A Shining Exception: I have always been proud to be from Crystal City

Dave Almany

In 1954, the United States Supreme Court handed down its landmark Brown v. the Topeka Board of Education decision, a ruling that outlawed the racial segregation of the nation’s public schools. As a southern border state, the evil of separate but equal Jim Crow was deeply rooted in rural Missouri’s social norms. Many Missouri school districts initially ignored the federal edict then challenged it in the state courts first, and then the federal courts, often delaying school desegregation in many Missouri towns until far into the 1960s.

Crystal City was a shining exception.

Led by an educated school board, many of its members college grads who worked in administrative roles at the local PPG glass plant, the district immediately and fully desegregated its high school. In 1955, Coach Arvel Popp issued football uniforms to three African American athletes; Richard Byas, Bennie Evans and Don Riney. In the years that followed, African American student-athletes would play prominent roles on every outstanding Hornet squad.

“I was a senior in the fall of 1955, when the three (African-Americans) joined our team,” remembers team member Dick Cook.  “It was never an issue. They were never excluded, due to their race, from anything we did as a team. If we hung out as a team at a certain place away from school, they hung with us.” Cook remembers a sort of de facto segregation in the community before 1955 - nothing written, but just an accepted fact that there were certain places in town local blacks just didn’t patronize. “Looking back, I feel we broke a lot of those (assumed) racial barriers, although at the time we didn’t realize it. I remember no problems anywhere we went as a team. Athletics, no doubt, helped in the transition,” Cook recalls. “If you wore our uniform, you were our teammate. It was that simple.” All three black athletes earned their acceptance by proving their mettle on the football field. “If they could help us win, then that was all that mattered,” says Cook.

Former Hornet Danny LaRose was an established star player at the University of Missouri in 1958 when St. Louis Vashon High School graduate Norris Stevenson became the first African-American to earn a foototball scholarship to the state’s flagship university. LaRose put into practice the diversity lessons he had learned as a Hornet teammate to Byas, Evans and Riney. Years later, upon his induction to the Missouri Athletic Hall of Fame, Stevenson gave a newspaper interview in which he recalled the positive role LaRose played in Stevenson’s trailblazing and sometimes rocky path as a Tiger.

“When I first came to (Missouri) Danny LaRose was a team leader and (he) went out of his way to make me feel welcome,” a still grateful Stevenson remembered. Racism was a constant companion for Stevenson in his years at Mizzou. With many football players from the South on the roster and a campus heavily decorated with the Confederate Flag and a “Dixie gonna do it again” mentality, without the symbolic message the respected LaRose’s actions sent to the rest of the squad, Stevenson feels his road to acceptance, or at least tolerance, would have been much steeper. “It says a lot about LaRose’s character,” said Stevenson. “It wasn’t a popular stance he took with many on the team at the time.” But it was a just stance and LaRose’s actions validate the progressive action the Crystal City public schools took in 1955.

Today, LaRose eschews with a cavalier shrug his role in Stevenson’s story and plays down any noble intent on his part in befriending him. “Anybody that knows me, knows I am a big jokester,” LaRose says. “I just liked the guy because he was like me, always kidding around. I am not political and never have been. The other black player on the team at the time was Mel West from Jefferson City. Mel and Norris were two of my best friends on the team. Mel was very light-skinned for a black guy. I had been outside all summer working construction and I was really dark from the sun. One time, Mel and I went downtown together and this lady in a restaurant says, ‘Oh, you two boys are so tan.’ We laughed and laughed at that one.”

However, Crystal City High School in the 1950s and 60s was not a racial utopia either.  Randy Cayce was a standout African-American running back and defensive back for the 1963 to 1965 Hornets and remembers the volatile years of desegregation with negatives many local whites did not see, or maybe, choose today not to remember. Even as a star football player in a football crazy town, Cayce was not immune to the intolerance that seethed below the surface of small town 1960s America, left to wonder as to the level of sincerity of the postgame back slaps heaped upon him by smitten white fans. Cayce had attended the “colored” Star Elementary School. “It was a hard time,” Cayce says today, recalling the trauma-induced anxiety of a young teenage boy moving up to a just-integrated high school. Cayce agrees that the power positions in the community were manned by progressive minds, and that expedited school integration, but the hateful sting was still felt. “The racists were still there. Even if they had no power, (they) couldn’t keep us out of school like they did some places, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t make our lives miserable, and some did. It was over 50 years ago, but I still remember the hurt.”

Having been taught by a proud father to never be bitter, Cayce’s views today of his years at CCHS are shaped with a more philosophical bent than when he was younger, tempered by the years, which he says, brings perspective. “There was racism, for sure, in Crystal City in the ‘60s. How could there not be, considering the times? I mean, this was several years before Dr. King was murdered; we still had a long ways to go. But, when we went to practice, that all changed. My teammates were great, I can’t emphasize that enough. And Coach Cook and his wife were like second parents to me, (as) fine a people as I have ever known. You see, that is why sports are so important. My teammates knew me as a person, respected me as a teammate. There are good people and there are bad people everywhere. Athletics brought out the good people of Crystal City. I have always been proud to be from Crystal City.”