Back in the '60s, it was still a matter of . . . black or white

Don Davis had no idea why his football coach summoned him to his office one spring day in 1966. And not just him, but also the two other team captains from Stone High School, which for decades was South Brevard County's school for blacks before the walls of segregation fell.

As Davis and teammates Sam Banks and Tony Stokes entered Perry Hughes' tiny physical education office with the small steel desk and filing cabinet, they detected a flatline countenance to their coach.

"Do you know why you guys are here?" Hughes asked the boys.

They shook their heads.

"I was instructed to talk to you guys about going to Melbourne High to play football for your senior year," Hughes said. "You'll have a better opportunity there -- better facilities, better equipment, a better chance for a scholarship."

Hughes paused, looking at the three soon-to-be seniors individually.

"It's up to you," he said. "You're not under any pressure. I was told to talk to you."

As the three teenagers walked home to their black neighborhood in Melbourne that afternoon -- Davis to his house on Lipscomb Street -- they talked. At the time, they didn't know they'd been selected as test cases for integration. From their perspective, they were being asked to leave their friends and football team.

"We decided that, hell no, we weren't going to go to Melbourne High," Davis recalled. "We were going to stay right there at Stone. Once a Gopher, always a Gopher. We weren't going anywhere."

It helped that the Stone High School Gophers traditionally fielded a solid football program. From 1960-62, during a sensational three-season stretch, they never lost a game, and the 1966 season promised to be a good one. But there was another reason why Davis and his classmates didn't want to go to the white school, and as Davis recently sat with a few old friends from Brevard County's pre- integration days, they recalled the common current they felt growing up in that era.

"We were segregated . . .," said Leon Daniel Watts, a former star athlete at North Brevard's Gibson High School.

Watts paused for effect. Then he repeated his words.

"We were segregated, but we were not unhappy."

As Watts said this, he received agreeing nods from Davis, Dick Blake and Rosemary McGill, all three of whom graduated from Brevard County's three pre-integration black schools.

Watts, 65, graduated from Titusville's Gibson High School before going to Florida A&M; and then the University of Florida's College of Law, becoming an attorney.

Blake, 77, graduated from Cocoa's Monroe High School before going to FAMU. He is now a retired principal from Cocoa High, a school Blake was not even allowed to attend when he grew up.

Davis, 62, who graduated from Melbourne's Stone High School, is a retired KSC worker.

McGill, 67, who also graduated from Monroe High School, retired several years ago from the City of Cocoa Utilities Finance Department. She now works for Brevard Community College as a Multicultural Legacy Specialist.

"I wish white folks could have lived with us back then, to see what we had," McGill said.

She, like the others, recall a culture rooted in the trinity of family, school and church.

"The first person I saw in the morning was my father," she said. "We ate breakfast together as a family. We ate dinner together as a family. And the last person I saw before going to bed was my father."

What has happened to black America, they say, with its hip-hop culture and alarming rate of unwed mothers and imprisoned young men, is "integration."

"We got what we wanted," Blake intoned, "but we lost what we had."

What did they have?

They show school yearbooks brimming with pictures of clubs and activities, sports and societies, good times.

"I never thought, even though we went to segregated schools, that I didn't get a good education, or that I was deprived of anything," said Watts, who as a teenager used to write up his team's athletic endeavors for Titusville's Star-Advocate newspaper.

Sports were a big part of what they had.

Their sports.

"We weren't interested in keeping up with what Melbourne High or any of those other white schools were doing," Davis said. "We were too busy doing our own thing."

Not that they didn't know there was a difference. Their textbooks were hand-me-downs from white schools, often at least three years old, tattered, torn and marked up by the time it arrived on their shelves.

Remember how Davis and his buddies chose to spend their senior year at Stone High instead of Melbourne High? The Gophers' football team won the district championship that season, which was the highest achievement a black school could aspire to.

"We won the district championship, and we got this little write-up in the newspaper," Davis said, holding his thumb and forefinger a few inches a part. "That same year, Melbourne High won the state championship, and they got a whole page in the newspaper."

He cared, but he didn't.

"Yeah, it bothered you that they got all the publicity, but we knew why," he said. "I just would've liked to have played them. Even if we couldn't play them, I always had the feeling that we were better than them."

