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The
Minority Quarterback
Coaches Chose a White to Call
the Plays.
The Campus Found That Hard to
Swallow.
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Nicole Bengiveno/ The
New York Times
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Marcus
Jacoby, top, was the
starting quarterback
for Southern
University. Jabari
Morgan, bottom, played
in the school's
marching band.
• MORE
PHOTOS
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By IRA BERKOW
About
This Series
 ATON
ROUGE, La. -- A late summer
morning and the sun was already
harsh on the dusty high school
football field. The shirtless
blond 19-year-old in shorts
stained with sweat kept dropping
back to pass, his hands at times
so wet it was hard to grip the
ball. He was throwing to a friend,
working "up the ladder," as it is
called, starting with short passes
and ending long.
But his mind wasn't totally on
his receiver. He could feel the
eyes of the man in the dark
glasses who sat in a car on the
other side of a chain-link fence,
a hundred yards away.
The boy knew the man was
watching. It had been subtly
arranged. The National Collegiate
Athletic Association does not
allow tryouts, but if a college
coach happens by a field where
kids regularly throw the ball
around, well, a coach may argue,
where's the harm?
At that time, in July of 1996,
Southern University, a football
powerhouse among black colleges,
desperately needed a quarterback,
and the boy, Marcus Jacoby, badly
needed a place to play
quarterback.
After half an hour, the man in
dark glasses, Mark Orlando,
Southern's offensive coordinator,
had seen enough and drove off.
It had gone well. The boy was
invited to the coach's apartment,
where after a short visit he was
offered a full football
scholarship.
The coach explained that the boy
had a shot at the starting job,
that the intended starter's poor
grades had lost him his place on
the team and that the two backups
did not have the coaches'
confidence.
"Sounds good," Mr. Jacoby, who
had been a star at Catholic High,
one of Baton Rouge's schoolboy
powers, recalled saying. "But I
have to think about it -- talk
with my parents."
"Practice starts in four days,"
the coach responded. "We're going
to need an answer soon."
Marcus Jacoby was unaware that if
he accepted the scholarship, he
would be the first white to play
quarterback for Southern
University.
And he would be the first white
to start at quarterback in the
76-year history of the black
Southwestern Athletic Conference.
Mr. Jacoby had grown up in Baton
Rouge, and yet he knew practically
nothing about Southern, had never
even been to the other side of
town to see the campus. Until that
July day he had spent his life
surrounded by whites.
The Business of How to Succeed
Southern's head coach, Pete
Richardson, worked out of a modest
wood-paneled office lined with
trophies. In his three years
there, he had turned a
laughingstock into a national
force. Southern won 11 of 12 games
his first year, 1993, and two
years later it was the No. 1 black
college in the nation.
It is not easy for a black man to
become a head coach. Despite his
record, Mr. Richardson, 54, has
never had an offer from one of the
114 Division I-A colleges; only
three of them have black head
football coaches.
In college he played at the
University of Dayton, hardly a
football school, and though he had
limited natural talent, he reached
the professional level, playing
three years for the Buffalo Bills.
He coached high school ball for a
few years, then took the head
coach job at Winston-Salem State
in North Carolina. Finally, in
1993, he got his big break at
Southern, which with its combined
campuses is the largest
historically black college in the
nation. "I can't get caught up
with the thought that, 'Hey, why
shouldn't I be at Notre Dame?' "
he said in an interview. "I can't
get sidetracked or go around with
a chip on my shoulder." He is a
stoical man and expected stoicism
from his players.
That day in his office, the
Jacobys said, they were impressed
by his quiet intellect, the way he
measured his words, his
determination. Indeed, the
president of Southern, Dr. Dorothy
Spikes, often said that she had
hired Mr. Richardson over
better-known candidates not just
because his teams had been winners
but because of his reputation for
integrity, for running a clean
program.
Coach Richardson and the Jacobys
discussed everything from
Southern's rich athletic tradition
to the engineering courses that
interested Marcus, but for a long
while they didn't mention the
thing that worried the parents
most. The quarterback is team
leader. Would a black team accept
a white leader? Would the black
campus? The night before, at the
Jacobys' home in the
upper-middle-class white Tara
section of Baton Rouge, talk had
become heated. "What if they don't
like Marcus?" Marian Jacoby had
said, tears in her eyes. "What if
there's some kind of . . .
action?" Marcus had not been able
to sleep he was so upset.
Now his father, Glen, an
environmental engineer, asked the
coach, "How are you going to
protect my son?"
The room went silent, Glen Jacoby
said later. "I realize that you're
concerned," Mr. Richardson began,
"but I just don't think it will be
that big a deal. Sure, there will
be some adjustments from all
sides. But Marcus will have the
backing of the administration as
well as the coaching staff."
Coach Richardson pointed out that
there were other minorities on
campus. He meant that of the
10,500 students, 5 percent were
not black, but Mrs. Jacoby kept
thinking about how it would feel
to be in a stadium with her
husband and 30,000 black fans.
The coach didn't say it to the
Jacobys, but no one knew better
than he about the strain Marcus
would feel being in the minority.
As a successful black man Mr.
Richardson was used to the stares
of surprise.
"Walking into a place with a suit
and tie on, you're always going to
get that second look because
you're not supposed to be there."
When he coached at Winston-Salem,
he had a state government car.
