William Widmer for The New York Times
EUNICE, La. — Before two-a-day football practices began in August 1969, Coach Joe Nagata gathered some of his white senior players at Eunice High School. He told them to prepare for workouts more difficult than usual in heat and humidity that felt like damp clothes inside a dryer.
Desegregation by federal mandate was approaching belatedly and nervously in my rural hometown on the Cajun prairie, two and a half hours west of New Orleans in St. Landry Parish.
Fifteen years had passed since Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the landmark Supreme Court ruling, declared racial segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional.