Dragon Slayer

There is an essential truth at the heart of this story: Vincent Bingham loved everything about the sport of track and field. Vince passed away last week. A 1981 graduate of Crystal City High School, he was known for his upbeat, gregarious nature, love for kids and passion for coaching.

Vince and my late brother Bill were classmates who shared many of the same interests, so I have known him for a long time. I remember when Vincent ran high school track. He was not as good as he liked to remember. But who of us are? His forte would be as a teacher of the sport.

Vince Bingham was a coach. Plain and simple. It was his life. I know of Vince’s resume - high on accomplishment but low on monetary reward. I doubt he ever had much money. Vincent never married, never had any children. He liked to share stories of when it was necessary to advance his early coaching career, he lived in his car. By most of society’s markers he was not wealthy, but if impact were a bankable commodity, Vincent would have resided in a penthouse. He left his mark.

Vincent was a man who brought a lot of smiles. He was always stoked to be out there coaching his kids, being around his coaches and team -he glowed through the culture of the sport. Kids were drawn to him. He was always there for them- he kept Quick Trip hours. He knew all their parents. The kids had his cell number. Vincent loved what he was doing. He was a content man, and he knew it.

In Vince’s worldview, beer had its place. He considered it a restorative drink, the reward due a man after an honest day’s work. He was in his element at coaching clinics. He was in demand as a presenter, then, a fine companion come social hour. Three generations of track coaches throughout the Midwest have Vincent Bingham stories. Once a young coach asked me, in Vince’s presence, how long I had known him. Vince answered for me, “since I was skinny.”

Known for his unyielding expectation of excellence, when it came to results, Vince was old school. He needed what all competitors need: more. In the sport of track and field, there is nowhere to hide, no one to blame. The stopwatch does not lie; the tape measure shows no favorite. I think that was the real draw for Vince. He coached winning. “If you ran a world record and finished second, you not only didn't win, but you also didn’t really set a world record,” I heard him once say at a coaches’ clinic.

Vince always opened his programs to the frustrated and the disenfranchised, offering second chances. He loved the underdog, he saw himself as one, always fighting against those he found in administrative roles who did not share his passion - for his sport or for his kids.

He was a motivator. Something about Vince made a prospect walk away wanting to work more, laugh more, run more, give more. He was admired not so much on the front porch of the sport, but in the backyard, where coaches and former players appreciated the wide shadow, he cast. It is why we should never regret the raising of dragon slayers in a time where there are actual dragons amongst us. Vince was a dragon slayer.

Vincent coached everywhere. He never stayed in one location long. It would take less space to list the area schools he did not coach at compared to those he did. His 2006 Missouri Baptist University women’s team produced a national team championship with 18 of his athletes earning All-American honors. That squad is widely recognized as the best track team ever assembled in the state of Missouri. Over his long career he coached five Olympians. His recruiting efforts led to the Kansas University Jayhawks men’s team winning the 2013 NCAA team championship. In 2009, when he arrived on the Lawrence campus, the program was not even nationally ranked.

In January 2024 I took the track coaching job at St. Charles, MO Community College - their sixth coach in six years. No track. No budget. No roster. No uniforms. No schedule. And as I found in due time, no administrative support. Since the semester had already begun, it was too late for any transfers, so I used social media to recruit students currently enrolled. Somehow that May our Men’s team would finish 8th in the nation.

One prospect showed up and said he had only run track his senior year of high school and he enjoyed it. “Can I come out,” he asked. “Are you breathing,” I responded. When I googled him, I found, true, he had only run track one year at Liberty High School in Wentzville, MO, and he was also the large school state 300-meter hurdle champion.

I told my newfound star that my hurdle expertise was about the level of junior high. I texted Vince. He wanted video of three flights of hurdles, no more or no less. I asked what I could do to aid the cause. Nothing Vince said, “you try and coach him, you will just get him hurt. Just send me the video and do exactly what I tell you to have him do.”

That was in mid-January. At the end of May in Utica, NY my guy was crowned Junior College 110-meter-high hurdle national champion. Second was a full flight behind. I cheered him all the way to a gold medal. I didn’t coach him. Vince did that. I would strongly suspect many other coaches have similar stories of Vince’s behind the scenes help.

Vincent’s health deteriorated over the last decade. Diabetes cost him first his mobility, then his independence, but never his spirit. But when the disease began to compromise his eyesight, that one he shared was tough. Also suffering from congestive heart failure, in 2023 Vince was placed in a nursing home. Plans and paperwork were drawn up to secure him in the comfort of hospice care. You cannot bring down a sledgehammer faster than that. The end was near.

The track world came to his bedside to say their goodbyes. But Vince said he was not yet ready to hang up his whistle, rallied on the back stretch of his life’s journey and a month later, walked out of the nursing home.

Now, the St. Louis area track and field community circled around him. There were numerous fund raisers and prayers. Coaching brought Vince great joy in life. And after his dire final diagnosis two years prior, it also brought him a great deal of strength to keep fighting - to keep coaching. It was an extended escape back into his natural element. Vince attended this past summer’s national AAU meet. He coached to the very end.

I have many cordial and professional acquaintances, but few close friends. I considered Vincent an acquaintance. So, when Vince shared with me 18 months ago his excitement over his return to his Christian roots, I was surprised but pleased to sense the contentment in his voice. He said he had spent too many years not living up to what he now knew was the right path and he intended to use the time he had left to follow that path.

For those of us raised in this small river town on the banks of the broad and murky Mississippi River, legacy means all. The beauty of Crystal City is that time has passed us by. We no longer have the look nor feel of a post-war mill town, which is exactly what we were – a place where for multi generations immigrants worked long hours at backbreaking and lung-choking jobs both above and below the earth. Those days are gone and are not coming back. But today, the legacy still pumps strong. Call it "the American way"—the competition of both the next man up and the last man standing. Vincent thrived on accountability and factory towns are all about accountability. Vincent Bingham was a fitting representative of a hometown he always made proud.

If you untangle and then eliminate the baggage, the race of Life is very simple. We have no say as to when and where we enter the race and we have minimal choice as to when we exit. What we do control is how we run, and Coach Vince Bingham ran hard, and he ran well.

How much, now that the end has arrived, was changed by Vince? In the St. Louis area track and field world, they will be tallying that one up for a while.

 

Because, Mr. History Teacher, No One Ever Taught You

 Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of tremendous strength. Our songs are full of love and life— and the ups and downs of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with nature and wonderment. Our struggles are real and rugged. They beckon our memory to the highest callings of the spirit, to help us rejoice and to overcome.”

Deborah L. Parker

He had the looks of a scruffy middle-aged Sidney Poitier but his swag was all Fred Sanford, with just the right mixture of Falstaffian character qualities: robust, bawdy and brazen. He was working the night shift as the front desk clerk of a rundown motel on the seedy side of Biloxi, Mississippi. Even before releasing my right hand after the obligatory first meeting handshake, he had informed me, “The name is Marvin M. Harris. The M is for Marvelous.”

Biloxi is a seaport city with a colorful past steeped in the now long-ago antebellum glory days of the Old South. Unfortunately, to a first-time visitor, the city’s present is a mere one step ahead of urban decay. In Biloxi’s case, big city eastern seaboard problems have found their way onto the Gulf Coast of Mississippi. Stately southern mansions still dot several well preserved and protected inland subdivisions, majestic Magnolia trees bordering wide boulevards. But the tourist industry has all but dried up and left town, a concession to the rapid development of what the locales refer to as “the Redneck Rivera,” the Gulf Shores, AL area, about 60 miles up the coast.

The Jimmy Buffet parrot head types spend little time in modern day Biloxi, it being no Margaritaville. It is instead as blue collar as a beach front community can get, still a sailor’s town, ripe with a full supply of all the shady enmities that sailors enjoy.

The evening shift on this particular winter weekday, Marvelous informed me, had been slow. He was on the 4 pm to midnight shift. He preferred the midnight to 8 am schedule. It paid a dollar an hour more. “Not as busy, either,” he told me, “but there are still a few more problems on the graveyard shift.” Such as, I asked? “No custodian on duty after midnight, so I got to clean up the puke in the lobby myself.”

I guessed his age to have been between 65 to 70 years. But he also appeared to have lived a hard life, the sort that can make a man appear older than he really is. Manners did not allow for me to inquire, but even if my estimate is off by a decade either way, he would still have been of the last of a generation of blacks to have lived in the south under the Jim Crow laws of segregation. I asked about coming of age in Mississippi under such discriminatory laws, when separate but equal was the law of the land, strictly keeping the races separate.

“You assuming a lot, my friend, what makes you think I grew up in the south?” The accent, maybe, I responded? “I went to an all-black school,” he answered with a head nod to my inquiry about growing up in the Mississippi of segregationist laws. “Terrible schools. Teachers, most of them, couldn’t even read themselves. Back then all of our teachers were black, and most were poorly educated because the college’s blacks could go to in those days were not good colleges. The books, the few we had, were the ones sent down from the white schools when they were done with them. Most didn’t have the covers even left on them, but I guess they were good enough for us black  kids. But tell you what, we behaved, or they would beat our little black asses until we couldn’t sit down. My, oh my how those teachers could swing that paddle. Today, the schools are still segregated, but not by law, but instead by choice. The white kids all go to the private academies, but we do have lots of well-educated white teachers in the local public schools. They teach my grand babies.”

“We couldn’t even go to school in Biloxi, not for high school, anyway,” Marvelous remembered. “They sent us up to Gulf Port to what was known as the 33rd Avenue High School. It is where all the ‘colored’ children, as they referred to us in polite society back then, went. It was the law up until the early 70’s. School building still there, but when Katrina blew through, it darn near took it down. Not much left. It is named after the address of the street it sits on. Think about that? You ever hear of a school named for its address? Guess the white people in charge back then figured there was not one black from the area, going back 100 years, that was worth naming the school after,” he said with a laugh. “And no self-respecting white back then wanted their name on the front door of the town’s black  school.”

Marvelous asked me what I did for a living. I told him I was now a professional vagabond pretending to be retired, but I had previously spent 30+ years in public education. “You was a teacher,” he said, in a tone that told me I was now sitting dead in his sights, I just wasn’t yet sure why. It would not take long for me to understand. “Yes,” I confirmed, “15 years in a classroom and 15 years as a building administrator.” What did you teach, he asked? “American History,” I told him.

“Well, let me tell you about history, Mr. History teacher, our true history, not that stuff they want kids to learn in schools, but the truth, how it really was,” Marvelous responded with a condescending tone in his voice. “See, I like history, it’s kind of a hobby of mine.  I love to read. Pretty much self-taught. I quit school in 8th grade when I turned 16. But I always knew if I was to make anything in this life I had to know how to read. Black kids today just don’t understand how important education is. So many good people a long time ago sacrificed so much, just so black kids today can sit in a classroom. Some even gave their lives, and these dumb punks today throw it away. Throw way the opportunity we were denied for so long, the right to an education. It makes me just sick to see the waste. And you know the real shame; it’s the black community allowing it to happen, a self-inflicted wound.”

It was time, Marvelous told me, for a quiz and he was now the one at the head of the class. “Now tell me what you know about Woodrow Wilson,” Marvelous asked, leaning across the front lobby desk, the gleam in his eyes now matching the shine on his gold front tooth, oblivious to the two young ladies of the evening who had just entered the lobby. Attired in four-inch heels and two-inch skirts; they loudly argued about who did or did not hold seniority on the street corner outside the front door.

Later, when the bickering between the two began anew, interrupting our conversation, Marvelous quickly and decisively ran both out of the lobby. “Dumb ass crack whores are the only whores that are left to work on the street anymore. The hookers with any class at all, now days, they all use Craig’s List,” Marvelous said.

