Minority Report

Many things are determined by color.

By Phil

You see people wearing black in a church, you know you’re at a funeral. The red and green of a stoplight tells you either to go or stop (please say you know which is which). On the athletic field, color sets two teams apart. And, in life, color could mean the difference between acceptance and persecution.

Color is woven into the fabric of Stillman College, a four-year liberal arts school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Stillman was established in 1875 as a training school for black male ministers, and ever since it has been dedicated to increasing employment opportunities for young African-Americans.
On the football field there are only two colors that matter at Stillman: Navy Blue and Old Gold, the school colors. When the Tigers take the field in their uniforms and helmets, they all look the same, with only the numbers on the players’ backs acting as a guide.

Once the helmets come off, however, you may notice something different about No. 12 (Sean Reck) and No. 17 (Kevin Flemming). These two players are, as one source told me, ‘two stars in a night sky.’
You see, Reck and Flemming are white.

Reck is the team’s punter and Flemming the place kicker, both of whom were recruited and signed by Tigers head coach Theophilus Danzy, whose motives were very clear.

‘The only thing I wanted was a football player,’ explains Danzy. ‘A football team is just a football team. We all got to work together and it either happens or it doesn’t.’

So when a high school coach in Vernon, Alabama, told Danzy they had a kicker that could help his team out, and when Carol White in Atlanta gave him a list of punters that included Sean, a native of Prattville, Alabama, their nationality or color or race never crossed his mind.

‘Kevin’s coach said he could kick with both his right and left foot and that we should see him. That’s all I needed to hear,’ Danzy explained.

‘The whole race thing didn’t even come up when he came up to recruit me,’ Flemming adds. ‘Coach never even mentioned it.’

When Flemming heard that Stillman College was looking at him, he didn’t know it was a historically black school, partially due to the fact he is an exchange student from Germany (though you wouldn’t know it from his southern accent).

‘The coaches and my friends told me it was a black school,’ says the kicker, now a senior.’But I didn’t see it at as any reason for me to not come here. All my friends are proud of me, the look through the newspaper for my name on Mondays.’

Both players know people from other parts of the country may think the situation strange, but Kevin, for one, was raised to be color-blind. He was just going to school and playing football. ‘I really don’t see it as a big deal,’ Flemming says, laughing.. ‘It isn’t something unusual to me. My parents raised me not look at the outside of a person, but get to know them. You can’t judge someone just by looking at them if you don’t know them.’

‘There are good black people and good white people, but there also are bad people of both kinds. I don’t have any problems with anybody on the team. I don’t have any problems on campus, either.’
Reck, a sophomore, readily agrees. ‘When I first came here, I thought it was going to be tough for me on campus. But it hasn’t. It’s been great.’

Coach Danzy has his own theories on why the two kickers fit in so well.
‘Kickers are a little off-beat anyway,’ he explained. ‘They can’t kick too much or they will overstrain the leg, they don’t run. They are out there by themselves. They gain strength from each other because they are out there on their own.’

Danzy also believes that is one of the factors why there are so few black kickers.
‘It’s something that puts you out there by yourself, and probably the black kids don’t like being out there by themselves. Plus, it’s also expensive to send a kid to kicking school.’

Flemming and Reck are good friends; they room together on the road and hang out in their free time, though the kicker has some ulterior motives. ‘Reck’s my holder on field goals, I have to be nice to him.’
Race really is the least of their concerns.