A racial turning point
In 1960s Louisiana, a black football player developed a bond with a Japanese-American coach, said journalist Jeré Longman in Decades later, that player came back to run the parish’s schools.
EUNICE, LA.— Before two-a-day football practices began in August 1969, coach Joe Nagata gathered some of his white senior players at
Eunice High School. He told them to prepare for workouts more difficult than usual in heat and humidity that felt like damp clothes inside a dryer. Desegregation by federal mandate was approaching belatedly and nervously in my rural hometown on the Cajun prairie, 2½ hours west of New Orleans in St. Landry Parish. Fifteen years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling, declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. Neil Armstrong had walked on the moon a month earlier. Finally, black students from Charles Drew High School were, by court order, to fully integrate Eunice High School as summer turned to fall. “We don’t know these other young men,” Nagata said of the arriving black players, according to Coleman Dupre, our star white running back. “We have to find out who is willing to pay the price.” Integration happened uneasily at Eunice High School, after prolonged white resistance. A spasm of violence convulsed the school just as classes began. But despite initial wariness, desegregation also provided the beginning of a decadeslong bond between a coach and a player that belied the Southern archetype.
Nagata was a Japanese-American who had endured racism and suspicion of the other during World War II. And Darrel Brown was a black player who became a teacher, coach, principal, and, in 2013, the first African-American elected as the full-time school superintendent of St. Landry Parish. It was a relationship I learned about as a sports reporter for The New York Times while examining the 50th anniversary of desegregation at my high school. It was a vital friendship that continued until Nagata died in 2001 at age 77. And it illustrated race relations in Eunice over the past half-century: the systematic separation of a bygone era; the everevolving change today; the essential but imperfect progress that unspools ahead, kinks and snags, then untangles and casts forward again, hopeful and complicated. Darrel’s parents and a number of black mentors strongly influenced him. His father was a teacher, his mother a librarian. His mother was so proud when Darrel became assistant principal of Eunice High School in 1999 that even though she was gravely ill, she visited his office in her robe and nightgown. But he also developed a lasting connection with Nagata at a transformative moment in Eunice and across the South, when the line of scrimmage became a front line of a profound new social order.
“Coach Nagata inspired me,” Darrel, now retired at 66, told me recently over a long lunch and dinner of shrimp and crawfish. ARREL AND I did not know each other in 1969. He was a senior; I was a sophomore. He was a starting defensive lineman; I was a backup center who played mostly on the junior varsity. He is black; I am white. We grew up about a half-mile apart with lives that were
Dseparate and unequal, governed by restrictions on who could live in what neighborhood, swim in what pool, sit in what section of a movie theater. Segregation was so entrenched in my naïve boyhood that I thought the “Whites Only” sign at the laundromat referred to the color of clothes. Then, everything changed that August. Black players and white players dressed in the same locker room, showered in the same showers, challenged one another for positions on the line and in the backfield. We were wary of each other, no doubt. But we were also small-town teenagers trying to bond as a team in an apprehensive meritocracy of helmets and shoulder pads.
Nagata showed great loyalty to his players but was said to have had complex feelings about desegregation. Coleman, our running back, told me the coach resented what he considered social “entitlements” for blacks, feeling he had not received the same support when facing bigotry himself as a teenager, LSU football player, and soldier during World War II. Coleman added that Nagata later grew frustrated, feeling he was not permitted to discipline black students as he could white students.
Yet as a Japanese-American, he had also yearned to be treated equally and felt that everyone should be treated with dignity. “He had an understanding of what blacks had gone through growing up, dealing with prejudice, given what he and his family had to put up with,” Coleman said.
HE 1969 FOOTBALL season began as scheduled, and school opened edgily after white protests around
St. Landry Parish. Still, there had been no wholesale white flight in Eunice, no rush to build so-called segregation academies. Black teachers, surely given little choice, had accepted less than a 50-50 apportionment at Eunice High School. Leadership in the school, black and white, was strong and committed to discipline and tolerance. But a fragile calm combusted on Sept. 22. A white student walking to class came upon a fight in a hallway. He was stabbed in the left side by a black teenager from Baltimore who had apparently not regis
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