Jerral Jones Owner of Dallas Cowboys Just Announced that Mike McCarthy is no Longer
Jerral Wayne Jones, a crew-cut sophomore, found his place on the first day of classes at North Little Rock High amid a group of White males who had gathered at the front entrance and were obstructing the way of six Black students who were trying to desegregate the school.
This football season, The Washington Post is delving into the NFL’s long-standing inability to fairly elevate Black coaches to executive positions, despite the fact that Black players drive the multibillion-dollar league.
A snapshot obtained at the moment showed Jones standing a few yards away from where the mob’s ringleaders were jostling and shooing away the six Black students with growling racial epithets. Richard Lindsey, a Black student, stated that at one point, he felt a hand touch the back of his neck from someone in the throng. He heard someone say, “I want to see how a nigger feels,” from behind him. The thuggish animosity was successful in discouraging the potential new members.
The incident took place 65 years ago, on September 9, 1957, in the same month that Little Rock Central High, a few miles away in the capital city, was the site of a more high-profile integration effort. Considered a turning point in the history of the civil rights movement, the Little Rock Nine incident occurred when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent federal forces to escort the Black students who were breaking new ground past the spitting crowds. It obscured the unpleasant occurrences that were concurrently occurring at Jones’s high school across the Arkansas River; most of these events have been lost to history, but not completely.
The picture, which was taken by Associated Press photographer William P. Straeter, depicts a young Jones with a striped shirt who is squinting to get a better look and, as he acknowledged in a recent interview with The Washington Post, “looking like a little burrhead.” He was going to be fifteen in one month. Since August, he had been working out twice a day and lifting weights to gain bulk in an attempt to make the school’s football B-team. There could have been problems, as the coach, Jim Albright, had stated he “didn’t want to see any of you knot-heads at the front of that school tomorrow.”
That instruction didn’t stop Jones. He appeared close to the crux of the dispute, positioned on the upper landing close to the double-leaf entrance doors of the school, a face in the back row of the human barrier designed to keep people out based only on the color of their skin.
Jones claimed he was just observing and not taking part. “I don’t think that anyone, including myself, knew in advance what was involved. It was more of an oddity, he claimed.
However, it appears from Straeter’s photos that Jones had to duck around the North Little Rock Six in order to get to the top of the stairs before the Black pupils finished walking up to the schoolhouse entrance. Jones provided the standard account of the encounter, which was that the six young Black guys were the victims of older white supremacists, while the majority of individuals in the area were teens.
Even at eighty years old, Jerry Jones’s face is one of the most identifiable in the nation. The Dallas Cowboys are owned by the boy from North Little Rock. “The Cowboys are America,” Jones declared upon purchasing the team in 1989, and there’s little doubting that they’ve surpassed the New York Yankees to become the nation’s most lucrative and well-liked sports organization. NFL games are the highest-rated television programming, and the Cowboys are the club with the most viewers.
Jones is the only star of Texas-sized glitz, her gentle Arkansas drawl delivering every phrase like a delectable bite. It is no coincidence that “Jerry World” is the colloquial name for his football palace. He is a hands-on owner who acts as his own general manager and greets the throng of reporters in the locker room following a game. He is more than that, though. He is perhaps the most powerful person in the NFL due to the success of his club and his charismatic personality. He is an irrepressible showman with a self-image that matches his wealth of almost $11 billion. Though Roger Goodell is the official commissioner, he is occasionally referred to as a shadow commissioner with greater authority. He hasn’t held back when using his influence as a financial and cultural maestro to further mold the league into his vision.
In a game where there are only three Black full-time head coaches despite the fact that the majority of players are Black, this raises questions about race, power, and the situation of Black coaches. Jones might set the standard for the NFL’s appalling hiring, promoting, and supporting of Black coaches.
His track record with important appointments has been poor. Jones has had eight White head coaches in his thirty-three years as owner. Only two of the team’s offensive and defensive coordinators—who serve as stepping stones to head coaching positions—have been Black during that time, and none of them have been since 2008. Although he and Jones both grew up in Arkansas, Maurice Carthon, the offensive coordinator under Bill Parcells in 2003 and 2004, said he had a strong relationship with Jones but never felt he had a serious chance to be the head coach. or with any additional proprietor. Carthon remarked, “I can’t say that I was close at any point.” “I believe they’re all failing.” Carthon coached seven different teams before retiring in 2012.
