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High’s white players flocked to Gardner Stadium to see Payton in action. “We’d all go and sit in the northeast stands and just be blown away,” said Steve Stewart, Columbia High’s standout linebacker. “He was so much better than anything we had. Eddie Payton was the best football player I’d ever seen. He did things none of us could imagine.”
    And what of Walter? The head coach of Jefferson High School, Charles Boston, had been aware that somewhere within the building’s confines his all-everything halfback had a younger brother. But it wasn’t until an otherwise nondescript weekday afternoon that knowledge and reality collided. Boston, who also served as Jefferson’s assistant principal, was sitting in his office, looking over some papers, when he was told that a junior high student was crying in the courtyard.
    “Who is it?” he asked.
    “Oh, just Eddie Payton’s little brother.”
    Boston ran out to find Walter, all of five foot five, withering in pain on the ground. He had snapped his collarbone in a game of sandlot football, and his left arm now dangled like a fork on a string. “He’s crying and crying and crying,” said Boston. “So I picked him up, called his mother, and took him to Marion County General Hospital.”
    Throughout the long, gray hallways of Jefferson High School, everyone knew Charles Boston, and Charles Boston knew most everyone. Granted, he was the assistant principal, as well as the football coach. But it was more than that. In Boston, Jefferson’s students found an advocate; a man who genuinely believed that, despite reason to think otherwise, young black boys and young black girls could emerge from a bitterly racist society to accomplish their goals. “Mr. Boston was the perfect example of the strong black male who was comfortable with himself because he never needed a white person to lean on,” said Edward Moses, Walter’s classmate and friend. “He didn’t need a title, and he didn’t need anyone to anoint him a leader. He led by nature. It was his gift.” Born in the impoverished town of Laurel, Mississippi, in 1933, Boston was one of ten siblings in a family renowned for athletic excellence. An older brother, Peter, was perhaps the best wide receiver Laurel had ever produced. His little brother, Ralph, would go on to win a gold medal in the long jump at the 1960 Olympic Games in Rome. For one remarkable twelve-year stretch, there was always a Boston brother playing on the Oak Park High School varsity football team. “People accused the school of using the same guy for all those years,” said Charles, who excelled in football and basketball. “We all punted, so that raised suspicions. But when Peter was in high school, he weighed a hundred eighty pounds. I was one-forty.”
    If Boston took one thing from his prep football experience, it was that brutal coaching methods—at the time a staple of black Southern football—were unnecessary. From the sidelines, Boston watched opposing coaches smack their players, punch their players, kick their players. Although Russell Frye, Oak Park’s coach, occasionally laid his hands on others, he never touched Boston. “I told him I’d do the absolute best I could,” he said, “but that I wasn’t going to be abused.” Boston was a good enough player for Frye to comply.
    In 1959, following four years of football at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (later known as Alcorn State University), Boston was hired as a gym teacher/football coach by (tiny) Carver High School in (tiny) Bassfield, Mississippi. He was twenty-two years old, and he was greeted on his first day by a team with twenty-two players and seventeen ragtag uniforms. “We won three games that first year, and I was sure I’d be fired,” Boston said. “I’d played on two championship teams in Laurel, and I was used to winning. But the people in Bassfield were so happy with me winning three games that they wanted to name me mayor.” The following