Here’s a true story that touches on many of the issues that still challenge some Southern communities. The book centers on a season-long boycott of 31 black players at Conway High in Conway, S.C. The walkout occurred in 1989 after an unseasoned white quarterback was given the nod over the returning black starter, this despite the fact that Carlos Hunt looked to make the town’s beloved Tigers a contender for the school’s first state championship. The black players, with the support of a local pastor and NAACP president, protested Hunt’s demotion as an act of racisim. The impact on Conway of this dispute makes for a revealing study of how hard it can be to move on from cultural tensions.
Here’s an excerpt from Lines of Scrimmage:
“Twenty-five years later, the boycott remains a subject that people in Conway often speak about in whispers. Local whites get especially tongue-tied when the subject of 1989 comes up, presumably because they don’t want to risk sounding racist. They’ll often tell you that they weren’t supporting a white kid over a black kid; they were supporting the coach’s prerogative to choose who plays where. H.H. Singleton, they’ll say, thought he was doing the right thing, but he should have stuck with leading Cherry Hills Baptist and the NAACP instead of trying to run the football team. Similarly, there are blacks in Conway who still don’t much like Chuck Jordan. They won’t come right out and say he was a racist, but they will say that he didn’t treat Carlos fairly, that he didn’t give the kid a chance.
“Lots of people, black and white, mostly just don’t want to stir up all that trouble again. Let it die, they’ll say. The past is the past. But as long as there are folks in town who still remember that year – and Conwayites tend to stay close to home long after high school graduation – stories of the boycott will endure.”
