The Ghost Of Speedy Cannon

Raymond Woodruff believes the same thing Andy Lamb believes about Speedy Cannon’s death. He is one of many people in Jacksonville who quietly hold this belief. At two memorial services last October timed for the 40th anniversary of Cannon’s last game, classmates and teammates got behind the microphone and said very nice things about Cannon’s life while remaining silent on the circumstances of his death. And then, away from the microphone, several of them voiced their lingering suspicion.

Woodruff has his reasons. Playing basketball for Jacksonville High, he visited Wellborn High for a game in the early ’70s. This is the main thing he recalls about that visit. Before the game started, a Wellborn player took Woodruff aside and told him he’d better not score any points. Woodruff didn’t understand. The player told him to look up in the bleachers. Woodruff looked up and saw a white man discreetly threatening him with a gun. Then Woodruff understood. He fouled out of that game as fast as he could.

On the night his cousin died, Woodruff was watching from the stands. As he remembers it, the Wellborn players were trying to injure Speedy “the whole game,” with raucous encouragement from the crowd: “You could hear ’em hollerin’, sayin’, ‘Kill that n-----! Kill that n-----!’ ”

Much would later be said about Wellborn’s collective grief over Cannon’s death. But Raymond Woodruff remembers the opposite. He says there was widespread celebration immediately after the fatal hit. The band played Dixie. People waved Confederate flags. Tragedy? No, Woodruff told me. The atmosphere at Wellborn was one of triumph.

All along, I’d been wondering whether anyone who cared about Speedy Cannon had done anything to avenge his death. And if not, why not?

In the larger picture of race relations in Alabama, the answers to those questions turned out to be the most important part of the story.

No Jacksonville players retaliated during the game because they were busy playing, and because they didn’t know how serious Cannon’s injury was. He actually stood up after the hit, with some help, and for a moment he watched the game from the sideline. He said, My head hurts. He may have seen the touchdown Jacksonville scored to stretch its lead to 21â€"7, although who knows what he understood. Even later in the game, when Cannon collapsed again and the ambulance came, no one knew he would die. That didn’t happen until around 3 a.m. at Carraway Methodist Hospital in Birmingham, hours after Wellborn finished the 22â€"21 comeback win that was made possible by Cannon’s departure.

In Jacksonville, many people came to believe that the fatal hit had been orchestrated by the Wellborn coaches. Ernest Wilson, an uncle of Cannon’s, says more than one Wellborn player told him this directly. “They were told to get him out of the game. Not to kill him. Just to get him out of the game. If you have to hurt him, hurt him.”

Under this scenario, it would be easy to imagine Cannon’s father taking justice into his own hands. But he was long gone, to Indianapolis, and he had started a new family. Cannon’s brothers had gone to Indianapolis with their father. His mother had died of cancer several years earlier. Cannon lived with his grandparentsâ€"he had stayed in Alabama to pursue his football careerâ€"and the responsibility of family spokesman fell to his uncle Ernest. Anger was rising among African-Americans in Jacksonville. The NAACP and the SCLC got involved. There were mass meetings. The people looked to Ernest Wilson for direction.

Wilson was angry too. He wanted justice for Cannon, but he wanted it done the right way. Wilson knew what Speedy Cannon would have done.

Cannon grew up sleeping on floors and wearing second-hand clothes in a town where a black man in a car accident could be dragged from the wreck and beaten by police. Where a black boy who said hello to a white girl who said hello to him first was driven away in a squad car and forced to leave his brand-new bicycle by the side of the road. In elementary school, Cannon waited until all the white children ate lunch and then he cleaned the cafeteria kitchen to earn his own lunch. When someone called him a n-----, he just walked away. When there was a doubt, he gave the benefit. He changed his manner of speaking when white people were around. He made white friends. He did all this for years, until his junior year in high school, when the white children elected him their class president. Now he was going places. He thought he could play football for the Crimson Tide, and then in the NFL, if he could just survive high school in the changing South.

What would Speedy Cannon have done?

He would have told everyone to settle down.

We don’t want any racial trouble here, Wilson told the people. It’s not going solve anything. And so, although they suspected that one of their own had been killed because of his race, they let it go.

This nonviolent response had a profound effect. Here was a young black man, loved by whites and blacks alike, blameless in life and in death, with no subsequent bloodshed to complicate his legacy. A hush fell over the community, a time of quiet reflection on a beautiful life, and when it ended blacks and whites seemed to get along better. One after another, black and white, those who had witnessed this change told me the same thing.

“I believe it changed racism in Alabama,” said Tim Lewis, one of Cannon’s black teammates.

But in the midst of all the forbearance, I did find evidence of two minor confrontations.

Pamela Baker-King, an African-American cheerleader who attended Jacksonville with Cannon, told me that when the game ended, two uniformed Wellborn players approached her. One of them said, “We got your n-----.” Furious, Baker-King attacked one of the boys and knocked him to the ground. It took a watchful Jacksonville parent to stop her from beating him with his own helmet.

Then there was Frank Burgess, the Jacksonville assistant coach. On the morning after the game, Burgess, who is white, and the other Jacksonville coaches gathered at the school and watched the game film again and again. Burgess was horrified. “That’s the cheapest shot I’ve ever seen taken in a football game,” he told me.

As the Jacksonville coaches watched the film, they got a surprise visitor: the head football coach for Wellborn High. He had apparently come to offer condolences.

Former Jacksonville assistant coach Frank Burgess says he confronted the head coach from Wellborn, telling him he believed the fatal hit on Speedy Cannon was intentional.

Burgess was only 22 then, younger than the other Jacksonville coaches, and he was the only one who challenged the Wellborn coach. “I said, ‘We know what happened. You told ’em to kill him.’ And Coach Currier [Jacksonville’s head coach, now deceased] told me to shut up.”

I asked Burgess how the Wellborn coach had responded to the accusation. “He didn’t have much to say,” Burgess said. “He kind of just turned around and left.”

I wondered what Wellborn’s coach would have to say about this. His name had come up in a previous conversation with Ricky Armstrong, the Jacksonville student trainer, who was pretty sure the old coach was dead.