Woodrow Wilson, I responded, drawing out the pronunciation in a way that showed I was calling up from my well-educated history teaching brain a plethora of information that would prove overwhelming by sheer volume for this night shift desk clerk wannabe historian.

Woodrow Wilson: “President of the United States, highly educated, served as President of Princeton University, created the League of Nations after WWI, considered the most educated president ever,” and I added, after a long pause to draw out the drama of the knockout punch of knowledge I was about to unload, “probably had a nervous breakdown the last three months of his final term. Most historians agree now that his wife really ran the nation during that time, with Wilson sequestered in the White House 24 hours a day in his bedroom. Sequestered, that means hid out,” I clarified for my new friend.

“You left out the most important part,” Marvelous said, ignoring my condescending addendum to the end of my lecture. “Wilson was the biggest racist in the history of the American Presidency. Even worse than some before the (civil war) who had owned slaves.” Taken aback slightly by this tidbit of trivia, I recovered quickly. “I do know that was rumored, the racism,” was my retort. “Rumored,” Marvelous answered. “Rumored, your white ass. It is a fact, but I bet you never taught it to those kids in your class, now did you?”

Marvelous was now in full control of this conversation. “All this Princeton stuff, the League of Nations and its 14 Points (damn, I thought, I forgot to mention the 14 Points), all bull shit. Wilson came from the South. He came to the presidency in 1912 with considerable help from the black vote. Back in that time, blacks were very much aligned with the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln. Teddy Roosevelt had been the progressive leader of the Party and had served seven years in the White House, but the Democrats made a big push to win over the black vote in 1912 and it worked, get Taft out. When TR couldn’t get the nomination away from Taft and (he) formed a third party, the Bull Moose Party. That is what we need today, a man of action, like Teddy, but that is another story, so back to Wilson. They (black voters) got Wilson elected. And you know what the first thing he did when he got to Washington to pay back blacks for their loyalty? Wilson segregated everything, both in the city and in the government agencies buildings. Made it the law. Blacks and whites now had to work in separate buildings, if they worked for the government. If circumstances made it so it was not possible to separate whites from blacks by buildings, then Wilson ordered that curtains be hung between white and black workers, to discourage association. Bet you never taught that to your students, now did you, Mr. History teacher?”

Later when I researched Wilson’s race segregating history, I found that Marvelous was extremely accurate in his rendition of a very sad chapter in our nation’s past, one, as Marvelous had predicted, I had never taught to my students.

“Now listen to this, it should be a very important part of our history and should be taught to every school kid in America, but it’s not.” Marvelous was rolling now. “The worst domestic riots in the history of this nation were racial riots and came in the later years of Wilson’s (tenure) and the year’s immediately after his terms in office. He set the tone for the 1920’s, the worst decade in our history for intimidation and the denial of civil rights to black citizens in the South.”

“I will give you an interesting fact, the first example of air bombing of civilians, anywhere in the recorded history of the world happened right here in this country, came during the race riots in Tulsa, OK in 1921. Our military bombed black neighborhoods in Tulsa. They, our military, understand, dropped dynamite on the black neighborhoods of Tulsa and killed at least 70 innocently random people. We are not talking now about Syria or Iran, mind you, we are talking about Oklahoma, OKLAHOMA, and nobody remembers. Did you ever teach that to your students?”

Back on my heels now, Marvelous smelled blood in the water and moved in for the intellectual kill. “Tell me about the Reconstruction Era, the year’s right after the Civil War,” he asked? I once again gave him the standard textbook rendition: The defeated southern states were treated as a conquered nation by the northern victors. Blacks in the southern states were put into positions of governmental authority by northern forces. Although noble in intent, the complexity of governing a nation by a group of just freed and uneducated slaves proved to be too much and was a dismal failure. Eventually, the north out of frustration, withdrew its troops and thus the enforcement of the reconstruction mandates it had put in place. With no agency of power to enforce the laws of equality, whites took back all local and state power in the southern states and a Jim Crow segregated society became deeply entrenched for the next 100 years.

Once again, Marvelous was neither impressed nor in agreement with my assessment. “Bullshit, more bullshit,” was his evaluation of my knowledge of Reconstruction. “You know less about Reconstruction than you do about Wilson, and that my friend is limited,” he said.

“Did you know that Reconstruction in Mississippi worked just fine,” he stated, “as long as the federal troops were there to enforce the law that all men are equal? Once they (the Feds) pulled out, then fear took over and terror was used to take back all the gains of Reconstruction. The Klan rose to power and the darkest chapter in the history of this country, even worse that slavery itself, came about. Jim Crow and segregation was released upon my people, my ancestors, and eventually upon me.”

He was not yet through; he had one better and strong volley of academia ammunition to fire across the bow of my sinking ship. “Here is a fact you will not find in the history books,” Marvelous announced. “Did you know that the first public school mandatory laws for school attendance in Mississippi; and the first laws that obligated the state to support compulsory education for white children (were) passed in 1870 by an almost all black state legislature?”

“How ironic that it was black politicians who made the laws that for the first time allowed white kids in Mississippi the right to go and get a free public-school education. Right here in good old boy Jim Crow Magnolia state Mississippi. Did you ever teach your students that fact when you talked to them about how Reconstruction failed because blacks were not ready to lead,” he asked, with no attempt to try and hide the triumph in the tone of his voice? I remained silent, defenseless to the onslaught. Marvelous answered for me, “No.”

“And you know why you didn’t,” he prodded, rhetorically? “Because, Mr. History teacher, no one ever taught you.”

They have now.

Obsolete Racial Paradigms of Limitations.

Without deliberate malice intent, we still today cryogenically freeze young athletes, of all races, into worn out obsolete racial paradigms of limitations. "Racial stereotypes" is a nice politically correct term that when broken down becomes a squalid and dirty indictment of all racist preconceptions: that blacks are not cerebral enough to take on “leadership roles.” as players, coaches or in positions of management. 

