Then the 49-year-old coach drifts back in his mind to the people who bled and died in a struggle he remembers mostly through the eyes of a child and teenage boy—people who absorbed genuine hatred, who changed his society and made it possible for him to play his way onto the Alabama football team in 1971, the second year that Paul (Bear) Bryant allowed black players on his squad. And he begins to cry.
His father, in the late 1940s, feared being lynched. Croom himself attended a newly integrated junior high school where students refused to talk to him or even look at him, where a spit wad spattered on his face the first day of classes.
But none of that is worth crying over, for Croom. It is the memory of a white woman that is causing him to break down, a 39-year-old homemaker and mother of five from Detroit who volunteered to drive protesters during the historic Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1965. Three Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her as she drove down a stretch of road, a black man in the seat beside her. It was more than the Klansmen could stand.
“Viola Liuzzo,” says Croom, and he takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. It looks a little strange, to see hands that big wiping at tears. “When she got shot ... all that lady was trying to do was
help someone. Just plain ol’ people, trying to do the right thing, and they killed her.”
That was perhaps the first time the young Sylvester Croom realized the awful cost of the change that was taking place around him. And suddenly it very much matters that a black man is the head coach at a school in the conference of the Bear, the Big Orange, Death Valley, and the Loveliest Village on the Plain. Because if it doesn’t matter, then what was all that suffering for?
“It was coming, sooner or later,” says Ming, who is white, a few days after she approached Croom in a Starkville diner and asked him for his autograph, for Buster. She even had her picture taken with him. Not too long ago, this would have been scandalous. Now the autograph—a black man’s name—is in a frame, a thing of value. Southerners get where they need to go, Ming says sweetly, “but we don’t like to be pushed.”
Nearly 40 years have passed since the first black scholarship athlete took the field in the SEC. And a lifetime, it seems, has passed since Sylvester Croom kicked a field goal over the clothesline in his yard in Tuscaloosa and dreamed about being swept up into glory on the Crimson Tide. But even as he entered high school, the only players wearing Alabama jerseys were white. “No way I should be sitting here,” he says from his MSU office, his mind hung up—for just a moment—on that clothesline.
Then, that quickly, he is standing before a team of SEC athletes—his boys—in the Mississippi State field house. He’s one of only five black head football coaches in Division I-A, five out of 117. His players sit straight and tense, and you get the feeling that if he told them to jump off a roof, they would balk only long enough to write notes to their mamas.
“We’re kind of tickled with him,” says Jimmy Cowan, class of 1959, a retired engineer who lives in Aberdeen, Miss., and drives his recreational vehicle to all the Bulldogs’ home and away games and—like most white Mississippians of his generation—went to all-white schools.
“It was a chance to do the right thing,” Douglas Brinkley, historian, author, and director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies in New Orleans, says of Croom’s hiring. But, because of the coach’s credentials, “it was also a safe thing.”
Head football coach of a state school in the South is a position whose prestige rivals, and in some places exceeds, that of the governor. In the increasingly conservative, increasingly Republican
South, the first black coach in the SEC had to be someone too solid to question, too deserving to deny. “We have to be able to say we were looking for the best football coach, not to cure the ills of our state,” Brinkley says of the Southern mind-set.
Croom wishes, of course, that his father had lived to see this. The Reverend Sylvester Croom Sr. passed in January 2000, but not before he saw many of the barriers that he once peered through knocked to the ground. His sons, Kelvin and Sylvester Jr., both played for the Bear, and Croom Sr. became the Alabama football team’s chaplain, invoking God on behalf of whites and blacks (but rarely Auburn). He died too soon to see his older son take over an SEC program. But Kelvin, the baby brother, knows what their father probably would have done. He would have placed a hand on Sylvester’s shoulder and, in a voice that always seemed to be dropping down from a mountain, told him something you had to know Croom Sr. to understand: “Son, you had the best ice cream.”
In the glow of the stage lights, in a community theater in Tuscaloosa, a wrongly accused black man stood trial for his life. It was only theater, only another local interpretation of the classic
To Kill a Mockingbird,
but in the pitch dark of the auditorium, sweat beaded on the Reverend Dr. Kelvin Croom’s face. In his mind he did not see an actor, a stage, or the curtain that could drop and cover the ugliness of the story with thick, soft velvet. “In my mind,” he says, “I saw my father.”