Today, what they care most about is that the legacies and the people from that era are not forgotten.

"If we don't tell our stories," McGill said, "they'll go to the cemetery with us."

Watts is convinced that some of the athletes from that era, had there been equal opportunity, would not have needed their causes championed or the memories of them refreshed all these years later.

Watts played baseball at FAMU. His roommate was Hal McRae, who later played and managed in the major leagues.

"I've seen a lot of great athletes in my years," Watts said. "But the best I ever saw was Frank Maizon, up in Titusville. What an athlete. Gifted. God almighty, he was a natural. Six-foot-three, 180 pounds. Basketball, baseball, football. He could do it all. I was the quarterback my sophomore year, and I broke my ankle and missed the whole season. Maizon stepped in and played quarterback, and we only lost one game. He kicked for us, too. He could punt a football 60 yards barefooted. And what a golfer. I believe he could've made the PGA Tour if they'd have let him play."

The three schools -- Andrew J. Gibson High in Titusville, Jessie Ruth Monroe High in Cocoa and John Stone High in Melbourne -- had great teachers, they say, and legendary coaches. Perry Hughes, whose memory now rests in the FAMU Sports Hall of Fame, coached at Stone High. Dick Blake, the retired Cocoa High principal, coached at Monroe. And Dr. Joe Lee Smith, who grew up with Blake and is now the provost at BCC's Melbourne campus, coached at Gibson High.

It doesn't take much to hit the rewind button and zip back through the years and all the great athletes.

Willie "Ric-rac" Wright, the legendary multi-sports athlete from Monroe High, comes to mind for all of them. Henry Lee Scott. Winston McIver. Barbara Piper. Roosevelt "Pete" Holmes. Melvin Shaw. Alice Brown. Altamese Edmondson, who later married Dr. Joe Lee Smith. And on and on.

Who was the best?

There are so many different opinions.

"There are those who are trained athletes," McGill said, "and then there are those who come into the world with a gift. Ric-rac had the gift. He was so phenomenal, you just shake your head. The fellow was before his time. Guys like him today have nowhere to go but the pros."

One of the county's first NFL players was a kid from Monroe -- Norman Davis, who was born 65 years ago in Cocoa. Davis graduated from Grambling, where he played under the legendary Eddie Robinson, before going to the NFL -- initially with the Baltimore Colts, and then the New Orleans Saints and Philadelphia Eagles. When Davis played his first NFL season in 1967, the pride in the local black community was immeasurable.

But not all the stories were good, or inspiring. Segregation was ugly. Too often, it was even deadly.

One July day in 1944, Dick Blake and two of his older brothers -- the three of them grandchildren of a man who was born into slavery -- sneaked out of Cocoa's First Born Pentecostal Church to meet up with seven friends. The destination was a minor league baseball game at the city's old Provost Park, which has long since been razed in favor of soccer fields. The Cocoa Indians were playing that afternoon, and as it often did in the summer, it started to rain, then lightning.

"The rain was hard, so hard," Blake said. "And to this day, I've never seen lightning like that again in my entire life."

Some of Cocoa's old-timers still talk about the thousands of chickens the rain killed that day, and all the car accidents it caused. Mostly, they remember the tragedy it inflicted on a group of children caught in the crosshairs of prejudice.

The 10 boys tried to find shelter under an awning in the stands. There was more than enough room, but not if your skin was black. A white man told them they couldn't stay there, but that they could "go to that shed in right field." They did, huddling in the cramped, tin-roofed shed, among lawn equipment, their heavy breaths mingling as their bodies flinched with each boom of thunder.

Dick, just 10, had his arm around his brother Gary, 12. Their older brother Alonzo, 16, was next to them. Just then, lightning exploded on the shed. At that precise moment, the clock stopped at the home of Virgil and Bertha Blake, the boys' parents.

The blast knocked Dick out. When he came to, he saw Gary slumped in the mud, his skin a sickening purplish hue. He ran home as fast as he could, but Alonzo was already there, screaming between gasps of breaths. "Gary is dead, momma! Gary is dead!" And that's when the wailing began.