"Whites look at you and ask you
what you're doing driving the
state's car," he said. "You pull
over to get some gas and people
will address you the wrong way or
policemen will look at you funny."
There was something else Mr.
Richardson didn't say that
morning: He was well aware how
hostile Southern's fans could be
to any newcomer, regardless of
creed or color. Many had not
wanted him hired. They felt he had
come from too small a college;
they had wanted a big name in
black college football. They had
even used race on him.
Shortly after he arrived, a rumor
started that Mr. Richardson's
wife, who is light-skinned, was
white, and that his white
offensive coordinator was his
wife's brother. None of it true,
but Mr. Richardson didn't let it
get to him. He knew the best
answer was to win, and since he
had done so, he was -- as
Southern's registrar, Marvin
Allen, liked to point out -- a
campus god.
The coach thought he could make
this Jacoby thing work. He wasn't
sitting there fretting about
whether Marcus could learn to be
part of the minority. The first
game was only six weeks away. As
he would say later, he didn't have
"ample time to find another black
quarterback." Marcus would have to
do what all good players did, what
the coach himself had done: suck
it up.
To reassure the Jacobys, the
coach told them about his staff.
Of six assistants he had hired
when he started in 1993, two were
white, one Asian. He was told
Southern fans would never stand
for that. But after his 11-1 debut
season -- the year before they had
been 6-5 -- a popular T-shirt on
campus featured a photo of the
integrated staff, with the phrase
"In Living Color."
The parents wanted to think about
it overnight, but Marcus did not.
He climbed into his Jeep, he said
later, and went riding. He was
getting his shot, finally. There
was nothing he loved like
football. As a boy, when he
couldn't find a friend, he tossed
footballs into garbage can lids in
his yard. His parents held him
back in ninth grade, so he would
have time to grow, and a better
chance to play high school ball.
After starring at Catholic, he
went to Louisiana Tech, but there,
prospects for playing were dim.
Now he envisioned a game night at
Southern with a crowd cheering as
he threw yet another touchdown
pass. When he stopped at a red
light, he lifted his head and at
the top of his lungs screamed,
"Praise God!"
Hard Work, or Privilege?
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A
billboard advertising
Southern University
features a picture of
Marcus Jacoby, third
from left.
• MORE PHOTOS
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From the Jacobys' home,
Southern was a 20-minute car trip,
literally to the other side of the
tracks. On the ride to the first
practice, as he drove over the Hump
-- the small hill that is one of the
barriers between Southern and white
Baton Rouge -- the momentousness of
what he had done started sinking in.
As he looked around, he began
imagining himself playing a game, he
recalled. "Would I see a white
face?"
Southern's decision to sign a
white quarterback made headlines,
first locally, then nationally,
and the reaction of some whites he
knew startled him. When Mr. Jacoby
called his girlfriend to talk
about it, her mother answered.
"The niggers over there will kill
you," he recalled her saying.
"There are bullets flying all over
the place. It's a war zone." When
his girlfriend got on the phone,
she said, "Marcus, I don't want
you to call me again." To many on
the white side of town, who had
never visited this campus bustling
with middle-class black students
on the bluffs of the Mississippi,
it was as if Mr. Jacoby had
voluntarily moved to the ghetto.
Like many white Americans, he
knew there was still prejudice --
though, he says, not at home. He
had been raised to believe that,
after generations of injustice,
the country was now a fair place
when it came to race, and he had
made a few black friends while
playing high school ball.
The Jacobys were considered a
little eccentric for Baton Rouge,
having moved here from California
when Marcus was 3. His paternal
grandfather was Jewish. His mother
had attended Berkeley in the
1960's and still had some of the
flower child in her. She was a
fitness buff, and had even tried
putting her family on a vegetarian
diet, stocking the refrigerator
with so many oat products that
Marcus's buddies asked whether
they owned a horse. Marcus and his
sister at first attended a private
school, but their mother felt too
many children there were spoiled
by wealth. So she taught them at
home for five years, until Marcus
was a sophomore.
Friends and teachers at Catholic
High remember him as hard-working,
smart and moralistic, with a
strong Christian bent. "We'd make
fun of his being so innocent,"
said John Eric Sullivan, one of
his best friends. "By that I mean,
he didn't do anything that most
normal high school kids are doing.
He'd be, 'Watch out, watch
yourself,' when guys would be
drinking. We'd say, like, 'Marc,
relax, man.' " He told them he was
waiting until he was 21 to drink.
The Southern coaches were
impressed with his arm and had
never seen a quarterback learn
Coach Richardson's complex offense
so fast.
Mr. Jacoby stayed to do extra
throwing and often studied game
films well past midnight. Southern
at times uses a no-huddle offense,
meaning the quarterback has to
call plays rapidly right at the
line, and Coach Richardson felt
that of the three candidates, only
Marcus Jacoby knew the system well
enough to do that. Within days of
arriving, he was first string.
That sparked anger among many of
his new black teammates. For over
a year they had been friendly with
the two quarterbacks now relegated
to backup, and they resented the
newcomer, complaining that he had
not earned his stripes. "He was given
his stripes," said Virgil
Smothers, a lineman. "There was a
lingering bitterness."
Several felt the decision was
racial. "It just became the fact
that we were going to have this
white quarterback," said Sam
George, a quarterback prospect who
was academically ineligible that
year. "It wasn't about ability no
more." Teammates picked at Mr.
