LITTLE ROCK — It was early 2007 and Little Rock native Jay Jennings was living the life of a free-lance writer in a 400-square-foot New York apartment.
He also was thinking about coming home to Arkansas.
Jennings says he had been wanting to “write about Little Rock in a substantial way for a long time.” He was having lunch with Little Rock financial adviser Stephen Chaffin, who had been a football teammate at Catholic High back in the 1970s, when the subject came up.
Jennings told Chaffin that he was considering a book connected with that year’s 50th anniversary commemorations of the Little Rock Central High School integration crisis. After all, he had been born in 1957 and had heard about the events of that autumn his entire life. There were, however, already a number of books written or planned along those lines.
Jennings, a former reporter for Sports Illustrated, had called a friend at the magazine the previous year to float the idea of a story or book about the 1957 Central football team. He was told that Gary Smith, a veteran SI writer famed for his long-form storytelling, had been working on just such a story for six months.
The story, which was titled “Blindsided by History” and ran in the April 2007 issue, was considered a classic. It was, in fact, one of the 20 Smith stories chosen for his 2008 anthology, “Going Deep.”
As Jennings struggled to find a topic, Chaffin offered a suggestion that day at lunch: “What about Bernie Cox?”
The Little Rock Central football coach had arrived at the school as an assistant in 1972. His first season as head coach was 1975, which just happened to be Jennings’ and Chaffin’s senior season at Catholic. Jennings later would write, “For 32 years, his stare had struck fear in the hearts ofplayers tough enough to make it in the NFL and smart enough to become surgeons.”
Jennings sent a note to Cox to float the idea of following the Tigers on a daily basis during the fall of 2007. Cox agreed to give him total access, and Jennings moved back to Little Rock in early May of that year. He dived into the project, attending spring practice.
“He was very gracious about it,” Jennings says over breakfast at the Capital Hotel when asked about Cox. “He was proud of what they were doing.”
As a history teacher, Cox also was interested in Jennings’ concept of tying the history of race relations in 20th century Little Rock to the storyof Central’s football program. The result is the recently released book, “Carry the Rock: Race, Football and the Soul of an American City.”
The 2007 Tigers were picked to finish first in thestate. Twelve starters returned from a squad that had gone 10-1 the previous year. As it turned out, the team could not live up to those lofty expectations. It finished 6-4 and failed to make the playoffs. Still, no one could have predicted that Central would go 0-20 during the next two seasons, the worst losing streak in the 105-year history of the program.
Cox retired at the end of the 2009 season, only to resurface this fall as an assistant at Arkansas Baptist High School in West Little Rock. Jennings makes clear that Cox never wanted this book to be simply about a highschool coach. Due to his modesty and his interest in history, he wanted it to be something bigger than that. And it is.
Jennings is at his best when contrasting the events of 1927-the flood that inundated so much of the state, the trip home to Little Rock of Metropolitan Opera star Mary Lewis to dedicate the city’s majestic new high school building and the lynching of black convict John Carter after he had escaped his work detail at the Pulaski County Penal Farm.
He doesn’t run from the current racial divisions in the city, either. He writes about divisions on the Little Rock School Board that still boil over from time to time. But he believes that race relations have improved since 2007 and is generally an optimist about the city’s future.
Jennings notes that the events surrounding the 50th anniversary of the integration crisis forced Little Rock residents to discuss difficult issues ranging from the role of charterschools to the role of high school sports. Though the players on that 2007 team never jelled in the way that Cox had hoped they would, Jennings says he was encouraged that they were “just a lot morecasual about race than people were when I was in high school.”
Given the complex history of race relations in the city, the state and the South, Jennings says it’s a “glacial process.” His book, “Carry the Rock,” is about much more than high school football. It’s a worthy addition to a body of work on Southern race relations that already exists.
Free-lance columnist Rex Nelson is the senior vice president for government relations and public outreach at The Communications Group in Little Rock.
Editorial, Pages 17 on 09/25/2010