My Southern Journey

by Rick Bragg

  That was perhaps the first time the young Sylvester Croom realized the awful cost of the change that was taking place around him. And suddenly it very much matters that a black man is the head coach at a school in the conference of the Bear, the Big Orange, Death Valley, and the Loveliest Village on the Plain. Because if it doesn’t matter, then what was all that suffering for?

  “It was coming, sooner or later,” says Ming, who is white, a few days after she approached Croom in a Starkville diner and asked him for his autograph, for Buster. She even had her picture taken with him. Not too long ago, this would have been scandalous. Now the autograph—a black man’s name—is in a frame, a thing of value. Southerners get where they need to go, Ming says sweetly, “but we don’t like to be pushed.”

  Nearly 40 years have passed since the first black scholarship athlete took the field in the SEC. And a lifetime, it seems, has passed since Sylvester Croom kicked a field goal over the clothesline in his yard in Tuscaloosa and dreamed about being swept up into glory on the Crimson Tide. But even as he entered high school, the only players wearing Alabama jerseys were white. “No way I should be sitting here,” he says from his MSU office, his mind hung up—for just a moment—on that clothesline.

  Then, that quickly, he is standing before a team of SEC athletes—his boys—in the Mississippi State field house. He’s one of only five black head football coaches in Division I-A, five out of 117. His players sit straight and tense, and you get the feeling that if he told them to jump off a roof, they would balk only long enough to write notes to their mamas.

  “We’re kind of tickled with him,” says Jimmy Cowan, class of 1959, a retired engineer who lives in Aberdeen, Miss., and drives his recreational vehicle to all the Bulldogs’ home and away games and—like most white Mississippians of his generation—went to all-white schools.

  “It was a chance to do the right thing,” Douglas Brinkley, historian, author, and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans, says of Croom’s hiring. But, because of the coach’s credentials, “it was also a safe thing.”

  Head football coach of a state school in the South is a position whose prestige rivals, and in some places exceeds, that of the governor. In the increasingly conservative, increasingly Republican South, the first black coach in the SEC had to be someone too solid to question, too deserving to deny. “We have to be able to say we were looking for the best football coach, not to cure the ills of our state,” Brinkley says of the Southern mind-set.

  Croom wishes, of course, that his father had lived to see this. The Reverend Sylvester Croom Sr. passed in January 2000, but not before he saw many of the barriers that he once peered through knocked to the ground. His sons, Kelvin and Sylvester Jr., both played for the Bear, and Croom Sr. became the Alabama football team’s chaplain, invoking God on behalf of whites and blacks (but rarely Auburn). He died too soon to see his older son take over an SEC program. But Kelvin, the baby brother, knows what their father probably would have done. He would have placed a hand on Sylvester’s shoulder and, in a voice that always seemed to be dropping down from a mountain, told him something you had to know Croom Sr. to understand: “Son, you had the best ice cream.”

  In the glow of the stage lights, in a community theater in Tuscaloosa, a wrongly accused black man stood trial for his life. It was only theater, only another local interpretation of the classic To Kill a Mockingbird, but in the pitch dark of the auditorium, sweat beaded on the Reverend Dr. Kelvin Croom’s face. In his mind he did not see an actor, a stage, or the curtain that could drop and cover the ugliness of the story with thick, soft velvet. “In my mind,” he says, “I saw my father.”

  He saw the same South, the same story, but this one unfolded in Holt, Ala., not Harper Lee’s Maycomb, in the mid-1940s. A white woman had been raped and had told authorities that three black men had done it. Justice had to be swift, for the sake of society. It did not need to be accurate.

  Sylvester Croom Sr. had been out rabbit hunting with two of his brothers. They had blood and hair on their clothes when police went for them, acting on a tip from a black woman who said she had seen the Croom boys splashed with red.

  Police arrested them and put them in jail, even as local clergymen tried to convince authorities that the boys were innocent. A short time later, fearing for the safety of their prisoners, officials spirited the boys out of the local jail and took them to a Birmingham lockup.

