Manning: A Father, His Sons, And A Football Legacy.

• Author: HUDSON, MICHAEL
• Position: Review

How Americans developed separate and unequal memories of race

MANNING: A Father, his Sons, And a Football Legacy By Archie Manning, Peyton Manning, and John Underwood HarperCollins, $24.00

THEY GREW UP AROUND DREW, Mississippi, a little "walk-everywhere kind of town" of perhaps 2,000 people surrounded by fields of cotton and soybeans. They came of age in the 1960s, chopped cotton under the same Delta sun, went to the same pep rallies, sat next to each other in class.

But in many ways Archie Manning and Ruth Carter Whittle grew up worlds apart--and to this day they're separated by race-shadowed, irreconcilable memories. He remembers Drew as a great place to grow up, a place where people didn't lock their doors and the police force consisted of a "day man" and a "night man," a department "more `Andy of Mayberry' than `NYPD Blue.'" The future pro football star knew "separate but equal" wasn't equal, but he never detected much animosity between the races.

She remembers a different Drew.

From the vantage of her family's sharecropper cabin outside town, Drew seemed frightening. She was afraid to be on the same sidewalk with those town cops. After she and her siblings broke the color line at Drew High School, classmates called them "niggers," smacked them in the head with spitballs and chalk, or treated them with silent disdain.

Memory is an imperfect thing, especially when it comes to race relations. Many blacks and whites find themselves at odds when they try to make sense of their shared histories. Denial, myth-making, and divergent experiences help keep blacks and whites stuck in discordant, misremembered pasts.

Manning: at Father, His Sons, And al Football Legacy, is not a book about race. It's an often-inspiring memoir of a half-century of family and football--the story of quarterback legend Archie Manning and his football playing sons, including Indianapolis Colts phenom Peyton, one of the National Football League's best young quarterbacks.

Archie Manning grew up in Mississippi, however, and race relations were a big enough issue in his mind that he devotes a good part of a chapter to the subject. The book, co-authored by Archie, Peyton, and journalist John Underwood, provides a glimpse at how one Southerner has grappled with the issue of race in a changing world.

Archie Manning starts by saying he's "Old South" and proud of it, but he's no bigot. He recalls black friends he made over the years. He says blacks "were the ones hurt the most by segregation" and integration was "right and inevitable."

But his memory seems dimmer when it comes to how hard blacks had to fight to end Jim Crow and how much they suffered for their efforts. When he looks back in anger, it's not at the hurts inflicted upon blacks, but at the wrongs inflicted upon him as a white Southerner.

In one passage, he recalls an NFL teammate who complained Manning was playing favorites, throwing more passes to whites than blacks. Manning blew up at the guy: "I was so mad because I was so right and felt so wronged."

Manning also writes about the Carter family. It was in 1965 that seven Carter children--from first grade through 11th--broke the color line at Drew's public schools. Manning says he had...