He saw the same South, the same story, but this one unfolded in Holt, Ala., not Harper Lee’s Maycomb, in the mid-1940s. A white woman had been raped and had told authorities that three black men had done it. Justice had to be swift, for the sake of society. It did not need to be accurate.
Sylvester Croom Sr. had been out rabbit hunting with two of his brothers. They had blood and hair on their clothes when police went for them, acting on a tip from a black woman who said she had seen the Croom boys splashed with red.
Police arrested them and put them in jail, even as local clergymen tried to convince authorities that the boys were innocent. A short time later, fearing for the safety of their prisoners, officials spirited the boys out of the local jail and took them to a Birmingham lockup.
All this happened before Kelvin and Sylvester Jr. were born, and the story would be told and retold, sharpened every time, an old razor that still draws blood. How close, Kelvin would always think.
How close his father had come to being another victim of a doomed, hateful way of life. “It was hard to sit through that play,” Kelvin says.
The elder Croom’s arrest might have cowed some men, might have made some men walk with their eyes glued to the tops of their shoes. Sylvester Croom Sr. straightened up tall in the service of God and took to wearing a cowboy hat. “You can’t keep a good man down,” he would boom from his pulpit at Beautiful Zion A.M.E. Zion Church in southwest Tuscaloosa, “and you can’t keep a bad man up.”
He was 6'4", 290 pounds, and on the football field at all-black Alabama A&M he had hit like a pickup truck. The stories he told and the ones told about him made his boys want to be him. “Against South Carolina State, in about 1950, he picked up a ball on the one or two and ran it all the way back for a touchdown,” says Sylvester Jr. “I’d always liked that story, and in my head I always saw myself doing that.”
In the pulpit Sylvester Sr. was demanding, unbending. If he saw his sons acting a fool or just not paying attention, he would point one big finger at them, silently passing sentence, and it augered right into their hearts. “You didn’t enjoy any of the rest of that sermon,” Kelvin says. “You knew what was coming when you got home.”
As the Civil Rights movement took hold of Alabama, Sylvester Sr. lived the nonviolence that the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preached, but in the afternoons he would stand at the practice field fence and stare at the vaunted all-white Alabama football team, and dream. His sons stood with him, dreaming too.
To work beside a man or share a lunch counter with him or sit with him on a bus, that meant something. But to line up across from him in full pads and slam into him with all the power in your body, without any consequence beyond the outcome of a play, a game? When was a man more free than that?
Tuscaloosa, like the rest of Alabama, was rigidly segregated, with an insidious Klan presence. The Alabama campus was off-limits—Sylvester Croom Jr. never strolled across it, or even walked past it. He saw it from the windows of cars.
Once, in the midst of the Civil Rights movement, an ice-cream vendor came to Croom Sr. for counsel. “He was having difficulty,” Kelvin says. It was a matter of conscience. The vendor was known to have the best ice cream in Tuscaloosa, and people—blacks and
whites—lined up for it. He served whites through the front door and blacks through the back door. His business thrived, within the conventions of society. But it was a time to question convention, and the vendor, who was white, wanted to do something revolutionary. He wanted to serve blacks and whites through one door.
“He knew what was right, but he needed someone to lean on,” Kelvin says.
“You do have the best ice cream in town,” Croom Sr. told the vendor. The people would have to decide if it was worth standing beside someone of another color to get some. “Serve it from one door,” he told the vendor, and make it about flavor, not about color.
There is a Southern tradition of lamentation when it comes to daddies. Men have been known to drink too much and talk and cry all night, remembering. But a sober man sings the best songs of praise.
“I guess the best sermon he preached was the one he lived,” Kelvin says. “If anybody did without in our house, it was him. It was important to him what Mom, me, and Sly thought of him. He always told us to love people, to never hold grudges.” It would have been just words if Kelvin and Sylvester Jr. had not known that their father had a reason to hate.
