Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City
by Jay Jennings (9781605296371)

A tour de force that chronicles one season of Little Rock's Central High School football team 50 years after the tumultuous integration of the Little Rock Nine
On their first day of school in 1957, nine Central High students faced down the troops from the Arkansas National Guard, which had been deployed to enforce the governor's segregationist mandate. The president federalized the Guard, and sent in the U.S. Army. The teenagers, who became known as the Little Rock Nine, were integrated into the school, polarizing the city, capturing the country's imagination, and making history.
Fifty years after the school's integration, Jay Jennings, a seasoned sports reporter and native son of Little Rock, explores how much things have changed--and how much they have remained the same--convincing the notoriously reticent coach of the Central High football team to allow him full access for a year. From an off-season program in June through the final game in November, Jennings attended every practice and sat in on every coach's meeting, lending him a unique vantage point on the social, educational, and racial bonds and fractures in the community that manifest on the field and off.
Chronicling a high school football season, Jennings tells the story of a city riven by racial tension in the 50s and still, in many ways, segregated today. What Friday Night Lights did for small-town Texas, Carry the Rock does for the urban South, where the legacy of the civil rights movement is far more fraught and complex than it might seem.

USD $25.99

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