Decades after standing on the frontlines of one of Little Rock’s darkest segregation clashes, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones has led the league toward new revenue models but has yet to hire a Black head coach.
to be interviewed. Jones insists the most avid candidates will find a way in. In May, he spoke at the NFL’s first Accelerator program, at which 62 minority coaches and executives were invited to mingle with owners. Jones cited his Black vice president of personnel, Will McClay, who started out as a scout more than 20 years ago and caught Jones’s eye by showing up at the graduation ceremony of one of his grandkids.“It’s not, you sit and wait on the phone to ring.
Asked how he imagined that story sounded to a mid-level Black coach whose network does not include White members of Augusta National — and who has met an implacable resistance that NFL owners will not name — Jones falls quiet. Jones said he always felt at ease interacting with people of color, even though he operated in all-White environments as a student and a football player in Arkansas, and even though that racial bubble continued as he went on to make his fortune in insurance and oil before buying the Cowboys. “Very comfortable in my own skin doing what I do” is how he put it, and he attributed that sensibility to the fact that he had been around Black people so much outside of school during his younger days.
The region was a center of white supremacy. A large political rally there in February 1956 drew Klansmen from throughout the Deep South, including leaders of the Arkansas branch of the White Citizens’ Council. Its Little Rock offshoot was the Capital Citizens’ Council, which played a key role in inciting virulent protest of desegregation at the high schools.
Mischief is a common motif in Jones’s memories. He remembers how he and two Black playmates, Billy and Kenny, would hide between Pat’s Super Market and the Caple Tractor Co. next door and hurl rotten cabbages at cars heading down East Broadway. His buddy Don Caple recalled them tossing a baseball around with Johnny Smith, whose mother cleaned a nearby church. “Then one day Johnny didn’t come by anymore,” Caple said.
“Son, you had a great experience in college. Get it out of your head,” Pat said. “You got to go to work. You got to get in business. You can’t“You’re not old enough to have a life’s dream,” Pat fired back. “Get your head on right. You’re just hopeless.” Mid-anecdote, Jones’s throat closes, and he ducks his head and begins to cry over the difficulty of his NFL journey. “I’ve got one thing to say about all this: This isstuff,” he says. Tears spill out of those melting-ice-tray eyes. The crying puzzles him so much that he admits he has consulted experts about it.“I’ve asked doctors, ‘What’s going on here?’ ” he says. “ ‘How can this be?’ I’ll do it making a speech, or I’ll do it talking like this.
Jones’s main interest in collective bargaining was always the same — maximum growth. “He has no opinion other than money,” said Domonique Foxworth, a former president of the players union who is now an ESPN commentator. But this actually made him easier to negotiate with than some owners. “Jerry is usually the quickest person to get to the deal point,” said a person familiar with league affairs.
He told Jones that no good could come from forcing strong-willed young Black men into compliance. “You can’t dictate,” he said. To his relief, Jones listened without resentment. “I wouldn’t have been doing him any justice if I just said whatever I thought he wanted me to say,” McClay recalled. “… And however he took it, he took it.”
It was with this history in mind that Jones met with his team over the anthem controversy. He promised he would have his players’ backs “long after you quit catching passes or toting the ball.” Then Jones did what he does best: He struck a deal. To McClay, they were important statements, given whom they came from. “He is the unspoken mouthpiece for the league,” McClay said. “When something needs to get done, they go to Jerry. For someone of his power and strength within the league to say, ‘Hey, we need to look at this,’ that’s a positive change. … So, whatever the motives or ulterior motives, he did it.
Lindsey came in his Sunday shoes. He was there because an aunt had told him to go. Persons was coaxed into being there by his older sister. Smith, whose father was a successful Black businessman, agreed with his dad that this was something that had to be done. Four ministers from the African Methodist Episcopal Church were there to lead them.
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