Athletics remain today in America a great social benchmark for measuring racial trends. Listen between the lines of any athletic based conversation and immediately one can seize on the obvious catch words of racial athletic stereotyping. For example, if a basketball player is described as” very athletic,” or if a team has “great athleticism,” rest assured, it is a team of predominantly African Americans. If a player or team is labeled as “smart” or “disciplined,” the labels are assigned dutifully to white players or a white team.

Today, if a quarterback is listed as a "dual-threat, run or pass," the chance this athlete is African American is very high. If a quarterback is judged as a "pocket passer of limited mobility," then you have a safe bet he is white and in the eyes of coaches cannot outrun a dead black man.

In 2014, I agreed to take on a one-year assignment to coach the girls’ basketball team at St Louis Metro High School. I had coached boys for 30+ years but had always wanted to coach girls and had always wanted to coach in the St. Louis Public High League. I could mark off two items on my professional “to-do” list with one stroke, so I took the job.

Metro High is an anomaly for the St. Louis Public Schools, a high academic performing building. Metro is consistently ranked in the top ten list of the nation’s public high schools, once rising to number 1 on the prestigious US News and World Report’s list of the nation’s top public high schools.

All Metro students are required to perform 300 hours of community service prior to graduation. For the 2003–2004 school year, Metro was named a Missouri Gold Star school and a national Blue-Ribbon school. It was again named a Missouri Gold Star school and Blue-Ribbon school in 2007–2008. In 2012, Newsweek ranked the school as 12 out of the top 1,000 public high schools in the United States. In 2016, the school earned the top scores for Missouri’s public high schools for end-of-course exams in english, science, and social studies.  In May 2018, Metro again earned the top ranking in the state. You get the point: Metro kids are smart.

The academic demands and pressure to perform in the classroom placed upon its students are off the chart. Half of the entering freshmen will not be around in four years for graduation, academic casualties, transferred to a less challenging city high school. It is the one magnet school in the SLPS that has done what it is supposed to do - draw non-black students from the county. The high academics at Metro and the college opportunities it provides its graduates is a very effective “magnet” to entice students and their parents to come back to the city schools. Metro is the pride of the city’s educational leaders, a fair-haired favorite child within the midst of a field of red headed stepchildren.

My basketball team was all black. We were pretty good. We had early in the season beaten East St. Louis, IL, a powerhouse with ten times our enrollment. Metro had never beaten East Side in any athletic event, so around school, it was a big deal. But it got us no respect from the establishment powerhouses in the suburbs. The Public High League was viewed as a circuit void of talent (the private schools and the county public schools had siphoned it all off), undisciplined and poorly coached teams of underachieving black kids. We were entered in the 16-team field for the Visitation Academy Christmas Tournament, the only black city school entered. The “Viz” tournament is the oldest and most prestigious event of its kind in the Midwest.

Despite our 5-1 record, we knew we would get little respect from the suburban schools at the seed meeting. I had told our girls we wanted to be seeded 15^th and draw the second seed in the opening round. We did not want to be 16^th and forced to play the number 1 seed, Incarnate Word Academy, who would finish the season as the number 2 ranked team in the nation. We could not beat them, but I felt we could best any of the other 14 teams in the field. I sandbagged as best I could at the Saturday morning coaches’ seed meeting. Bingo, we were seeded 15^th and drew the number two seed, a large county school ranked third in the state.

Our first-round opponent’s coach made the statement in the local media that it was an honor to be chosen second in such a strong field, but she and her team knew they would be in for “a strong test AFTER the first round.” AFTER? Oh, my! The ambush was set, the perfect overconfident foil in place. We won by 9 points and it really was not that close.

I had two young ladies at Metro in 2014 who were very athletic: excellent quickness and jumping ability. The rest of the roster - nice girls, very hard workers and very smart- but slow and flat footed. We learned to play to our strengths: work ethic and intelligence.

After the game, I was interviewed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and their reporter’s first comments were, “this has to be one of the biggest upsets in history of the area’s girls’ basketball.” Not really, I thought, but I let him go on uninterrupted. He then said, “your team is so athletic.” I looked at him like he had two heads. “Did you watch the game,” I asked? “We are not athletic, what you mean is we are very black.” We are also, I told him, “very smart.” So much for stereotypes.

It became a running joke amongst our team that white teams were smart and black teams were athletic. We played late in the season, Lutheran North, a north side team that played one white girl.  The rest of their rotation was black. Late in the game we were nursing a lead and wanted to make sure we took away the three-point shot by putting a lot of pressure on their best shooter, who just happened to be their only white player. I told my girls as we broke the timeout huddle, “be sure and know where Klotzer is.” One of our girls asked, “which one is Klotzer?” Before I could answer, one of our senior players, without missing a beat said, “the smart one.”

The End of Jim Crow Education in a Small Town

We never know how high we are

Till we are called to rise;

And then, if we are true to plan,
  Our statures touch the skies— Emily Dickinson

By Dave Almany

1969 MC Football

Think of it this way: the Monroe City, MO Washington school has been dead more years than it lived, and here you have Howard Pruitt with a monk like resolve pouring over old newspapers and yearbooks. His determination is rooted in documentation. Get it written down! When he is called home by his Lord, Pruitt intends to leave this earth a gift; the eternal flame of the Washington School that for 40 years educated the “colored” students of Monroe City. The school was finally closed sometime in the mid 1960’s. Even the exact date of complete racial desegregation of the Monroe City Public Schools is open to debate. 

Monroe City’s Washington School is a story of eventual triumph, but still, the reality is it was a flower grown from poisonous soil—the segregation laws of 20th-century America. "People need to know that it was the law back then," says Pruitt. And there is a modern burden to bear, “woke” culture be damned. "A lot of good people back then didn't question.” 

Searching for ghosts is not easy but there's a spiritually uplifting Dickensian touch to all this - what Pruitt is attempting - but there's also a sense of immense pressure he battles. He is nearing 70 years of age and as he says, “we are passing fast.” An old African proverb states that when an old man dies, a library dies with him. “So many stories I have not heard,” Pruitt says with a sad shake of his head, “and they need to not only be heard but recorded. That keeps me up at night.” If you have ever called Monroe City home, regardless of your racial makeup, you owe Howard Pruitt a big thank you.

But that anonymity - out of sight, out of mind - was, and still is, the essence of Monroe City's ignored “Colored” school; the nameless faces of a school without even a yearbook to record their mere existence. They were neighbors and boyfriends and sons and nephews, and they had dads and moms and sisters and brothers and teachers and that special girl, and the link that bonded it all still pulsates through the heart and in the blood of now aging alums like Howard Pruitt. It is a unique confluence of dignity and history, and Pruitt sells it all to me with the wry smile of a prophet. 

Until the fall of 1965, Pruitt attended the Washington School. “I started school at Washington in 1958 and went through the 6th grade. Then I moved over to the White school.”  1958 - the tail years of the Eisenhower administration, as Martin Luther King Jr. was marching in the South and an inchoate and aborning civil rights movement was beginning to spread across America.

The landmark Supreme Court decision of 1954, Brown v Topeka Board of Education made segregated schools based on race unconstitutional. Pruitt entered the 7th grade, for the first time sitting in a classroom next to white students, 11 years after Brown v Board.

The Monroe City Public School District began providing high school level education for its Black students in 1938. As required by the State law of the day, Black and White students were taught in separate buildings. Beginning in 1948, Monroe City Black high school aged students were bussed to the all-Black Douglas High School in Hannibal, MO. In 1955, the Hannibal Public Schools made the decision to abide by the Brown v Board ruling and completely integrate its schools, thus closing Douglas High. 

Many districts in Missouri ignored and/or challenged the Brown v Board ruling in court. Monroe City chose a hybrid path. The high school was integrated, as the law required, but the district’s Black elementary students were still, until 1965, segregated at Washington. 

In 1956, Monroe City High School graduated its first Black students, four in total. Donald Scott was one. He played on the varsity basketball team. He became the first in his family to graduate from college. He earned his degree in 1960 from Lincoln University and joined the US Army. Thirty-one years later he retired with the rank of Brigadier General. 

Upon retiring from active duty in 1992, Scott served as the chief operating officer and chief of staff for the mayor of Atlanta. He later became the founding director and chief executive officer of the AmeriCorps National Civilian Corp. He was in 1997 appointed by President Bill Clinton to the role of the Deputy Librarian of Congress. He retired for good in 2006.

I taught in Monroe City for five years and never heard the story of Donald Scott. And we question why we need a black history month. “And tell him about how you led the protest at the high school for a black history class, Howard. 1970 and Howard is protesting and demanding a black history class at Monroe City High School,” teases classmate and lifelong friend Brenda Wilkerson Harris. “You were something, even back then, Howard Pruitt.”

Harris has joined us for a lunch meeting in Columbia, MO. Both she and Pruitt have called the host city for the University of Missouri home for over 40 years.  Harris is now retired after a career as an office administrative assistant. She has raised two adult children and has been single since her second husband passed away in 1984.

Howard Pruitt and Brenda Harris

Black children’s lives all too often become a cliché of criminal pathology: absentee father, mother struggling with mental health issues and drug addiction, no food in the fridge, neighborhoods of casual violence - a spiderweb capable of ensnaring the most innocent. Pruitt says Monroe City was different. “This was a good place to grow up. When we integrated, sure we had our share of knuckleheads who didn’t want us there, would do the drive-by insults. But we got things straight, in time. They learned we would only take so much. A lot of people were good to us. I remember our junior high principal, Mr. Minor, that first year went well out of his way to make us feel welcome, to check on us, see how we were doing. We loved our football coach, Coach Welker. Not one teacher in all the years I was in the White school treated me unfairly because of my skin (color)."

"My grandfather, Jesse Robinson, was a strong disciplinarian," says Pruitt. “They lived right across the railroad tracks form us. I also had a stepfather and a mother who took a strong role in raising me. In those days, in the black community of Monroe City, there were plenty of eyes to keep watch on us." Any youthful transgressions that were not within the norms of the family standards were dealt with swiftly. "We all had a time schedule, curfews” says Pruitt. “We had lunch at the same time. We had dinner at the same time. Don't be late or you didn't eat. We all ate at a big table and talked about school and what was happening in world events. We all dressed up neat—my grandfather father was a clean, neat dresser and a proud man—and we all went to church on Sunday together. We were a family."

Harris has similar memories of a childhood that was long on both structure and discipline, but also love and support. “The black community of Monroe City took care of its own,” she recalls. Your children were your purpose in life, she says. “We would have been terrified to ever do anything that would bring disrespect or shame to our family, to our parents.”  She initially attended college at Northeast Missouri State University in nearby Kirksville, MO but then dropped out to follow a boyfriend to first Iowa and then Chicago. In 1974 she moved to her current home of Columbia.

Like in many small towns in the 1960’s, athletics played a key role in successfully integrating Monroe City High School. Think, “Remember the Panthers.” Howard Pruitt says with noticeable pride that the 1969 Panther football team started multiple Blacks on defense, sometimes as many as nine, Pruitt being one. They spent that summer before his junior year preparing, did enough pushups to power a steam engine. They were ready. “We came within one game of playing for state.” The following year Pruitt was team’s captain and the school’s homecoming king.

"When Holy Rosary was still open," Pruitt recalls, "we had to walk past their school as we went from the south side to Washington school. Some of them would taunt us with slurs and insults. There were a group of brothers who were the leaders and one of them was my age. We were outnumbered so we just kept walking. When we got to high school Washington and Holy Rosary are both now closed and the first day of high school football practice, we are teammates. The first day we run the "Hamburger" drill and I make sure I am opposite him. We got things straight really quick."

The Hamburger drill is legendary amongst any male who played high school football in the 1950s, 1960 or 1970s. Sometimes also called the "Oklahoma" drill, it was simple and brutal. Two blocking dummies 15 feet or so apart, one blocker one tackler and a ball carrier. The battle was up front between the blocker and the tackler. No rules. Man on Man. Nowhere to hide. It was as macho as it got and often coaches would use it on the first day of the pre-season to measure toughness and shame those lacking it. 

"I wouldn't say after that day that all was forgotten, but we now knew we were teammates and eventually we became friends."

Still, Pruitt does not shy away from pointing out that such obvious discrimination was the root of Jim Crow and we Caucasian baby boomers, bless our pastoral soul, are quick to offer a tidy and reassuring narrative to distance the pure evil of Jim Crow. It's a tale that reflects how we like to think of our current selves, as a society forever progressive if not yet perfect, and we conveniently conjure up ennobling roles for whites as well as blacks. It serves the purpose of validating our self-righteous indignation - but not much else. Pruitt says, such a spin ignores one undeniable fact - color it as we might, there will always be pain at the heart of the story of those who endured Jim Crow.  You learn to smile while your lip is bleeding. 

"No grave can hold this body down," said Jesse Jackson at the funeral of Jackie Robinson. "It belongs to the ages." Ed Talton is the son of a Washington graduate. His father, Cliff, became the first African American police officer in the town’s history. A decade ago, Ed became the first African American full time male teacher in the Monroe City school district. Five years before that he became the first elected school board member of color. Today Talton is the district’s high school principal. He has trailblazed a lot of paths. Talton tells Pruitt, Pruitt says, it is a worthy battle he is waging, fighting to keep the spirit of Washington alive, but also one that does not resonate with the offspring of those who never suffered the indignity of segregation. “They do not know what it was like to be forced to sit in the balcony at the movies or to not be allowed in certain parts of town after sunset,” Pruitt states. He remembers. So does Alice Smith.

Alice Jones Smith is a 1975 graduate of Monroe City High School. She attended the Washington School through the third grade. In 1966, Washington School was closed, and Smith was assigned for 4th grade to the previously all white Monroe City Elementary School.

The 1954 landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education US Supreme Court decision was not fully implemented in Monroe City until 1966, twelve years after the fact. In my research I found the only other school district in Missouri in 1966, besides Monroe City, that was still defying the federal law was Charleston, a small southeast Missouri town a rock's throw away from Mississippi.

Why did Monroe City hold out for so long? The high school accepted its first black students in 1956. The district had no choice. The Hannibal School District had in 1956 immediately implemented the federal law set forth by Brown v Board by closing its segregated all-black Douglas High School, to where Monroe City had for a decade bussed its Black high school aged students. So why did Monroe City keep Washington school open for Black elementary students for over a decade?

I heard from several whites in Monroe City that the district had given black families a choice and most wanted to keep Washington open and segregated. Ms. Smith was adamant and irritated in that this story is patently false and has been told for too long. "That is not true," she told me. "Maybe that makes some (whites) feel good today," she theorizes on what she sees as an attempt at historical revisionism. "We were never given a choice. We were told we had to go to Washington," recalls Smith.

Alice Smith

The School Board had its hand played for them, Smith says, pursuant to its black high school students when Douglas shut down. "There were not enough high school age students for Monroe to have its own high school, so they had to integrate (the high school) in '56. But with Washington, they made a conscious decision to keep the elementary black and white kids from sitting in class together. That is not something people in Monroe City like today to hear, but it is true."

After her graduation, Smith moved to Springfield, IL. She was hired by the State of Illinois in May 1976 as an entry level clerk typist. She retired in May 2012 as a department supervisor. Over the years she took as many classes and received as much advanced training as was made available to her, as she moved up the state bureaucratic ladder.

Harris, like her friends and classmates Pruitt and Smith also remembers the slights. “There was a restaurant in town that it was well known they did not serve blacks. Our parents were always on the outlook for trouble, didn’t want us causing any. 'Stay away from there,’ they would warn us. But you know how young people are.  A group of us in high school one day just went in a set down. We were told we would not be served but we said we are not leaving until you do. Finally, they did and that was the end of it. Crumbled that quickly.” By that time, the early 70’s, most to the town, Harris recalls, had accepted that the old ways were done. “The physical barriers may have fell,” she recalls, “but the social separation remained. In many ways, still does.”

Today, Pruitt is retired from the University of Missouri and has lived in Columbia, MO since 1979. He stays busy, as he approaches his 70th year, working three days a week as a life coach through the federal program Job Point. He is also the driving force behind the Washington School Alumni Association. “Too many have no idea that there ever was a Washington School. It is part of who we are. It needs to be remembered,” he says. The Alumni Association allows Pruitt to honor an institution he loved. "We need this," he says. 

This is what segregation looked like, Pruitt says. “A part of me is sad to see it. I think about our people born after segregation ended and how the things, they take for granted, and I get upset, because I never want to forget what our people went through. It's sad, but lifts me up in determination to keep working, keep asking and keep recording."

To borrow from the teachings of racial activist W. E. B. Du Bois, the memory of Washington School and its alum deserve, Pruitt says, "respect, redemption and recognition." Many were solid citizens who made Monroe City a thriving community, but they were born too soon to be appreciated.  

“Ed (Talton) knows his dad’s legacy, how he changed Monroe City for the better. But it came with a price. There are many good white people in Monroe City, people who have been friends my entire life, who do not want to be reminded of segregation. Who just want it to be forgotten and buried. But if we do that, then we also bury Washington school, and I cannot let that happen. Pretty or not, it is part of who we are today.”

Alice Smith at various times, due to her race, was denied a toilet, a hotel room, an education, a living, her very humanity. Smith says those who didn't suffer the indignity of Jim Crow, both black and white, just don't get it. "Even many of our younger blacks in Monroe City don't understand the deep symbolic hurt of Jim Crow that those of us who lived it still feel. We need to keep the memory of Washington School, the good and the bad, alive (because) we don’t ever want to go back there.”

Is it fair to expect today's younger black leaders, those who were not even born before 1954, to carry a torch for a memory that is seen by many whites as unnecessarily upsetting and destabilizing? Do the leaders of black society carry an unfair burden not placed on white leaders? Michael Jordan was intentionally non-political and many black leaders, Jim Brown one of the most vocal, criticized him as too greedy and lacking social responsibility. Why didn't he spend more time in the inner cities fighting for a better life for the people of color trapped there, spread some of his Nike largesse around? Maybe fair, maybe not, but I recall no one ever ripping into Larry Bird for not spending his hours away from basketball demonstrating against the poverty and disfunction in his native white Appalachia.

Monroe City recently commissioned the painting of a downtown outdoor mural. Pruitt says that a consistent criticism he heard from the town’s black community was that Washington school was not recognized. His response was if you want a seat at the table and one is not offered, then bring your own silverware and set it yourself. "A lot of people come to me with great ideas, but most of them don't follow through," he says. That is not Pruitt. He vows to never lose his passion, “for making sure these men and women of Washington school receive their due." For Pruitt, this is a very personal mission.

Howard Pruitt is not afraid to voice his opinion. Outspoken men like Pruitt would be horribly naive to think everyone is going to agree with them. And if you voice that opinion with any degree of strength, your opposition will most often respond in kind.

Newsman Lester Holt had a line about politician and civil right activist John Lewis and how he attacked racism the way the great ones did, out of pure hate. I don't feel that Pruitt's obsession with the legacy of Washington school is powered with hate, but there is, I sense, quiet anger in him. His research is an act of integrity to sooth the anger. To think anything else would be as wrong as to assume he resents his hometown and his upbringing. He does not. I know because I asked him. If you want memories to last, he says, "you bring them out of the dark."

Emmitt Till

This town is absurdly misnamed.

Money, Mississippi is a dying place, a hamlet of poverty years past any concern about self-worth. Where we stand in Money should be an American shrine, a historical tourist must-see. But it is not.

I seek out non-descript locations that have momentous historical significance but are somehow relegated and folded into the small print of history, tucked away in the weeds of social neglect, unnoted and forgotten.  Money, MS is just such a place. We sanitize our well-known historical markers. The horror of the hand-to-hand combat on the fields at Shiloh, for example, is artificially softened by the immaculately gardened landscapes trampled by selfie snappers. It is different here. A raw evil resonates, absorbs and sticks to me. It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I have never before had this unsettling sensation of repugnant awe.

Nearly every tentacle of the post-World War II Civil Rights movement somehow touches this tumbledown building we stand in front of. Made of cinder block, wood and brick, we are here today to peer through its broken glass windows in a search for understanding of a brutal and senseless murder. A short and fat just turned 14-year-old black kid from Chicago affectionately known to his family as “Bobo,” 68 years ago lost his life for a simple miscalculation he made in this building.  We stare directly into eyes of the ghosts of past evil, Mississippi style. Bobo to history is known as Emmett Till.

Like the crumbling exterior shells of its few still standing structures, Money is a community on life support. This is a town that by condoning evil has forever encapsulated its legacy in dishonor as much as if the town’s residents had collectively and actively participated in the horrific event itself.

1955

Antiphrasis is the use of a word or phrase in a way that is opposite of what it really means, like nicknaming a fat man “Tiny,” or naming this stricken town “Money” - the more humorous the stretch the better.  Antiphrasis is suitable for both sarcasm and irony. When something does not register, it surprises people, making them stop and think about what is really meant.  My wife, Shawna, and I have followed this morning a parallel route of back road asphalt along the old Illinois Central railroad tracks to a point about 90 minutes south of Memphis. This rotting structure once housed the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market where local cotton field workers, both white and black, could purchase the popular staples of the 1950’s: Lucky Strike Cigarettes, Moon Pies, lye soap and Goode’s headache powder were sold here. In its heyday four Coca-Cola signs adorned the outside front of the building, alongside benches for daytime loafers and checker players.

Emmitt Till was lynched because here where I gaze at the counter of what remains of the Bryant Grocery and Meat Market, he bought two cents worth of bubble gum and then wolf whistled at the 21-year-old white woman who had sold Till his snack. She clerked for the business owned by her and her 24-year-old husband. They lived in three rooms off the back of the store with their two small sons.

Till walked through these doors on August 24, 1955. He had been in Mississippi all of three days, visiting    a great uncle, Moses Wright, a cotton sharecropper and a part time preacher. In a few weeks he would return back to Chicago and enter the 9th grade. Till did not understand the ways of the 1955 Jim Crow South, the bone-numbing racism - an unending string of degradation: “keep your eyes down, your mouth shut and your pride in your pocket.” He would pay dearly for committing a Dixieland cultural taboo.

Today

Till had accompanied several of his cousins to Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market to buy some candy. According to accounts, Emmett allegedly whistled at Carolyn Bryant, the white woman who owned the store.

Maurie Wright, 16, Emmett’s cousin, told the United Press in a report published Sept. 1, 1955: “Emmett went into the store and asked for some bubble gum and left after telling the women ‘Goodbye.’ Outside, Emmett gave a ‘wolf call.’ I told Emmett to be careful of what he said in the store.”

On Aug. 28, 1955, Carolyn Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J.W. Milam, paid a middle of the night visit to Emmett’s great-uncle’s home and demanded the boy. Neither local man made any attempt to conceal their identity. Milam had in his possession a five-cell flashlight and a Colt 45 handgun.

“Moses pleaded with the men to leave Emmett alone,” according to an online story in 2007 posted by PBS. "He's only 14, he’s from up North. Why not give the boy a whipping, and leave it at that?’” His wife, Elizabeth Wright, “offered money to the intruders, but they ordered her to go back to bed.”

Emmett’s uncle “led the men throughout his home with flashlights until they found Emmett in a bed, sleeping,” according to the PBS report. “They woke him up and told him to get dressed.”

