How a Football Game Became a Racial Scrimmage

[MountainLaurel]

In the third quarter of a game against Fort Hill High School, a tearful defensive end from Dunbar High threw his helmet to the ground and kicked it. Suddenly, a Friday night encounter that had been all about football was all about race.

Arranged as a long-distance matchup of two football powers, the Sept. 19 game pitted a black team from the Shaw neighborhood of Northwest Washington against a mostly white team from rural western Maryland.

Leading the Sentinels 14-8, the visiting Crimson Tide walked out of Greenway Avenue Stadium as the coach contended that his players had been targets of racial taunts. The home team, which could end up winning by forfeit, denied the accusations.

In subsequent interviews, four Dunbar players and the father of a fifth have said that the team was subjected to a barrage of racial epithets that night -- principally the N-word -- uttered by Fort Hill players as they brushed past on the field, faced off at the line of scrimmage or picked themselves up from a pileup. Some of the players and their families said it was the first time they had heard the word uttered in hate.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092603387.html

Knowing what I do of that region (my mother's family is from WV a few miles away), I can't say this surprises me in the least. This is also where Lynndie England and the unit involved in Abu Ghraib is from. It's still sad though and shows what we're up against.