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A racial turning point
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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.
D
ARREL AND I did not know each
other in 1969. He was a senior; I
was a sophomore. He was a start-
ing defensive lineman; I was a backup cen-
ter who played mostly on the junior varsity.
He is black; I am white. We grew up about
a half-mile apart with lives that wereseparate 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 laundro-
mat 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 teenag-
ers 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 consid-
ered 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 frus-
trated, 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.T
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 apportion-
ment 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-In 1960s Louisiana, a black football player developed a bond with a Japanese-American coach, said journalist
Jeré Longman in The New York Times. Decades later, that player came back to run the parish’s schools.Coach Nagata with his parents in Eunice, La.E
UNICE, 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 ner-
vously 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 decades-
long 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 ever-
evolving change today; the essential but
imperfect progress that unspools ahead,
kinks and snags, then untangles and casts