So often in my daily habits I have noticed blind spots. Erasures of the story as told by the Gadsden Times are not uncommon. This rag I have noticed tends towards business recruitment with its booster literature about the Queen City of the Coosa River, and the industrial prominence of its past. In order to feel a sense of a more dynamic past in Gadsden I have often searched for it.
You do not often hear about William Lewis Moore, the Baltimore man and schizophrenic, who made an attempted solo march from Chattanooga to Jackson, Mississippi in order to deliver a letter to Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett in support of ending segregation. He was a CORE member and postman. Prior to his assassination in Keener, Alabama along the interstate, at one time he was in D.C. where he wrote President Kennedy a letter suggesting that he could carry the President’s mail to anyone in the path of his march down South. I am unsure if Kennedy read the initial letter, but just as with the union organizers from Akron, Ohio, who came South to organize for better wages at Goodyear in Gadsden during the Thirties, by 1963 the rhetoric about outside agitators was still a potent discursive weapon, and Moore lost his life on April 23rd, 1963 when he was shot in cold blood. He died in an Attalla hospital.
In 1960, about three years earlier than Moore’s tragic demise, my father and grandfather participated in a terrific community enterprise that resonates with me for my own pee wee football days. My team was located in a Birmingham suburb called Mountain Brook. Our coach was a Circuit Judge named Big Bucky. His son was the quarterback, and would go on to win state championships as a Mountain Brook High School basketball coach, and he is the present day Samford basketball coach. We ended up losing the championship game to a quarterback who grew into none other than future Notre Dame Offensive Coordinator, Chip Long. Long went on to work as a Tennessee, Tulane, and Georgia Tech Offensive coordinator. His pee wee Eagles team beat me and Little Bucky’s Raiders team when we could not bring Chip down before he rumbled and stumbled into the end zone for a 7-0 win.
Mountain Brook, back in the early 1990s, was devoid of black athletes with the exception of NFL network analyst Patrick Claybon. He was a basketball player way back then, and a golfer, who because of his dark complexion suffered the indignity of being cheered on as “Shaq” whenever he made a good play on the ball, or made a bucket. We did not know any better. I don’t remember this happening during golf tryouts however. As far as Pee-Wee football went though, Mountain Brook fielded about six different teams and we only played other Brookies in those days.
I remember my own father helping Big Bucky coach during practices. It must have reminded him in those days of his 1960-1961 years in Gadsden on the all-white Eura Brown football squad. A few of my readers were on those squads. They were reported by the Gadsden Times to have been “rags to riches,” when they lost every game in 1959. Then went 8-4 in 1960, and were undefeated in 1961. When asked who they played Wes recalled that “Striplin Elementary was who I recall hating playing the most because of all the chert on their field, and what was worse, it did not seem to bother them that it was there.” The Euro Brown team was organized because President Kennedy requested that every community develop a program to “stir the imagination, call on the toughest abilities, enlist the greatest enthusiasm, and build the energy and strength of America’s youth.” Maybe it is cynicism, but this could have been related to steepening the resolve and fortitude of the young for the battles they had before them containing the threat of communism abroad. It was these young men and their young lady cheerleaders that would soon be taught to take cover under desks in the public education administration’s “do something” approach to living in the era of mutually assured destruction.
Much like my 10-12 year old teams Eura Brown Pee Wee did not train themselves by playing in a diverse competitive environment. It does not mean they were not tough. I am sure training in the Agricola Dairy field was full of dirt clods and cow pies that made practice memorable. Wes recalled my grandfather riding them onto the field with the kids holding on for dear life atop an open trailer bouncing their seventy pound bodies with every jolt to the axles. They trained for years at the base of Hensley Mountain, next to the Gadsden Country Club. This squad was hardened by the World War 2- leadership of Tommy Mclendon, Raymond Hill, and Hugh Agricola. It was a time when people did not question their social structures, or their President’s asks of them. Even if he was a northern liberal from Massachusetts. I have not forgotten that Kennedy was Catholic, but to say that he was brings me back full circle to the bigotry in the Coosa Valley that led to William Lewis Moore’s death.
The active bigotry of murder is reserved for Klansmen that would take that kind of deadly action to preserve a wasp culture, but this was somehow different from the social structures of segregation, but they somehow buttressed them— by the instigation of fear across the landscape, blind spots exist for many us still rooted to Gadsden.
The Eura Brown Pee Wee team would dominate the city championship in 1961, 1965, and 1967. They seemed to usually compete for it every year, but I noticed something in 1974. It seemed they lost the championship to a team called Carver. Carver was once the African American High School, and I assumed it had been converted to an elementary school after Brown vs Board of Education. I could be wrong about this.
After my father and his sisters moved from Gadsden, my grandfather ceased to Coach on the field, but he continued to coach from the pulpit. A Sports Illustrated journalist named Joe Marshall wrote an article in July of 1974 that began with Hugh Willie’s blessing of a WFL game. The article is titled, “Ball that Glitters May Be Gold.” Marshall opens by writing about my grandfather in the following way:
“The Reverend Hugh W. Agricola, rector of the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Ala., has on occasion delivered the invocation before games played by Bear Bryant's University of Alabama football team. The Reverend is a great believer in the Crimson Tide and he is not above suggesting in his invocations that the Bear's will be done and that Alabama be given the strength to destroy some hapless foe. Last week he was again in the center of Birmingham's Legion Field, although this time the Reverend was petitioning the Lord on behalf of the World Football League. Just before the opening kickoff of the Birmingham Americans-Southern California Sun game he prayed, "Grant to these teams who are meeting here for the first time the zeal, energy and ability to make a contest worthy of this Football Capital."
Hugh Willie was likely aware that the field itself was framed by sections of Agricola brick. He surely wanted the Birmingham team to do well, and prevail over the Southern California Sun. It was just four years earlier that Sam Cunningham and his USC Trojans defeated the Crimson Tide at Legion Field, and made way for Bear Bryant to do what he wanted to do since his Kentucky coaching days by integrating his teams. Hearing Cunningham discuss what the 1970 USC-Alabama game was about for the black people in West Birmingham gave me chills.
After 1970, Bear Bryant integrated his teams and continued his winning legacy, and in the decade that came before… my father took what he learned below Hensley Mountain to future football games in middle school in Sewanee at St. Andrews where his team went undefeated and un-scored upon. It is possible that he rubbed a coach at Virginia Episcopal the wrong way from 1964-68, or the coach was a teacher like me, that may have been ill-prepared for coaching. He put my 5’ 10, 150 lb, father at linebacker to the tune of two bum knees that make his every step out of the passenger seat of my truck difficult.
Today, Gadsden City High is consolidated from Emma Sansom High, Litchfield High, and Gadsden High. The school has so much potential to be a football and basketball juggernaut. Maybe next year they will be competitive as they are leaving 7A for 6A. It is partly a numbers game, but many kids have left for the evangelical school down the road, and for county schools. In spite of their potential they have never competed for a state championship, or fared very well in the playoffs. But they are able to claim three NFL standouts that were educated at Gadsden City. Chicago Bears wide receiver Darnell Mooney, Cal and Texan player Jordan Veasy, and Alabama cornerback and later Cincy Bengal— Dre Kirkpatrick. But this list is a departure from Eura Brown pee wee. It should be argued here that their play was just as tough, fielding a Texas Tech running back named Clay Renfroe on the 1972-1973 squad. That might be a losing argument however, at least quantitatively. But all that glitters is gold. Legion field is gone, Birmingham has a new minor league football team, and Bama will be back to redeem their loss to Georgia in the National Championship this year. So in spite of our complexity, we are Titans, and we are a championship caliber state who have the strength and zeal to achieve great things.
With the NIL payments how long we will remain a football dynasty with a sometimes above average redheaded little brother with a basketball program, remains to be seen. All that glitters may be gold. Money Talks, and fortunately there are much wealthier states such as Texas, and California. It is fortunate for our streams anyway, football may suffer. Tragedy looms one way or another I guess. It is our savoring of memories that makes the dairy roads and fields worthwhile.
https://vault.si.com/vault/1974/07/22/ball-that-glitters-may-be-gold
I was at that game when Hugh Willie gave the invocation. As I recall, his prayer ended with, "may the Sun never go down on the rath of the Americans!"