Editor’s note: Mississippi Today and the Mississippi Humanities Council cosponsored an event – “Reimagining Statuary Hall” – on Sept. 18 at The Station in Fondren. Several speakers suggested accomplished Mississippians to represent the state in Statuary Hall at the U.S. Capitol. Currently, statues of staunch segregationists Jefferson Davis and J..Z. George represent Mississippi. What follows is Mississippi Today sports columnist Rick Cleveland’s pitch from the event.

I have spent a lifetime writing about football, primarily Mississippi football. I have watched and written about many of the greatest football players to ever play the sport. And I am here to tell you Walter Payton of Columbia and Jackson State is easily the greatest all-around football player I have ever seen or ever hope to see.

You don’t have to take it from me. The National Football League is the most popular and easily the most successful sports organization on Earth. Since the league began, tens of thousands have played and coached. And here’s the deal: The most cherished award the NFL gives is known as the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, which recognizes excellence both on and off the field. At first, the award was known just as the NFL Man of the Year. Payton himself won it in 1977. Shortly after Walter’s untimely death in 1999, the league renamed the trophy as a tribute to Walter’s incredible work ethic, his football greatness and his legacy as a giver, a humanitarian.

Now then, choosing just two people to represent Mississippi in the National Statuary Hall Collection is an incredibly difficult task. That said we can do a whole lot better than we have. Mississippi has the highest percentage of Black population in the United States. To have two Confederate leaders, champions of slavery, representing us in the U.S. Capitol is nothing short of appalling. Mississippi’s two statues should be of people who represent what we do best. They should represent the best of Mississippi, not the worst. We do many things exceedingly well, including writing books, making music and playing sports.

You could argue — and I will — that we excel at nothing more than we do football. Mississippi has produced more NFL players per capita than any other state. And it’s not just quantity; it’s quality. We have produced more Pro Football Hall of Famers per capita than any other state, as well.

Our football heroes, Black and White, have emerged mostly from small towns. Walter Jerry Payton, nicknamed “Sweetness,” grew up in Columbia and came along at the cusp of integration. Walter was part of the first integrated football team at Columbia High School. In many ways, Columbia was a microcosm of Mississippi society as it pertains to integration: Black kids and White kids were playing organized sports together for the first time, working together, sweating together as teammates and being all the better for it. The late Maurice Dantin, a political leader and a candidate for governor, was a lineman on that first integrated team. He was, as he put it, one of seven White guys, blocking for four Black guys. Maurice told me: “The first time I saw Walter I was like everybody else. I was astounded. He did things on the football field I could never have imagined. Off the field, he was a good guy, a regular guy, a great teammate.” The two, Payton and Dantin, were friends for life.

That happened in small towns across Mississippi. Sports, football especially, showed the way. We were better for it. It says something about Mississippi a little more than half a century ago that Ole Miss, Mississippi State and Southern Miss, the three major football colleges in the state, did not recruit such a remarkable talent. I was a neophyte sports writer in Hattiesburg at the time. We had a Columbia correspondent, an elderly woman named Eva B. Beets, who called in the Columbia results every Friday night. I’ll never forget her rich, melodious Southern voice. “Rickey,” she’d drawl, “you are not going to believe what that Payton young’un did tonight…” In his last high school game, Walter scored six touchdowns, and on the last one he ran the last 35 yards backwards. Nobody could catch him.

Well that was it for the coaches at historically white universities. They weren’t about to have their first Black football player be a showboat drawing attention to himself. It remains singularly the dumbest thing I have ever heard. You can teach a player how to run forward and then hand the ball to the referee after scoring a touchdown; you can’t teach him how to score six touchdowns. Walter led the nation in scoring and set an NCAA scoring record at Jackson State. With the Chicago Bears, he scored a remarkable 125 touchdowns and handed the ball to the official after nearly every one.

Walter became the NFL’s all-time leading rusher, but he also excelled as a blocker, a receiver, a passer, a kick returner and even as a punter and kicker. He would have been a helluva strong safety, too. I once asked the great linebacker D.D. Lewis of Mississippi State and the Dallas Cowboys who was the hardest guy he ever had to tackle. D.D. didn’t hesitate. “Walter Payton, by far,” he answered. “It hurt. I mean, it really hurt. Trying to tackle Walter was like trying to tackle a 215-pound bowling ball.”

D.D., as any player who played with or against Walter, had the utmost respect for No. 34. Walter Payton was the epitome of what any athlete should strive for: Uncommon ability, superhuman work ethic, beloved teammate.

I’ll be honest with you. I don’t know who Mississippi’s two statues in the U.S. Capitol should be. I do know there are so many great choices other than what we have. And I believe Walter Payton, the greatest to ever do what Mississippians do best, should be strongly considered.