  All this happened before Kelvin and Sylvester Jr. were born, and the story would be told and retold, sharpened every time, an old razor that still draws blood. How close, Kelvin would always think. How close his father had come to being another victim of a doomed, hateful way of life. “It was hard to sit through that play,” Kelvin says.

  The elder Croom’s arrest might have cowed some men, might have made some men walk with their eyes glued to the tops of their shoes. Sylvester Croom Sr. straightened up tall in the service of God and took to wearing a cowboy hat. “You can’t keep a good man down,” he would boom from his pulpit at Beautiful Zion A.M.E. Zion Church in southwest Tuscaloosa, “and you can’t keep a bad man up.”

  He was 6'4", 290 pounds, and on the football field at all-black Alabama A&M he had hit like a pickup truck. The stories he told and the ones told about him made his boys want to be him. “Against South Carolina State, in about 1950, he picked up a ball on the one or two and ran it all the way back for a touchdown,” says Sylvester Jr. “I’d always liked that story, and in my head I always saw myself doing that.”

  In the pulpit Sylvester Sr. was demanding, unbending. If he saw his sons acting a fool or just not paying attention, he would point one big finger at them, silently passing sentence, and it augered right into their hearts. “You didn’t enjoy any of the rest of that sermon,” Kelvin says. “You knew what was coming when you got home.”

  As the Civil Rights movement took hold of Alabama, Sylvester Sr. lived the nonviolence that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, but in the afternoons he would stand at the practice field fence and stare at the vaunted all-white Alabama football team, and dream. His sons stood with him, dreaming too.

  To work beside a man or share a lunch counter with him or sit with him on a bus, that meant something. But to line up across from him in full pads and slam into him with all the power in your body, without any consequence beyond the outcome of a play, a game? When was a man more free than that?

  Tuscaloosa, like the rest of Alabama, was rigidly segregated, with an insidious Klan presence. The Alabama campus was off-limits—Sylvester Croom Jr. never strolled across it, or even walked past it. He saw it from the windows of cars.

  Once, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, an ice-cream vendor came to Croom Sr. for counsel. “He was having difficulty,” Kelvin says. It was a matter of conscience. The vendor was known to have the best ice cream in Tuscaloosa, and people—blacks and whites—lined up for it. He served whites through the front door and blacks through the back door. His business thrived, within the conventions of society. But it was a time to question convention, and the vendor, who was white, wanted to do something revolutionary. He wanted to serve blacks and whites through one door.

  “He knew what was right, but he needed someone to lean on,” Kelvin says.

  “You do have the best ice cream in town,” Croom Sr. told the vendor. The people would have to decide if it was worth standing beside someone of another color to get some. “Serve it from one door,” he told the vendor, and make it about flavor, not about color.

  There is a Southern tradition of lamentation when it comes to daddies. Men have been known to drink too much and talk and cry all night, remembering. But a sober man sings the best songs of praise.

  “I guess the best sermon he preached was the one he lived,” Kelvin says. “If anybody did without in our house, it was him. It was important to him what Mom, me, and Sly thought of him. He always told us to love people, to never hold grudges.” It would have been just words if Kelvin an
d Sylvester Jr. had not known that their father had a reason to hate.

  “He always said, ‘You got to do right every day,’” Sylvester Jr. says.

  “Work within the system when you can,” Kelvin says.

  “Fight by the rules,” Sylvester Jr. says.

  “And,” Kelvin says, “have the best ice cream.”

  The spit wad caught him square in the face. It was his welcome to the overwhelmingly white junior high school in Tuscaloosa that he and, later, his brother attended.

  He did not do a thing except wipe it off. “I look around, and I’m ticked, and I see who did it,” Sylvester Croom Jr. says.

  “Follow Dr. King’s teachings, no matter what happens,” his father had said.

  Later that day, at football practice, Sylvester Jr. saw the boy who had thrown the spit wad—across the line from him in pads. “I hit him as hard as I could,” Croom says, and he laughs out loud. It was a bone-numbing hit. “I would find a way to hit him ... every day.”

