Mr. Touchdown
Lyda Phillips
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2005 iUniverse
ISBN: 0595672884

A star football running back & his sister desegregate an all-white high school.

Let me say at the outset that if you're at all squeamish & invested in being properly PC, you're going to come across a lot of “N” words & racial slurs. Lyda Phillips tells it like it was, & it was horribly cruel, humiliatingly constraining & astonishingly exciting.

I highly recommend Mr. Touchdown as a glimpse into the life & times of teenage students back in 1965 who must face the change of their lifetimes when the law demands that the schools in their home town of Memphis, Tennessee be desegregated.

We follow Eddie & Lakeesha, the children of Rev. & Mrs. Russell, as they are picked by the local NAACP & SNCC to transfer & break the color bar.

Eddie is a straight A student with a passion for football, & Lakeesha is a math whizz with a serious case of shyness. Together, with a handful of other black students, they start the tortuous & excruciating process of not only leaving the school they'd grown up in, they now must face the unfettered hatred of almost all the teaching staff as well as the students at Forrest High.

Except there's Nancy & Spencer, who are both stars in their own right. Nancy's a cheer leader with a gaggle of girlfriends all of whom have colored cooks & maids, & Spencer's a huge, mostly inarticulate football hero, with a strong sense of justice. Both are appalled at the outright antagonism they witness from the first day of school, & are more curious about these newcomers, than hateful.

Mr. Touchdown touches on a deeply serious subject, with all the injustices & interracial violence & fears as the first wave of integration swept into our schools, & Lyda Phillips has tackled this exciting & scary era as seen through the eyes of the youngsters. How the white kids' world is disturbed by their own prejudices & how the black kids' are schooled to mingle with the whites.

Very well done! I listed this in Men's books because it's mostly about football & boys growing to manhood, although there's a lot about how girls were back then, too.

Mr. Touchdown should be required reading for everyone who cares about how far we've come... & how far we still have to go to be a fully & kindly integrated nation.
(01/29/06)

Rebecca