"Gary was an exceptional athlete," Dick Blake recalled. But there was more. Gary also was a straight-A student, brilliant academically, with a photographic memory. Teachers would write something on a board, erase it, and then have Gary recite it back, word for word. Ministers would point to him and ask him to recite a passage of Scripture, and he would, again word for word.

"My momma used to say that if she ever met a genius, it was Gary," Dick Blake said. "There were 10 of us children. My momma got as far as the eighth grade, and my daddy the sixth grade. But eight of the nine children who survived all went to college. Gary was the best and brightest of us all. He was brilliant. To the day my parents died, they always wondered what would've become of Gary."

There are other tragedies.

Rosemary McGill never understood why her mother and aunt drank heavily. Then, one day, she heard them say something about drinking to forget. Forget what?

"I finally heard the story about what happened when they were children, a story they kept from us for years," McGill said. "They saw a white man put a shotgun to their mother's head and pull the trigger. Blew her brains out. My mother and aunt ran into a field because they thought they were going to be next. They were just little girls. How do you recover from that?"

McGill, though, is living testimony that they did.

"Education, education, education," she said. "The importance of education was drummed into us. Education was our key. And we got a great education. We didn't even realize how well we were educated until integration. Our teachers were like surrogate parents. They paid for things out of their own pockets. They came to your house. At the same time, we were told that we had to be better than our white counterparts. We were told we had to run faster, jump higher and be able to compete against the fittest. We had to be better in everything. That was our mentality."

Occasionally, that mentality had opportunities to be put into practice.

Blake recalls a time in the early '60s, just before integration arrived, when Cocoa High basketball coach Jim Jenkins asked him if he wanted to bring his Monroe High players over for a scrimmage. It was a risky move in Jim Crow America, but Jenkins did it anyway.

Cocoa High was only a few years removed from winning the 1960 state championship, and Jenkins had built a powerhouse with the Tigers' hoops program.

How would they fare against the local black school?

To prevent prying eyes and any problems, Cocoa High's gym doors were locked.

"Not just locked," Blake recalled. "They were padlocked."

Blake smiled as he related how the scrimmage unfolded.

"They were still playing that system-style of basketball," he said, mimicking two-handed chest passes. "Pass, pass, pass. Meanwhile, we were playing fast-break basketball, running, running, running. Our boys were so fast they didn't know what the hell happened."

At some point, Blake said, they stopped keeping score.

"They told us it wasn't important," he said. "But our kids were sandlot players. They knew how to keep score in their heads. We beat them by a good 20 points."

There were other times when white people tried to force integration, even if it was against the law.

"There was a guy up in Titusville. Scofield was his name," Watts said. "I don't remember his first name. White guy. He started a summer baseball team with whites and blacks together. A lot of people didn't like that. But ol' Scofield, he didn't give a damn what people thought. And you know why people didn't want to see it? Because they knew that the kids would get along and want integration."

It was with sports, after all, where segregation's wall first started to crumble, particularly when Jackie Robinson became baseball's first black player, suiting up for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947.

"Without a doubt, sports was our salvation for ending segregation," Watts said. "With sports, you don't have a color line, you have a bottom line. People don't care if you're white, black, green, red or whatever. They care about winning."

It took awhile. Even though Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in 1947, it wasn't until the '60s when schools could legally integrate. For Watts, it wasn't until 1971 when he first attended an integrated school. That's when he went to UF's College of Law after graduating from FAMU. While a law student, he went to see a football game at Florida Field. At the time, Willie Jackson was one of the first of two blacks to ever play for the Gators.

"I'm sitting in the stands and I heard fans calling him the n-word. I'm not talking about opposing fans. Gator fans! I was so upset. I couldn't finish my schooling there fast enough. I just wanted to get out of there. I never liked Florida for that. I still don't like them."

It wasn't so much that the racism and bigotry surprised them. It's just that, growing up in segregated schools kept them somewhat insulated from it all. All these years later, they realize a dark period in American history still produced some of the brightest days of their lives.

"The way we grew up, it was a great experience," Davis said. "I wouldn't trade the experiences and the way we grew up for anything."

Contact Kerasotis at HeyPeterK@aol.com. Listen to him Fridays at 12:10 p.m. on WMEL, AM-1300. Follow his blog at www.floridatoday.com/heypeterkblog.