  But is that in keeping with Dr. King’s teachings? “Sometimes,” Kelvin says, “you slip.”

  White students refused to be Sylvester Jr.’s study partners, to share a locker with him, to let him into groups formed for class projects. He was not so much mistreated as ignored. The thing he hated most was the silence, which he endured even in a hallway that rang with voices and pounding feet and banging lockers. “The biggest fear I had was just being isolated,” he says. For all the interaction he had with students in some classes, “I might as well have been a tree.”

  But kindnesses, and courage, filled the silence. The practice field was three miles from the school, and the ninth-grade football players had to get there as best they could. The handful of black players did not have a ride, and it took time to walk three miles. They would have to miss part of practice. But the first week of football a car pulled up, and a white player, a quarterback named Stan Bradford, motioned the black players over. There was not room enough for all of them to sit in the backseat, so a couple of them squeezed into the front, beside Bradford’s mother.

  Every one of them knew that this was taboo, that people had been killed for less. “You just didn’t sit with no white lady,” Croom says. “It seems like a little thing, but that lady did something that wasn’t supposed to be done in that time, and it changed my world.”

  Another challenge to convention came from the Tuscaloosa High football coach, Billy Henderson. Other Alabama coaches had black players, but they left them at home or on the bench when they played in racially charged places such as Montgomery—or across the state line in Mississippi. But no one was going to tell Henderson who could start on his football team. “It took courage, but he believed in us,” says Kelvin. “He was some man.”

  Sylvester Jr. played practically every position—even did some kicking. He was big, strong, 5'11" and 195 pounds, and while his team won only about six games his whole high school career, he caught the attention of colleges. One day a recruiter from Alabama stood at the Crooms’ door.

  Sylvester Jr. had believed that Alabama was for dreaming, and that A&M was for playing. But Wilbur Jackson had broken the color line as the Crimson Tide’s first black recruit, in 1970, and Croom followed him there the next year. He remembers his first day of college. White players, knowing he was from Tuscaloosa, asked him how to find this place or that on campus.

  “How would I know?” he said. “I never been here.”

  “I wanted one thing,” Croom says. “I was sick of losing. I wanted to win.” At that time all Alabama did was win. “And I wanted to stand there at the foot of Denny Chimes as the captain of the football team.” His teammates, predominantly white, made him that in 1974.

  As a center in the wishbone Croom won honors—he was on Kodak’s All-America team and voted the best offensive lineman in the SEC—and signed with the New Orleans Saints, for whom he would play one game. But coaching would be Croom’s football future, and he was an assistant for 10 years at Alabama before moving on to the pros where he was an assistant coach at Tampa Bay, Indianapolis, San Diego, Detroit, and finally Green Bay. Then, last May, Alabama fired coach Mike Price. Mama called, as Bryant liked to say, but the door closed in Croom’s face before he could step inside.

  “At one point I thought I had the job,” Croom says, and Alabama—by all accounts—strongly considered him before settling on former Tide quarterback Mike Shula, who was nearly 11 years younger than Croom, and that much less experienced.

  Croom loves Alabama. His brother, who took over their father’s place in the pulpit at Tuscaloosa’s College Hill Baptist Church, leads the devotion before every Crimson Tide home basketball game. Not getting the Tide football job hurt Sylvester, says Kelvin. “He had been successful at every juncture. He was All-America. Why not bring him back?”

  But Sylvester would no more bad-mouth Alabama than he would his family. Asked about not getting the job, he thinks a minute. Then he says, “I just remember something Coach Bryant said: ‘Go where they want you.’

  “The interest Alabama showed probably opened this door for me,” he says of Mississippi State. “They wanted me. Not a black coach. They wanted me.”

  The MSU athletic director, Larry Templeton, is not worried that Croom will leave for Alabama if things go badly for Shula and Mama calls again. “Not the least bit,” he says. “Mississippi State gave him the opportunity, and he will remember that.”