“He always said, ‘You got to do right every day,’” Sylvester Jr. says.
“Work within the system when you can,” Kelvin says.
“Fight by the rules,” Sylvester Jr. says.
“And,” Kelvin says, “have the best ice cream.”
The spit wad caught him square in the face. It was his welcome to the overwhelmingly white junior high school in Tuscaloosa that he and, later, his brother attended.
He did not do a thing except wipe it off. “I look around, and I’m ticked, and I see who did it,” Sylvester Croom Jr. says.
“Follow Dr. King’s teachings, no matter what happens,” his father had said.
Later that day, at football practice, Sylvester Jr. saw the boy who had thrown the spit wad—across the line from him in pads. “I hit him as hard as I could,” Croom says, and he laughs out loud. It was a bone-numbing hit. “I would find a way to hit him ... every day.”
But is that in keeping with Dr. King’s teachings? “Sometimes,” Kelvin says, “you slip.”
White students refused to be Sylvester Jr.’s study partners, to share a locker with him, to let him into groups formed for class
projects. He was not so much mistreated as ignored. The thing he hated most was the silence, which he endured even in a hallway that rang with voices and pounding feet and banging lockers. “The biggest fear I had was just being isolated,” he says. For all the interaction he had with students in some classes, “I might as well have been a tree.”
But kindnesses, and courage, filled the silence. The practice field was three miles from the school, and the ninth-grade football players had to get there as best they could. The handful of black players did not have a ride, and it took time to walk three miles. They would have to miss part of practice. But the first week of football a car pulled up, and a white player, a quarterback named Stan Bradford, motioned the black players over. There was not room enough for all of them to sit in the backseat, so a couple of them squeezed into the front, beside Bradford’s mother.
Every one of them knew that this was taboo, that people had been killed for less. “You just didn’t sit with no white lady,” Croom says. “It seems like a little thing, but that lady did something that wasn’t supposed to be done in that time, and it changed my world.”
Another challenge to convention came from the Tuscaloosa High football coach, Billy Henderson. Other Alabama coaches had black players, but they left them at home or on the bench when they played in racially charged places such as Montgomery—or across the state line in Mississippi. But no one was going to tell Henderson who could start on his football team. “It took courage, but he believed in us,” says Kelvin. “He was some man.”
Sylvester Jr. played practically every position—even did some kicking. He was big, strong, 5'11" and 195 pounds, and while his team won only about six games his whole high school career, he caught the attention of colleges. One day a recruiter from Alabama stood at the Crooms’ door.
Sylvester Jr. had believed that Alabama was for dreaming, and that A&M was for playing. But Wilbur Jackson had broken the color line as the Crimson Tide’s first black recruit, in 1970, and Croom followed him there the next year. He remembers his first day of college. White players, knowing he was from Tuscaloosa, asked him how to find this place or that on campus.
“How would I know?” he said. “I never been here.”
“I wanted one thing,” Croom says. “I was sick of losing. I wanted to win.” At that time all Alabama did was win. “And I wanted to
stand there at the foot of Denny Chimes as the captain of the football team.” His teammates, predominantly white, made him that in 1974.
As a center in the wishbone Croom won honors—he was on Kodak’s All-America team and voted the best offensive lineman in the SEC—and signed with the New Orleans Saints, for whom he would play one game. But coaching would be Croom’s football future, and he was an assistant for 10 years at Alabama before moving on to the pros where he was an assistant coach at Tampa Bay, Indianapolis, San Diego, Detroit, and finally Green Bay. Then, last May, Alabama fired coach Mike Price. Mama called, as Bryant liked to say, but the door closed in Croom’s face before he could step inside.
“At one point I thought I had the job,” Croom says, and Alabama—by all accounts—strongly considered him before settling on former Tide quarterback Mike Shula, who was nearly 11 years younger than Croom, and that much less experienced.
Croom loves Alabama. His brother, who took over their father’s place in the pulpit at Tuscaloosa’s College Hill Baptist Church, leads the devotion before every Crimson Tide home basketball game. Not getting the Tide football job hurt Sylvester, says Kelvin. “He had been successful at every juncture. He was All-America. Why not bring him back?”