Jacoby's weaknesses -- he didn't
have "fast feet" and rarely
scrambled -- and joked that he was
the typical bland white athlete,
which angered Coach Richardson. "A
lot of minorities, they want the
flash," the coach said. "We felt
we needed a system in order to be
successful and a quarterback to
operate within the confines of
that system."
Except for the coaches, he was
isolated. In the locker room, Mr.
Jacoby recalled, "I would walk
around the corner and people would
just stop talking."
Even in the huddles there was
dissension. Scott Cloman, a
Southern receiver, recalled: "The
minute Marcus was like, 'Everybody
calm down, just shut up,' they
were like: 'Who are you talking
to? You're not talking to me.' You
know, stuff like that. If it was a
black person it wouldn't be a
problem. They all felt that 'I'm
not going to let a white person
talk to me like that.' "
His entire time at Southern, Mr.
Jacoby kept his feelings about all
this inside, "sucking it up,"
repeatedly telling the inquiring
reporters what a great
experience it was being exposed to
a new culture. "As soon as I
signed and walked onto the
campus," he told one interviewer,
"I felt like part of the family. I
definitely feel at home here."
School and Students in Step
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Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York
Times
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When LSU
student Marcus Jacoby
first went over to
Southern University, he
had to crossover "the
Hump" to get to the
campus. Harding Avenue
leads into the campus
and the hump goes over
the railroad tracks
below.
• MORE PHOTOS
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On Sept. 7, 1996,
Southern opened at Northwestern
State, with Marcus Jacoby at
quarterback. Of the 25,000
spectators, half had made the
three-hour trip from Southern, not
unusual for this football-crazy
place. "Fans plan their lives around
games," Coach Richardson said. "They
fight to get schedules, to see where
we're going to play so they can take
holidays and go to games."
Southern University families like
the Morgans will take more than 20
people to an away game, filling
several hotel rooms. Mo Morgan, a
supervisor at the local Exxon
plant who attended Southern in the
1960's, went so far as to buy a
motor home just for Southern
football, which made him the
object of good-natured ribbing.
Friends insisted that "black
people don't drive Winnebagos."
His wife, Wanda, and about 25 of
their relatives are Southern
graduates, and his youngest son,
Jabari, a freshman drummer and
cymbals player, was on the field
for that same opening game.
For the youngest Morgan, the band
was only partly about music. More
famous than Southern's football
team -- having performed at five
Super Bowls and three presidential
inaugurations -- it had real power
and importance on campus.
The 180-piece Southern band
thrived on intimidating lesser
rivals on the black college
circuit. With its hard-brass sound
and its assertive style, the group
had a militant edge that
old-timers on campus attributed to
the influence of the civil rights
era, when the band's show was
honed.
Robert Gray, who played cymbals
with Mr. Morgan, said: "When
people think about Southern band,
they think about a bunch of big,
tough-looking, tight-looking dudes
with psychotic looks on their
faces, ready to go to war. I just
think -- Southern band -- black,
all male, just rowdy, loud."
Families like the Morgans were
fiercely proud of their
school and its role in helping
generations of blacks into the
middle and professional classes --
even if the state had long treated
it as second-rate. In the early
1900's, legislators planning to
create a new campus for Southern
considered several locations
around Louisiana. But in city
after city, white residents rose
in protest, and finally the state
settled on a site that no one else
then coveted. In the 1950's,
blacks like Audrey Nabor-Jackson,
Wanda Morgan's aunt, were
prohibited from attending the big
white public campus across town,
Louisiana State University.
Southern was their only
alternative.
Even as late as the 1970's,
Louisiana's public higher
education system was capable of
inflicting deep racial wounds.
Wanda Morgan was required to take
several courses at L.S.U. as part
of a master's program at Southern.
In one class, she was one of four
blacks, and for every exam, she
said, the four were removed by the
professor and put in an empty
classroom across the hall, one in
each corner, while the white
students took the exam in their
regular seats. The message was
missed by no one: Black students
would cheat.
By the mid-1990's, change was
brewing. The year before Mr.
Jacoby arrived, Southern and
L.S.U. settled a 20-year-old
federal desegregation lawsuit.
Both institutions pledged sharp
minority increases on their
campuses, with 10 percent of
enrollment set aside for other
races -- more whites to Southern,
more blacks to L.S.U.
Alumni like the Morgans were
worried. Would Southern soon
become just another satellite
campus of L.S.U.? Was the white
quarterback the beginning of the
end?
Mo Morgan and Audrey
Nabor-Jackson agreed with an
editorial in Southern's student
paper saying that a white
quarterback did not belong. "There
are plenty of young black
athletes," it said, "who could
benefit from Jacoby's
scholarship."
Mo Morgan said, "I didn't like
the fact that he was there." About
the only Morgan not upset was
Jabari. Mo Morgan worried that his
18-year-old son was not
race-conscious enough. "I came
through the movement, I was
confronted with things," said the
father. "That's one of the things
that concerns me -- that he
hasn't." But Jabari Morgan
couldn't have cared less, he was
so consumed with the band. Long
before starting college, he had
begun assembling on his bedroom
wall what he called his shrine, a
montage about the Southern band
that included a picture of the
first white band member, in the
early 1990's.