  He will have every chance to succeed and will not be penalized for transgressions that may have been committed by his predecessors. His new contract would be extended for each year the school might be on probation. “If there are NCAA sanctions, his four years will begin when those sanctions are over,” Templeton says.

  Any backlash to the hiring of a black coach has been minuscule, says Lee, the MSU president. “We got mail from Ole Miss graduates” praising MSU—and some from Alabama, expressing regret that Alabama didn’t get him. The response “reaffirms that [people] just accepted that it is time. Private giving for athletics has increased. We’re quite happy.”

  Mississippi State, at least for now, has more pressing problems than its place in civil rights history. “The program has to be above reproach,” Lee says. He felt Croom would guarantee that. But then, of course, he also has to win in the SEC. Recruiting has gone better than expected for a team under an NCAA cloud, but the players will have to line up against faster, stronger, more talented teams, such as LSU, and bleed. They need a reason to do that. They say they will do it for Bulldog pride and a place in history. Everyone says color doesn’t matter, at first. Then you ask them who they are, where they are from, and....

  Deljuan Robinson’s mama mopped floors and drove a school bus and worked every other job she could find to give her four sons a chance. “She raised us by herself,” said Robinson, a 6'4", 295-pound defensive lineman from Hernando, Miss. “She made us finish school. Wasn’t nothin’ easy about that.” If growing up poor and black wasn’t a deep enough hole, the 19-year-old Robinson found out two years ago that he had a leaky heart valve. A scar from open-heart surgery bisects his chest. Now a black man will succeed or fail as a head coach in the SEC based in part on how Robinson performs. “I’ll be proud to take on a role like that,” Robinson says. “She’ll be proud too,” he says of his mom.

  Quarterback Omarr Conner’s father is on dialysis, and his mother used to work at a chicken plant and now works at a fish plant in Macon, Miss., about 30 minutes southeast of Starkville. College football was supposed to be a ticket to something better. Conner watched his first season, under former Bulldogs coach Jackie Sherrill, collapse into a 2-10 agony.

  Conner will never forget the first team meeting under Croom. “I thought, God has sent us someone to save us. I am fixing to play for Coach Croom, and Coach Croom played under Bear Bryant. And I can tell my child, ‘I was part of history. I made history with the first black coach in the SEC.’”

  Croom knows how hard it is to keep believing when the things you want seem so f
ar away. He is uncomfortable being a symbol. But there is no denying it, really.

  Somewhere, in a backyard in Alabama or Mississippi, a boy is kicking field goals over the clothesline and throwing touchdown passes to himself, lobbing the ball so high that he can be quarterback and receiver all in one.

  “He needs to know,” Croom says, “that things do change.”

  BORN TOO LATE

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: January 2013

  The house is a century old. It towers into the treetops from its corner lot in Tuscaloosa, two massive stories of yellow brick with a porch so wide and deep I have watched little boys play football across it. The house is built around a massive staircase, the kind you see only in the movies. You expect to see an elegant woman descend it in her evening gown—I imagine Lauren Bacall. A ghost walks its upper rooms, people say. I was a guest here for months and never saw her. Still, something dwells in that house, something from another age.

  The couple who welcomed me inside, Ken and Jessie Fowler, are true friends. They are almost a generation older than me, a generation of grace and civility. Their house has more rooms than a Marriott, but mostly we lived in the kitchen, talking about the places they had seen and the times they had lived, of Manhattan in an age of miniskirts, and Miami Beach when Gleason and Sinatra played, and glorious football teams that traveled by train.

  It was there, beside a refrigerator filled with limitless pie, I realized I was a man lost in time. I had always been most comfortable in the past. But I had never really wrapped my mind around it till then, staring at a forkful of lemon icebox, talking about how, in a bad wreck, you really can’t beat a Lincoln.

  I do not want to turn back time. Too many people want to do that already. Too much good, too much justice has come to be, out of the darkness of our past. But I felt a comfort in that room, and in that company, I have seldom known. Maybe that is because by taking me into their past, they took me back to my own.