tered for classes. As belts with sharpened
buckles were swung, Johnny Alfred, our
team’s best black running back, grabbed
Coleman, our top white back, and pulled
him to safety.
The fight might have carried over from
racial skirmishes at our football game three
days earlier, officials believed. By midmorn-
ing, the high school was closed. Football
players were commended by the principal
for calming the students and preventing
further trouble. Yet, when school reopened
the next day, nearly 400 of the 500 white
students were absent.
Local police officers, state troopers,
and FBI agents converged on Eunice
High School after the stabbing.
Threats were made to burn down
the school and black neighbor-
hoods. Nagata received anonymous
threats and put steel plating in the
front windows of his house, just in
case, his children said.
Eunice was placed under curfew.
Local and federal authorities spent
several nights inside the school.
After a week or so, most white
students returned. An anticipated
exodus did not occur. But the atmo-
sphere remained tense. I remember
students being frisked for weapons
in physical education class and
teachers carrying whistles to blow if fights
broke out.
The football team continued to play, serv-
ing to defuse tensions. Darrel, a 6-foot,
185-pound defensive guard, was nick-
named Bear for his thick chest and deep
voice, but those who know him can hardly
remember him raising it. He and others
became peacemakers. “The football players
were sort of referees in the halls,” Darrel
said. “We got between a lot of things.”
In Darrel, Nagata and his staff clearly saw
something special. David Greer, a white
assistant who’d grown up as a Catholic in
Birmingham, Ala., and experienced cross
burnings in his yard by the Ku Klux Klan,
gave Darrel rides to preseason practices.
Later, he and Nagata gauged Darrel’s inter-
est in attending a predominantly white
college in Louisiana, where he would
have been among the early black football
players. “They saw something in me that
maybe I didn’t see in myself,” Darrel said.
After that 1969 season, Nagata and
Edmund Saucier, the Eunice High School
principal, asked Darrel and other black
players to speak candidly about their expe-
riences with desegregation.
Darrel asked why the quarterback who had
been the starter at Charles Drew High wasThe last word^41
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not given the same opportunity at Eunice
High, touching on a corrosive stereotype
that black athletes were not smart enough
to be quarterbacks. Nagata said he’d chosen
a white quarterback based on experience,
not race. The white quarterback had played
in his system for three years. Darrel said he
accepted the answer and appreciated being
able to speak openly. “I had never had dia-
logue like that with the principal,” he said.
Still, the early years after desegregation
were fraught with strain that veered into
tragedy on Feb. 11, 1972. A fight broke
out in a dimly lit parking lot at Euniceschool superintendent, Darrel said, but
“when doors started to open, I walked
through them.” Nagata did not live to see
Darrel run the county schools. He resigned
from the school board in declining health
in 2000 and died a year later. At a memo-
rial service, Darrel fought back tears.
In Eunice, the subject of race, as in many
places, is not easily discussed and yet ever-
present. Eunice High School did not spon-
sor an integrated prom until 2004. After
more than 150 black students walked out
of class in 1980, protesting that a vote
for homecoming queen was unfairly tilted
toward whites, no queen was
chosen again until four years ago.
Despite efforts by the principal to
recruit minority faculty members,
there are two black teachers now
at the school, compared with 10
in 1969.
At the same time, among tra-
ditional public high schools in
St. Landry Parish, Eunice High
School offers the highest-rated
education, according to a 2019
ranking by U.S. News & World
Report. In many ways, desegrega-
tion has worked as intended. There
is one public high school in town,
and the student body—55 percent
white, 43 percent black, 2 percent
Hispanic—still roughly reflects the
racial makeup of the city.
Black students have been named valedicto-
rian, Mr. and Miss Eunice High, and, yes,
homecoming queen. Eight of the 10 mem-
bers of this season’s homecoming court are
African-American. A black player giving
his white girlfriend a kiss in the hallway at
Eunice High School brings only an admoni-
tion to hurry on to class, not the racial con-
frontation that surely would have erupted a
half-century ago.
In 2013, Darrel became superintendent
and served until late 2016. He was known
officially by his first name, Edward, though
in Eunice he is widely known as Darrel, his
middle name. He presided over one mile-
stone achievement: overseeing the dismissal
by a federal judge of the 47-year-old school
desegregation order in St. Landry Parish in
September 2016. His career had completed
a singular arc: He attended segregated
Charles Drew High School, graduated in
the first fully desegregated class at Eunice
High School, and headed the parish school
system nearly a half-century later when it
was released from federal oversight.Excerpted from an article that originally
appeared in The New York Times. Used
with permission.Darrel Brown, 50 years after he helped integrate Eunice HighHigh School after a basketball game. A
senior by then, I remember leaving the
gym and seeing a trash can arc through
the air like the jettisoned stage of a rocket.
The next morning, Nagata phoned me
and other football players with grim news.
The brawl had led to a stabbing. A white
teenager from the visiting school had been
nicked in the heart and died in the night.
Come to school, coach told us, and help
look for the knife. We never found it.D
ARREL WAS MIDWAY through college
at Grambling State, where he did
not play football, building toward a
career of keeping black and white students
together. An important moment for him
occurred in the early 1990s. By then, Nagata
was retired and serving on the St. Landry
Parish school board. He showed up unan-
nounced at Eunice Junior High School,
where Darrel was the head football coach,
and said, “Don’t have me call your name
for something and you’re not prepared.”
Then Nagata urged Darrel to get his
master’s degree. His words were cryptic,
but Darrel understood them to mean that
administrative positions would soon open.
Nagata’s encouragement, Darrel said, “lit
a fire.”
He had not aspired to become the parish