Now, in his freshman year, his
long-nurtured fantasy was coming
true. Standing there that day with
cymbals weighing nine pounds each,
ready to march into Northwestern
State's stadium, he was at the
front of the band. The director,
Dr. Isaac Greggs, always
positioned his tallest and most
imposing players -- his "towers of
terror" -- at the front, and
Jabari Morgan, at 6 foot 1, was
one of them. Football, he said,
was about the last thing on this
mind.
"It was like winning the
lottery."
He wouldn't have cared if Marcus
Jacoby were purple, as long as
Southern won and people stayed in
their seats for the halftime show.
A Mutinous Beginning
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Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York
Times
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Marcus
plays the guitar at
Highland Park near his
off campus home to relax
and take the weight off
of his shoulders.
• MORE PHOTOS
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Southern lost its first
two games. The team was young -- 10
of 11 offensive starters were new --
but what people remembered was the
11-1 record the year before.
For fans, the quarterback, more
than any other player, is
the team -- hero or goat. During
the second loss, Mr. Jacoby
recalled, "I heard the entire
stadium booing me."
Jean Harrison, the mother of the
quarterback prospect Sam George,
remembered, "One lady had a
megaphone and she was screaming,
'Get that white honky out of
there!' "
Chris Williams, an offensive
lineman, believed that the other
team hit Mr. Jacoby harder because
he was white: "Teams took cheap
shots at him. I really believe
that. I mean they hit him
sometimes blatantly late after the
whistle." Scott Cloman recalled
that after one Southern loss,
opposing players said, "That's
what you all get for bringing
white boys on the field."
Mr. Jacoby was hit so hard and so
often during the first game that
he was hospitalized with a
concussion.
Glen Jacoby, Marcus's father, was
sure the blockers were sandbagging
their white quarterback, but in
interviews at the time, the young
man denied it. He still says he
believes that it was just the
mistakes of an inexperienced line.
After Southern's second loss, an
angry fan threatened Mr. Jacoby. A
coach had to jump between them.
For the rest of his career, Mr.
Jacoby would have a police escort
at games. There was a disturbance
outside the stadium at another
game. Gunshots were fired. Mr.
Jacoby recalls thinking the shots
were aimed at him.
The Tuesday after the second
loss, Mr. Jacoby rose at 5 a.m.,
worked out in the weight room,
then walked to the cafeteria for
the team breakfast. No one was
there. He checked his watch.
Shortly after he sat down, Coach
Orlando came in, took him by the
arm and led him through a nearby
door.
As Mr. Jacoby remembered it, the
entire team and coaching staff sat
squeezed into a small room. All
chairs were taken, so he stood
alone against a wall. No one
looked at him. Coach Richardson
stood. "I think Marcus should know
what's going on," he said, adding,
"Who wants to say something?"
Mr. Smothers, the senior
defensive end, rose. The night
before, he had talked about
staging a strike. Now he mentioned
some minor gripes, then added:
"We're losing and we feel changes
ought to be made. Some guys aren't
getting a fair chance."
Someone else said, "Guys are
playing who shouldn't."
Coach Orlando walked to the
front. As offensive coordinator,
he naturally worked closely with
the quarterback. But several
players felt he favored Mr. Jacoby
because they were both white.
"Let's get this in the open," Mr.
Orlando said, adding, "This is
mostly about Jacoby, isn't it?"
Insisting that the quarterback had
been chosen fairly, he said: "You
have to accept Marcus, he's one of
us. We're 0 and 2, but we have to
put this behind us."
Lionel Hayes, who had lost the
quarterback job to Mr. Jacoby,
interrupted Coach Orlando. "You're
just saying that," Mr. Hayes said,
"because you're Jacoby's Dad." It
got a laugh, though his tone was
angry. Mr. Jacoby said later:
"There was a lot of hate in that
room. I felt like I was falling
into a hole, and I couldn't grab
the sides."
Coach Richardson spoke again: "We
win as a team, we lose as a team.
Jacoby's doing what he's supposed
to be doing, and he'll get better.
We all will." He said practice
would be at 3. "If anyone doesn't
want to be on the team with Jacoby
as the starting quarterback, don't
come."
Mr. Richardson remembered: "What
I saw was a frustration by some
players -- mostly seniors -- who
weren't playing. They weren't
playing because they didn't
deserve to. And so they needed a
scapegoat."
Mr. Jacoby remembers feeling like
the invisible man. "It was almost
as though I weren't there, and
they were talking about me," he
said. "I wasn't sure where to
turn. I felt they didn't want me
there -- not me personally, but
any white quarterback -- that I
was just another problem."
Three or four players didn't show
up for practice, and Coach
Richardson cut them. Not long
afterward, Virgil Smothers and one
of the coaches argued, and Mr.
Smothers was told, "Clear out your
locker."
When the players gathered the
next day at practice, before the
coaches arrived, Mr. Jacoby said,
he stood to talk. A few tried to
shout him down, but John Williams,
a star senior cornerback and
devout Christian who would go on
to play for the Baltimore Ravens,
rose and said, "Man, let the man
talk."
"I don't care if you like me or
hate me," Mr. Jacoby recalled
saying. "All I ask is that we can
go out and play football together.
This is not a popularity contest.
I'm trying to win. I'm just trying
to be your quarterback."
Winning Works Wonders
Things improved dramatically.
Southern won six of its next seven
games, beating the two top-ranked
black colleges, and was invited to
the Heritage Bowl in Atlanta, the
black college championship.
