July 2, 2000
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York Times
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Jabari Morgan
in his bedroom with snap shots
from over the years of the
marching band covering his wall.
• MORE
PHOTOS
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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
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Nicole
Bengiveno/ The New York Times
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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.
|
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About
This Series
|
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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."
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