Four days later, Emmett Till, Jr.’s nude body was pulled from the slime green waters of the Tallahatchie River, 12 miles upstream from Money at Pecan Point.

Emmett Till

Not only had Till been murdered, but he had also been forced to undress, had the side of his face caved in by the blunt end of an axe, then was shot twice in the back of the head with a Colt 45. His lifeless body was bound to a 75-pound cotton gin wheel with barbed wire and tossed into the river. The lesson taught Till in southern chivalry was a harsh one.

The murder of Emmett Till has not historically registered with the nation’s concessions and sense of guilt like other more well-known civil rights clashes. Within the Mississippi and Alabama Delta cotton regions, it is probable not even in the top 10. The March on Selma, Bloody Sunday, the bombing of the Birmingham church and the three little girls who died, the attack dogs of Sherriff Bull Conner, the murder of the Freedom Riders in Philadelphia, MS, the Scottsboro Boys, James Meredith and Ole Miss, the Birmingham Bus Boycott, Rosa Parks and Governor George Wallace blocking the schoolhouse door; all Mississippi Delta region events recorded in the nation’s archives ahead of the murder of Emmett Till. But, due to a heroic and brave decision by Till’s mother, no event more galvanized the noble cause of equality in mainstream white America like the murder of this 14-year-old boy. It was the key turning point in shifting the tide of the nation’s view of civil rights from denial to outrage.

When Mamie Elizabeth Till-Mobley heard the news that her only child had been murdered, she insisted that authorities send his body home to Chicago. When she went to the train station to see the body of her son, she collapsed. “Lord, take my soul,” she cried. Emmett Till’s body was bloated beyond recognition. His teeth were missing. His ear was severed. His eyes were hanging out.

Unexpectedly, Till-Mobley demanded an open casket at his funeral. “I want the world to see what they did to my boy,” she explained. More than 50,000 people filed through a south side Chicago church to view the corpse. “Negro Boy Was Killed for ‘Wolf Whistle,’” a headline in Jet Magazine read. When the magazine printed photos of Emmett’s mangled corpse, it created national outrage, shocking America across color lines. Till’s death became a rallying cry for the movement like no atrocity before. And it was simply because a mother made the heart wrenching decision to open a casket so the world, “can see what they did to my son.”  

The Accused and Wives

The grotesque image of the mutilated boy was a light in the dark to a nation in denial of the horrors of the racism of the day, then, now and for all time. The world had no choice but to take notice, could not ignore the rawness of the image and to recoil in collective outrage. It was a singular symbolic gesture that exploded and dwarfed previous years of less graphic mundane protests expressed in damnation of Jim Crow. A grieving nation asked how could any man think it was ok to do this to a 14-year-old boy who, maybe, made a passing kid-like come on to a woman?  

Till’s mother had been born and raised in rural Mississippi, moving to Chicago as a teenager in search of life away from the boiling toil in the sun of a Mississippi cotton field. Emmett was born in 1941, her only child with a local small time crook named Emmett Till. The senior Till joined the Army in 1943 and was sent to Europe. In 1945, he was court-martialed for the rape of a young German girl. The military hung him. Emmett Till, Sr. was buried and his remains today are still interred in Germany. Till, Jr. had no memories of his father.

Till-Mobley warned her son that Mississippi was a land dominated by the type of racism he had never experienced in his all-black Chicago south side neighborhood. She admonished him to obey his relatives.

“She told him ‘to be very careful … to humble himself to the extent of getting down on his knees,“  the media in 1955 was told by a relative. “Living in Chicago,” his mother testified at the trial of his murderers, "he didn’t know.”

Bryant and Milam were charged with murder and brought to trial on Sept. 19, 1955, in the county seat of Sumner, Mississippi.

Trial Jury - Not Guilty

After five lackluster days of prosecution and a wink to the jury by the defense, Bryant and Milam were acquitted by an all-white, all-male jury. The jury later reported they had taken about five minutes to agree on a unanimous not guilty verdict and then for appearance-sake spent about an hour discussing the weather and the upcoming World Series. One juror told the Jackson Chronicle, “We have to live here.” Today, their relatives have to live with the stigma of their infamous vote. The acquittal shocked the world.

Bryant and Miller, after their trial and with double jeopardy protection from any future prosecution, sold their stories to Look Magazine.  In its January 24, 1956, Look published their confessions.

In the magazine story, titled ‘The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi,’  “the men detailed how they beat Till with a gun, shot him and threw his body in the Tallahatchie River with a heavy cotton-gin fan attached with barbed wire to his neck to weigh him down,” according to the website of the History Channel. “The two killers were paid a reported $4,000 for their participation in the article.”

Nearly 70 years later, the woman in the center of the controversy, now known as Carolyn Donham, revealed she lied about her interaction with Emmett. Timothy B. Tyson, a professor at Duke University who published the book “The Blood of Emmett Till” in 2017, wrote that in an interview, Donham told him that the boy did not make a sexual advance toward her. Her statement perjured her testimony decades before, when she told a grand jury looking to indict her husband and brother-in-law for the capital offense of murder, that Emmett had grabbed her waist and said crude things to her. She had made the charge, she now claimed, to appease her husband, who she said had abused her throughout their dysfunctional marriage.

Peering in the back Window

In 2004, the Justice Department reopened the case. In 2005, Emmett’s body was exhumed by the FBI and an autopsy was performed. But a grand jury decided not to seek indictments. No one was ever convicted in Emmett Till’s slaying.

“You’re looking at Mississippi. I guess it’s about the same way it was 50 years ago,” Emmett’s cousin Simeon Wright told the Associated Press in 2007. “We had overwhelming evidence, and they came back with the same decision. Some of the people haven’t changed from 50 years ago. Same attitude. The evidence speaks for itself. I don’t know how many years I have left on this Earth. We can leave this world and say: ‘Hey, we tried. We tried to get some justice in this, and we failed.’”