"I wasn't getting booed nearly as
much," Mr. Jacoby said. Some
teammates began warming to him.
More than anything, they were
impressed by his work ethic.
During a practice break, players
drank from a garden hose. "Sorry,
Marcus," one teased, "this is the
black water fountain." They called
him "Tyrone," and "Rasheed."
"I appreciated it," he recalled.
"Things had changed to the extent
that some of the players were
calling me 'the man.' "
Before games, he and John
Williams prayed together. One
Sunday the two went to the black
church where Mr. Williams was a
minister.
Occasionally strangers would wish
Mr. Jacoby well. One day the
band's legendary director, Dr.
Greggs, greeted him warmly and
urged him to persevere.
He felt he was developing real
friendships with teammates and
Southern students. When Scott
Cloman needed a place to stay for
a month, Mr. Jacoby had him to his
parents' home and the two grew
close. "Marcus was the first white
person I ever really got to know,"
Mr. Cloman said. "I always felt a
lot of tension around whites. I'd
go into a store and I could just
feel the tension. Sometimes you
just feel like, 'I can't stand
white people.' I didn't understand
them. I really didn't want to be
near them."
"His parents treated me like a
son," added Mr. Cloman. Some
players now joked when they saw
him, "Where's your brother?"
"And some," he said, "called me
'white lover.' Didn't bother me. I
had come to understand the
Jacobys. A lot of times people
fear what they can't understand.
Because of being around the
Jacobys my attitude toward whites
in general changed."
Failure Is Not an Option
At the Heritage Bowl that first
year, on national television,
Southern took a 24-10 halftime
lead against Howard University,
then fell behind, 27-24. In the
closing minute, Southern drove to
Howard's 15-yard line. On third
down, with 42 seconds left, Marcus
Jacoby dropped back and, under
pressure, threw off the wrong
foot, floating a pass into the end
zone.
"I heard the crowd gasp," he
said. "I couldn't believe this was
happening." He'd been intercepted.
"Their fans must have cheered, but
I remember everything being
silent." A camera captured Coach
Richardson on his knees, hands
over his head.
"I dragged myself off the field
and sat on a bench and buried my
head in my arms," Mr. Jacoby said.
"A few people, like John Williams,
came by and patted me on the back,
to be encouraging. But I heard,
'You screwed up real bad this
time, whitey,' and, 'You're as
dumb as they come.' It was the
lowest point of my life."
After the game, Coach Orlando
received an anonymous call: "If
Jacoby ever plays for Southern
again, we'll kill him -- and you."
The coach said he averaged a
threat a week that season. Later,
as Coach Orlando and Mr. Jacoby
headed to their cars, the coach
pointed to several trees. In the
light of the street lamps, Mr.
Jacoby could see a yellow rope
hung from each tree. The ropes
were tied in nooses.
Eyes of Southern Are Upon Him
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Sections of
this report concerning the
Morgan family, Jabari
Morgan and life at
Southern University were
contributed by Kirk
Johnson. |
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On campus, Mr. Jacoby struggled
with all the daily irritations
that go with being in the
minority. As a white who grew up
among whites, he was used to being
inconspicuous. Here, he always
felt on display. "I hated that,"
he said, "because it was like I
had become just a novelty act."
He found that things he had done
unconsciously all his life were
suddenly brought to his attention
and analyzed. One was the way he
dressed. He liked to wear a
T-shirt, shorts and flip-flops to
class; most students at Southern
dressed up for class in slacks.
Another was that the way he
spoke, his slang, was different
from the black majority's. "Many
times I would say something at
Southern and they would repeat it
and I wouldn't get my point
across," he said. "It would get
lost in the mocking of how I said
it instead of what I said. I might
walk into a room and I'd say,
'Hey, how y'all doin'?' " Instead
of answering, someone would do an
imitation of a white person
talking, enunciating slowly.
"They'd say 'Hi, guy, how are you
doing?' So I just learned to say,
'Hey.' " He believed the
classmates were only needling him,
but being constantly reminded was
exhausting.
"People's eyes were on him," said
Chris Williams, a teammate, "He
just didn't blend in. I mean, like
me, I just blended in wherever I
went."
A white with a different
personality might have fared
better. There was one other white
on the 70-man squad, Matt Bushart.
And though as a punter he was at
the periphery of the team and
little noticed by fans, Mr.
Bushart had the personality and
experience to cope better as a
minority. While Marcus had seemed
protected and naïve even to
the middle-class white students at
Catholic High, Matt's years at a
local public high school where
most of his football teammates
were black had taught him how to
live comfortably among them. While
Marcus was more introspective, a
loner, a little too sensitive for
some of his coaches' tastes, Matt
was noisy, funny, sometimes crude
-- so outgoing, his girlfriend
said, that he could talk to a
wall.
When Mr. Bushart's teammates made
fun of the country music he liked,
he gave it right back to them
about their rap, and kept
listening to his music. "I get
kidded about it," he said, "but
there's been a song that's been
playing and one of the black guys
will come by and say, 'Play that
again, that's actually not too
bad.' "
Mr. Jacoby loved music, too;
playing guitar was an important
outlet for relieving the pressure,
but he would not play on campus.
As he put it: "At times the rap
just blared from the dorms; I
longed for something that was my
own. I couldn't play it on campus
because for most of the time, I
was apologizing for who I was. I
didn't want to cause any more
turmoil than there was. I didn't
want to make myself look like I
was any more separate than I was."
