal that it would be ‘over his dead body,’” Trapp recalls. “I think he had a strong race card going. That would be pretty obvious, he came from Georgia, and in fairness, he’d been indoctrinated, but at that time Broyles was very strong against integrating athletics.”

  A few months later, Trapp would get a final reminder of how popular his ideas on integrating football were. He was removed from the faculty athletics council, with which Broyles worked very closely. “I would guess, and this is a guess,” Trapp says, “that Frank Broyles said, ‘We don’t need that radical on that committee.’”

  Trapp was gone from the faculty athletics council by the mid-1960s, but more showdowns were on the horizon, ones that would reveal who held the power at the only major university in the state. Would it be the students and faculty? The board of trustees? Or the football coach?

  EIGHT

  GOD’S TROMBONES

  Rosario Richardson was tired of the talk in Fayetteville, and they hadn’t even been there a year. Waiting in line at a grocery store, she heard a shopper offering to give away her 1985–86 season tickets. The shopper knew the reason the Arkansas Razorbacks weren’t winning. “Because they hired that black coach.”

  Rose Richardson whipped out her checkbook and tapped the woman on the shoulder.

  “I’ll buy those tickets,” she said.

  The lady at the grocery store was not the only disappointed Razorback fan. Former coach Eddie Sutton’s crew had won their opening NCAA Tournament game the previous season, and Richardson had two of those starters back. Expectations were enormous—Arkansas was even included in some preseason Top 20 polls. While the team did pretty well in the preseason, once Southwest Conference play began, the Razorbacks stumbled badly.

  The team appeared confused under Richardson’s system, and they even lost seven games in Fayetteville’s Barnhill Arena. Richardson suspended two players for drug use. He realized that he didn’t have the talent in place to do much better, and he was already catching heat, particularly from Democrat-Gazette writer John Robert Starr. “You have to sweep the house out before you move in,” Richardson says. “I didn’t do that at Arkansas and it may have been a mistake.”

  Richardson’s time at Arkansas began with a sense of trepidation—he loved Tulsa; Yvonne was sick; then his new team floundered. The traits that made him successful—brazen confidence and his us-against-the-world philosophy—were in stark contrast to Frank Broyles’s trademarks. The athletics director was more politic and measured, quick to smile, always positive with his pat answers. Few people were aware then that Eddie Sutton had grown weary of Broyles’s strange, overbearing-yet-distant management style.

  Richardson found a modest townhouse overlooking a golf course in Fayetteville. The place didn’t quite feel like home, partly because the family was returning so often to Tulsa for medical treatment. They kept their house near Seventy-first and Memorial in Tulsa as a base for when Yvonne went in for treatment. Richardson soon came to believe there were not the doctors available in Fayetteville that Broyles had suggested there would be. Little Rock offered better medical care, but Tulsa was an hour closer. The constant return trips to Tulsa reminded Richardson of how content he had been there.

  Richardson also came to grips with the notion that leukemia killed the mother he could barely remember, and his nephew Butch was gone just two months after being diagnosed. Richardson badly needed support, but instead felt as though people in Arkansas only cared about whether his basketball team was winning.

  Mike Anderson, the point guard on Richardson’s first Tulsa teams, joined the staff at Arkansas as a low-level assistant coach. His responsibilities were centered on driving Yvonne back and forth to Tulsa on days when her father could not. Anderson had met Yvonne in 1980, his first year in Tulsa. “She was like my kid sister,” he says.

  “Yvonne was the inspiration to keep Coach Richardson going,” Anderson adds, emphasizing the powerful sway the girl, now in her teens, had over her father.

  As her health declined, Yvonne never expressed pity for herself. “She didn’t complain,” Anderson remembers. “She was optimistic, always thinking God would make a way for her to get well.”

  Anderson believes Richardson had been so fortunate in his time at Tulsa that the same feeling of optimism initially spilled over into everyone’s thinking about Yvonne. “All those championships Nolan had won, all those firsts for a black coach. His life was like a story-book in a way. When Yvonne was diagnosed with leukemia—well, we all just knew she would turn out okay.”

  As Yvonne deteriorated, she could still find humor in the darkest of times. Occasionally, Anderson would drive Yvonne, along with her mother, to road games on the day the Razorbacks played, so she wouldn’t have to be gone as many days as the team. Once, coming back from a loss in Dallas, Anderson found himself in a thick fog. High beams made the fog appear denser. Because he was on a narrow road, Anderson figured pulling over might be even more dangerous. He slowed down then leaned forward over the steering wheel, hoping that might help his vision. Rose, a nervous traveler in good weather, began crying out, “Oh, Lord Jesus!” at every dip and turn.

  When the fog lifted, Yvonne began mimicking her mother. Soon, everyone was laughing, even Rose. “Yvonne called me ‘Oh Lord Jesus’ for weeks afterward,” Anderson says.

  Yvonne wouldn’t let her father—Papi, she called him, or Papito—pity her, or himself. Instead, she peppered him with inspirational talks or demanded another “interview.”

  In an attempt to comfort her, Richardson reminded her not to worry, that the
Razorbacks would get better and he was doing his best. One day Yvonne told him his best wasn’t good enough, a startling thing for a child to tell a father. “You’ve got to step it up,” she said.

  When Richardson assured her he would, she let out a sigh.

  “I think I can rest now.”

  Remaining upbeat became nearly impossible for Richardson. The drive to and from Tulsa, which he sometimes did instead of Anderson, gave him plenty of time to second-guess his decision to leave for Arkansas.

  On one occasion, Yvonne was retching and vomiting and couldn’t stop. Richardson pulled the car over and decided to let her stretch out in the backseat. Tulsa was still over an hour away. Richardson climbed back in and floored the accelerator, figuring if he exceeded the speed limit on a straightaway, perhaps a policeman would pull him over. He could convince the cop to flip on his siren and give them an escort into Tulsa. Instead, he sped into Tulsa unnoticed.

  With Yvonne dying, his wife understandably distraught, and feeling pressure from Broyles, the fans, and media, Richardson felt isolated. He was in need of someone who could provide what Ol’ Mama did, and he found that guidance and friendship in an old white man named Orville Henry, Arkansas’s best-known sportswriter. Henry checked in with Richardson every day during his early tenure in Arkansas.

  This is a pattern in Richardson’s life, gravitating to older men, who are often white, for advice and friendship. First, Bert Williams, Don Haskins. Then Sid Simpson. Ed Beshara. Orville Henry.

  Although Henry was better known as a football writer, he and Richardson became close. Henry was in some ways an Old Southerner but had become more progressive as far as questions about race were concerned. An Orville Henry anecdote: In the late 1960s, Henry and his ten-year-old son Clay went to play golf at the Fairpark Golf Course. On the eighth hole, both Henrys drove their ball from the tee and began walking ahead. Clay saw a black boy about his own age cutting across the fairway.