READ MORE: Other Southern states removed white supremacist statues from Washington. Will Mississippi?

READ MORE: J.Z. George’s descendant advocates for removing the statue of the Confederate icon from the nation’s Capitol

READ MORE: Mississippi’s Jefferson Davis statue has new neighbor in U.S. Capitol: Arkansas civil rights leader

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Sept. 20, 1958

Martin Luther King Jr. was stabbed in New York City. 

King was signing his first book, his account of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, “Stride Toward Freedom,” when a well-dressed woman shouted, “Is this Martin Luther King?” King, then 29, answered, “Yes, it is.” 

The woman, Izola Curry, who was later diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, walked up and stabbed him with a 7-inch knife. Patrolman Al Howard kept a bystander from removing the blade, which might have killed him. 

“X-rays revealed that the tip of the blade was on the edge of my aorta, the main artery,” King later recalled. “Once that’s punctured, you’ve drowned in your own blood.” Surgeons operating on the civil rights leader said, “Had Dr. King sneezed or coughed, the weapon would have penetrated the aorta.… He was just a sneeze away from death.” 

King was rushed to the Harlem Hospital, where one surgeon arrived in a tuxedo because he had been summoned from a wedding. During the four-hour surgery, King had two ribs and part of his breast plate removed. He was quick to forgive his would-be assassin, who was the Black daughter of sharecroppers. 

“A climate of hatred and bitterness so permeates areas of our nation that inevitably deeds of extreme violence must erupt,” he told reporters. “The experience of these last few days has deepened my faith in the relevance of the spirit of nonviolence, if necessary social change is peacefully to take place.” 

In his last sermon before his assassination, King recalled a letter he received then from a ninth-grade student, who happened to be white: “I read that if you had sneezed, you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.” 

The crowd stood and applauded. “I want to say tonight that I, too, am happy that I didn’t sneeze,” King continued. “Because if I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been around here in 1960, when students all over the South started sitting in at lunch counters. … If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been down in Selma, Alabama, to see the great movement there. If I had sneezed, I wouldn’t have been in Memphis to see a community rally around those brothers and sisters who are suffering. I’m so happy that I didn’t sneeze.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The Justice Department announced Thursday that it had expanded its investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department where a self-described “Goon Squad” of deputies has been accused of torturing people for nearly two decades.

Investigators will seek to determine if the suburban Mississippi sheriff’s department engaged in a pattern of unconstitutional policing through widespread violence, illegal searches and arrests or other discriminatory practices.

“Since the Goon Squad’s sickening acts came to light, we have received reports of other instances where Rankin deputies overused Tasers, entered homes unlawfully, bandied about shocking racial slurs, and deployed dangerous, cruel tactics to assault people in their custody,” Kristen Clark, the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the Justice Department, said during a press conference.

Rankin County came to national attention last year after deputies, some from the Goon Squad, tortured two Black men in their home and shot one of them, nearly killing him. Six officers pleaded guilty and were sentenced to federal prison in March.

An investigation by The New York Times and Mississippi Today later revealed that nearly two dozen residents experienced similar brutality over two decades when Rankin deputies burst into their homes looking for illegal drugs.

During the press conference Thursday, Todd Gee, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Mississippi, noted that journalists “have compiled harrowing” details of torture and abuse of Rankin County citizens.

He also recalled hearing first-hand accounts of alleged abuse from “men and women, old and young alike,” during community meetings in Rankin County.

“If the Justice Department determines this is a pattern or practice, we will seek remedies,” Gee said.

In a statement on Facebook, the sheriff’s office wrote that it would “fully cooperate with all aspects of this investigation, while also welcoming DOJ’s input into our updated policies and practices.”

Rankin County Sheriff Bryan Bailey has sought to distance himself from the brutality of his deputies, saying he was never aware of any of these acts.

But some of the deputies who pleaded guilty said during their sentencing hearings that they were rewarded for their use of violence or that they modeled their behavior on those who supervised them.

In some cases, residents who accused deputies of violence filed lawsuits or said they lodged complaints with the department. 

The Times and Mississippi Today identified 20 deputies who were present at one or more of the incidents. They included several high-ranking officials: an undersheriff, detectives and a deputy who became a local police chief.

The investigation marks the 12th pattern or practice investigation into law enforcement misconduct by the current administration. Justice Department officials said previous investigations in other cities were followed by a reduction in use of force by the local officers.

The lawyer for Parker and Jenkins, Trent Walker of Jackson, Miss., said his clients are “exceedingly happy” about the investigation into the Rankin County Sheriff’s Department and hope the department is held to account “for its long and storied history of brutality, discriminatory policy and excessive force.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.