Interracial dating is complicated
at Southern. Ryan Lewis, Mr.
Jacoby's roommate, says most black
men would not openly date a white
woman on campus. "They would keep
it low so nobody knew about it but
them," Mr. Lewis said. "I've never
seen it."
As quarterback, Mr. Jacoby often
had female students flirting with
him. He felt uneasy, caught
between the white and black sides
of town. Among whites, he said,
"everybody just assumed the worst,
that I was dating a black girl now
because I was at Southern." But
even though there were some
"gorgeous light-skinned black
girls over there," he said, and a
couple of women from his classes
became good friends, he wasn't
attracted. He thinks it was "a
cultural thing."
Though college students are
confronted with new ideas --
sometimes only partially
understood -- and encouraged to
speak out about them, Mr. Jacoby
felt that when he did, he was
criticized. At first, in his
African-American history class,
when they discussed slavery, he
said he tried to be conciliatory
in an oral report. "I would say
something like, 'I can't imagine
how terrible it must have been,
that people could do those kinds
of things to other people.' And
others in the class made some kind
of jokes, but it was like bitter
jokes: 'What are you talking
about, Marcus? You're one of those
whites.' It was like they were
saying to me, 'Quit Uncle
Tomming.' "
Then he worried he wasn't being
true to his white roots. "I felt
that I had lost my pride and the
respect of friends that I had
grown up with," he said. For his
next oral report, he decided to
speak his mind and said that it
was unhealthy for blacks to dwell
too much on past racial violence.
"There have been tragedies like
slavery throughout time," he said.
"I don't think one is more
important than any other." When he
finished, he recalled, "there was
an eerie silence and I saw at
least three or four people glaring
at me."
Increasingly, being in the
minority alienated him, made him
feel alone. "I learned early on
that I was a pioneer in all this
and no one else had gone through
it and often the best advice I
could get was from myself. Because
I was the only one who knew the
whole situation."
It didn't help that his
preoccupied parents were going
through a divorce. At one point
when he was upset about not
fitting in, his mother gave him a
copy of "Black Like Me," the story
of a white man in the 1960's who
dyes his skin and travels the
South to experience being black
during segregation. At the time,
Mr. Jacoby said, "I resented my
mother giving me the book. I felt
she was almost taking the other
side."
One Fits, the Other Doesn't
|
|
Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York
Times
|
|
Jabari
Morgan in his bedroom
with snap shots from
over the years of the
marching band covering
his wall.
• MORE PHOTOS
|
Blacks, of course, are
much better at being in the
minority, since they have far more
practice and, usually, no choice.
When Jabari Morgan was considering
colleges, his father told him he was
free to pick Southern or a "white"
college, but if he picked white, he
had better be prepared. Then he gave
him the talk about being in the
minority that so many black American
men give their sons. "You are going
to face being called a nigger," Mo
Morgan told Jabari. "Now, are you
ready to deal with it? If you're not
ready to deal with it, don't go."
The Morgans have a family council
of elders that meets regularly to
guide their young, and one message
emphasized is this: "A black
person in America has to be
smarter and sharper and work
harder to achieve the same things
as a white person of the same
abilities." Mo Morgan says, as a
minority, he understands that "the
majority is white, and you have
control and you want to
keep control."
But Jabari Morgan did not think
like his father.
He had always dreamed of
attending Southern, but for him
its great appeal was not as a
racial sanctuary. He considered
race simply part of the rough and
tumble of life, the cost of doing
business in a mostly white world.
Southern was the place where he
might be able to play in the best
marching band in America, as his
father had before him.
He determined very early that the
best high school marching bands,
like the best college bands, were
black, and so he fudged his
address in order to attend a
nearly all-black Baton Rouge
school where the band rocked. He
figured that that would give him
an edge when he tried out at
Southern.
As a marketing major who
graduated in May, Mr. Morgan fully
expects that he will one day work
for a big white-controlled
corporation. But as a marching
band member at Southern for four
years, he was in many ways the
ultimate insider in the
self-contained black-majority
culture of the Yard, as Southern's
campus is known.
All the things that Marcus Jacoby
found so irritating were second
nature to Jabari Morgan -- the
music, the dress, the vernacular
of put-downs and nicknames that is
the campus currency. He loved
African-American literature class
because the poetry and stories
reinforced what his family had
taught him about black history.
Like all new band members, Mr.
Morgan went through hazing. But as
part of the majority, he never
worried that it was about race.
Mr. Jacoby, on the other hand,
felt so unsettled as part of the
minority that he often had trouble
sleeping.
Mr. Morgan eventually joined a
fraternity -- a support in its own
way as strong as the band's.
And, where Marcus Jacoby the
minority had no steady girlfriend
during his years at Southern,
Jabari Morgan the majority began,
in his second semester, dating
Monique Molizone, an economics
major from New Orleans. She had
also come to Southern partly for
the band -- to join the Dancing
Dolls, who perform at the band's
side.
Comeback and Competition
|
|
Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York
Times
|
|
Mark
Orlando was one of
Marcus' football coaches
when Marcus attended
Southern University.
|
As much as anything, what
got Mr. Jacoby through his second
year at Southern was a determination
to avenge that Heritage Bowl
interception, to show everyone he
could be a champion. He moved
through the 1997 season with a
passion, working so hard in the
weight room that he could now
bench-press 350 pounds; running
endless drills to improve his foot
speed; and doing so much extra
throwing that by day's end it took
an hour to ice and treat his arm.
Again, he was first string, but
he had competition. Sam George had
returned from academic probation.
Mr. George was a popular figure on
campus, known for his
hard-partying ways. Though he was
only 5 foot 7, he had a strong arm
and terrific speed.
His teammates, responding to his
take-charge style in huddles,
nicknamed him the Little General.
"And," Scott Cloman said, "he was
black."
Although Mr. Jacoby started,
Coach Richardson liked bringing in
Mr. George when the team seemed
flat. Both quarterbacks saw race
as the true reason behind the
coach's substitutions. Mr. Jacoby
was convinced that Mr. Richardson
was giving the black quarterback
playing time to pander to the
black fans; Mr. George was
convinced that Coach Richardson --
influenced by Coach Orlando -- was
starting the white quarterback
because of favoritism.
Mr. George wound up playing in 5
of 12 games. By Southern's third
game, against Arkansas-Pine Bluff,
both quarterbacks were bitter.
After winning its first two games,
Southern was losing to Pine Bluff
7-6 at the half. Coach Richardson
decided to replace the white
quarterback with the black. Mr.
Jacoby was devastated; he felt he
was a proven winner and should not
be yanked for one bad half.
Given his chance, Mr. George
threw a last-ditch 37-yard pass
that tied the game, and threw
another touchdown in triple
overtime for a 36-33 Southern win.
And yet, come Monday practice,
Mr. Jacoby was the starter again.
Now Mr. George was frustrated.
Southern had a 9-1 record going
into its two final games. A
victory in the next game -- the
Bayou Classic, against Grambling,
its archrival -- would assure a
return to the Heritage Bowl and a
chance for Mr. Jacoby to redeem
himself. His parents and teammates
had never seen him so obsessed. He
had trouble sleeping and little
appetite. His father called Coach
Orlando, worried that Marcus's
weight was down.
In a journal account of that
period, Marcus Jacoby wrote: "I
sat down and wrote out a detailed
plan of how I was going to get
through these last two games,
including my political and
motivational moves. My survival as
a person depended on these last
two games. Nobody, including Coach
Orlando, knew the amount of
outside forces that were pressing
on these last two games. I was at
a point where I felt that I was
crawling on my knees."
He added, "I dreamed of a time
when I could just say that I had
accomplished something, instead of
fighting for respect, fighting in
a classroom full of people who
disagreed with everything I stood
for, and could have a day of true
rest."
Before the big game against
Grambling, he pleaded with Coach
Orlando. "If you don't pull me,"
Mr. Jacoby said, "I guarantee
we'll win our next two games."
"You can't guarantee that," the
coach said.
"I just did," Mr. Jacoby said.
Coach Orlando suggested that if
Marcus Jacoby played a little more
like Sam George, sometimes
scrambling out of the pocket, he
might be more effective. Mr.
Jacoby felt that he was being told
to become something he was not,
but he was so desperate, so
nervous about being yanked, that
he followed the advice. He ran,
and it worked. In a 30-7 win
against Grambling, Mr. Jacoby
threw three touchdown passes and
played the entire game. He was
named the Bayou Classic's most
valuable player.
A month later he achieved his
redemption, throwing the winning
pass in a 34-28 Heritage Bowl
victory over South Carolina State,
capping an 11-1 season that earned
Southern the black national
championship. "I was happier than
I had ever been at Southern," he
recalled. On the trip back from
that game he slept soundly for the
first time in months.
The Going Gets Too Tough
The more you achieve, the more is
expected. After that 11-1 season,
the talk on campus was that
Southern would go undefeated in
1998. But in the opener, with the
team trailing 7-0 at the half, Mr.
Jacoby was pulled for Mr. George.
Southern lost anyway, 28-7.
In practice on Tuesday, Mr.
Jacoby overthrew a pass to one of
his ends, John Forman, who yelled
at him in front of everybody.
Mr. Forman would say later that
it was just the frustration of
having lost the opener, but to Mr.
Jacoby it was so much more -- the
final straw. He was sure that Mr.
Forman was trying to subvert his
control of the team to help Mr.
George, his roommate.
"If you have a choice, you choose
black first," Mr. Jacoby would
later say. "I felt that I was all
alone again, on an island by
myself. It was like I was right
back where I had started two years
before, with a lot of the same
attitudes against me."
He quit football and Southern.
Coach Richardson was surprised
and asked Mr. Jacoby to stay. But
more recently, he said he
understood the decision. Because
of "the type person he is," the
coach said, "it was the best thing
for Marcus because it would have
killed him." The coach meant that
Marcus Jacoby was not emotionally
equipped to continue being the
solitary white.
When Branch Rickey of the
Brooklyn Dodgers wanted to break
major league baseball's color line
in 1947, he chose Jackie Robinson,
not simply because he was a great
black ballplayer -- there were
greater black stars -- but because
he had experience inside white
institutions. Jackie Robinson was
28 that first year in the majors,
a mature man who had graduated
from U.C.L.A. and served in the
Army. He knew what it was like to
be in the minority.
When Coach Richardson went after
Mr. Jacoby, he was just looking
for a quarterback.
Reporters hounded Mr. Jacoby to
find why he had left, but he never
spoke openly about it. He never
mentioned race. In brief
interviews, he told them he was
burned out, and in a sense this
was true. He had burned out on
being in the minority. And as a
white, he didn't have to be. In
those last months at Southern, he
often thought about returning to a
white life. "You kind of look over
your shoulder and see your old
life and you say, 'I could go
back.' "
There had been such anguish over
the Jacoby-George quarterback
battle, and all its racial
nuances, but at least on the
field, in the end, it didn't seem
to make much difference. That year
Southern, with Sam George at the
helm, finished 9-3, once again
winning the Heritage Bowl.
A white quarterback at Southern
did make people think. Mo Morgan
had been against it, but not after
watching Mr. Jacoby at practices.
"I looked at the three
quarterbacks that were there and
he was the best at the time. I'm
just telling you straight out. It
wasn't his ability and I'm not
saying he was brighter than the
other kids. He just put in the
work."
Mr. Morgan's son Jabari said he,
too, was sorry to see Mr. Jacoby
go; he liked the idea of a white
guy being open to attending a
black college.
This past year, as a senior,
Jabari Morgan reached out to a
white freshman tuba player, Grant
Milliken, who tried out for the
band. He helped him through the
hazing. One of Mr. Morgan's
friends said he had done it
because Mr. Milliken was white,
but Mr. Morgan said no, he had
done it because Mr. Milliken was
really good on tuba.
Mr. Morgan even helped Mr.
Milliken create a dance solo full
of shakes and shivers and fancy
steps, which was performed at
halftimes to wild applause. What
the crowd loved, said Mr. Morgan,
was not just that a white guy
could dance.
"The whole point of letting the
white guy dance is that we were
saying to the world, 'Hey, you can
learn our culture just like we can
learn yours.' "
Mr. Morgan's father continues to
be both fearful of his son's more
relaxed attitude about race, and a
little in awe of it.
"He doesn't think it's something
he can't overcome," said Mo
Morgan, "and you know, I think
he's right. You can get caught up
in this, and it will screw up your
thinking."
No More Apologies
One weekend last fall, at the
request of a reporter, Mr. Jacoby
went to a Southern game for the
first time since quitting. This
was Homecoming Day, and from his
seat in the stands he watched
Southern seniors and their
families being introduced to the
crowd at midfield. It could have
been his moment. Ryan Lewis, his
old roommate, was there, and so
was Matt Bushart, the white
punter.
Mr. Bushart's name was called, to
applause. Mr. Jacoby had read in
the newspaper Mr. Bushart's saying
how much he had enjoyed Southern.
The team had won seven straight
games at that point, and so Mr.
Jacoby was surprised during the
first quarter when Southern's
starting quarterback was replaced
after throwing an interception.
Mr. Jacoby had always been so sure
he'd been replaced with Sam George
to pander to fans; now Coach
Richardson was using the exact
same strategy with two black
quarterbacks. In the paper the
next day, Mr. Richardson said he
had just been trying to light a
spark under the offense.
|
|
About This
Series
|
|
|
Two
generations after the
end of legal
discrimination, race
still ignites
political debates --
over Civil War flags,
for example, or police
profiling. But the
wider public
discussion of race
relations seems muted
by a full-employment
economy and by a
sense, particularly
among many whites,
that the time of large
social remedies is
past. Race relations
are being defined less
by political action
than by daily
experience, in
schools, in sports
arenas, in pop culture
and at worship, and
especially in the
workplace. These
encounters -- race
relations in the most
literal, everyday
sense -- make up this
series of reports, the
outcome of a yearlong
examination by a team
of Times reporters.
|
After the game, outside the
stadium, a large black man spotted
Mr. Jacoby and, extending his
hand, said, "Hi, Marcus, how ya
doin'?"
"O.K., Virgil," Mr. Jacoby said.
"How you doin'?" The two chatted
for a moment outside the stadium
-- the man said he had left school
and was working as an account
executive for a drug company --
then they went their separate
ways.
"That was Virgil Smothers," Mr.
Jacoby said afterward. It was Mr.
Smothers who had led the aborted
strike against Mr. Jacoby. "I
guess he figures it's all in the
past."
It was not all in Mr. Jacoby's
past. Though he had moved on -- he
was now majoring in finance at
L.S.U.
-- his Southern experience still
unsettled him. "Just last night I
had a dream about it," he said.
"Weird dreams. Like some of these
people are coming back to haunt me
in some way. By these people I
mean some of those who I
considered friends and who I felt
kind of turned on me."
At times he talks about being
lucky to have experienced another
culture; at others he describes it
as "a personal hell." His sister
Dana says, "There are some scars
that haven't gone away, from the
bad things."
After leaving Southern, Mr.
Jacoby took a while to realize how
much pressure he had felt. "I
remember one time a few months
after I quit -- and this was part
of the healing process -- I said
something about country music,
that I liked it. And I remember
standing around with four white
people and thinking, 'Oh, my God,
I can't believe I just said that.'
And then I caught myself right
before I got through that whole
thing in my mind and I looked at
the people's faces and they were
agreeing with me. I went 'Whoa,' I
didn't have to apologize for that
anymore."
These days, he appreciates
walking around anonymously on the
mostly white L.S.U. campus. "I got
burned out as far as being
somebody," he said. "At L.S.U.
I've just enjoyed being a part of
the crowd."
|
|
