A Return Engagement for Compton Players of ’55 : Race relations: Former junior college football champions are invited for a reunion with the team they defeated. The school was the first in Mississippi to play an integrated opponent.

One is a loan consultant. Another was a former all-pro safety with the SanDiego Chargers who committed suicide in January. His twin brother will retire later this year after a long career with the Northrop Corp.

No one seems to know for certain what happened to a couple of them. One was listed as Nat Washington in the yearbook, though some seem to think his first name might actually be Nate.

There were eight in all, the black players on the 1955 Compton team that won the junior college national championship: Billy Brown and Joe Lewis; Charles McNeil and his brother, Edis; Lee Sampson and Lee Mack; Jim Waddell and Washington, Nat or Nate. And now, after all those years and careers and children, those who are still alive are being drawn back together.

The magnet is an unlikely one--a little junior college in Mississippi that Compton defeated for the national title, in a game played at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena. Jones Junior College of Ellisville, Miss., wants to bring the black Compton players south next year, let them ride in a homecoming parade, honor them at a lunch and take them to a football game.

It is a gesture to show how the bad times of segregation have turned for the better. For Jones Junior College was the first school in Mississippi to play an integrated opponent, and not without an ugly fuss. That opponent was Compton.

There was no organized effort to bring the Compton players to Mississippi, no great pronouncements of how such a move would enhance the school’s reputation. Rather, it was the idea of a retired country newspaper editor who wrote a book titled “Mississippi’s Defiant Years” about the segregationist days of the state.

The players, those who have been found, have been both stunned by the offer and pleased that it has actually happened. They are in their late 50s and early 60s, at the closing years of their careers. The sudden notoriety has caught them off guard.

“It’s funny how times change,” said Edis McNeil, who has spent 22 years as a painter for Northrop. “I think it’s beautiful.”

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The same is true for Mack, a Compton star who broke his hip in the last game of the regular season and sat on the sidelines in a wheelchair during the fight for the national championship with the Jones Bobcats.

“For them to recognize that time after 40 years, it’s an honor,” he said.

Sampson, the loan consultant who has been the driving force in finding most of the players, agrees. “We need to put the past behind us and make it a better place for our next generation,” he said.

This is, to be sure, a little-known historical footnote. There may have been a major fuss in Mississippi, but little of the rancor found its way outside the state.

“Well, to be honest, those kids were real nice. It was the older people who caused the trouble,” Mack said.

In 1955, almost seven years before James Meredith became the first black student at the University of Mississippi, Jones Junior College was riding high. Its football team was ranked second nationally among junior colleges and was invited to play in the Junior Rose Bowl. The team ranked first in the nation that year was the undefeated, untied Compton Junior College.

Then word began to spread in Mississippi that there was a problem. The local press began to publish reports that Compton had black players on the squad.

“Then everything went backward,” said Erle Johnston. “The lieutenant governor who made such a big speech about how he was going to be such a big booster decided not to even go.”

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The board of supervisors from the neighboring county announced that it was withdrawing support for the college band, which was trying to raise money to make the trip. The editor of the state’s largest daily newspaper wrote that there “is no middle ground on the subject of segregation, nor should any exceptions be made.”

The Jones team voted to play anyway and, for its trouble, lost the game 22-13. McNeil, who would later go on to play for the Chargers, was named the game’s most valuable player. Waddell, the Compton player targeted by the Bobcats as the running back to key on, was injured in the first quarter and was out of the game.

At the end of the contest, the players from Compton and Jones went on their separate paths until Johnston’s idea spawned the search for the black players of the Compton Tartars.

“A great gesture toward race relations” was how he saw it. And so he began lining up sponsorships for air fares and lodging even before he knew whether any of the Compton players could be found. “It’s all full speed ahead,” he said.

But Compton’s alumni association was only this year being revitalized after decades of dormancy. There was no record at the school about where any of the graduates could be found. The only clue was the file that showed where their transcripts had been sent after graduation.

And in Mississippi, it was not an open and shut case of welcoming the Compton players to the 40th reunion.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense to bring in a bunch of guys who kicked your butt,” said Paul Barrett, editor of the nearby Laurel Leader-Call.

Tracy Stites, the director of alumni affairs at Jones, said she wondered if it might change the tenor of next year’s reunion and said Johnston’s idea was greeted at first with mixed feelings. “They (the team members) don’t feel like they were responsible for any history being made,” she said.

But Terrell Tisdale, the current president of Jones, liked the idea, and so did Ken Schultze, who was the team captain in 1955. Tisdale was a tuba player in the band that went to Pasadena for the game. “If any of them want to come, they would be very welcome,” he said.

Schultze is amused by the irony of how things were then and how they are now. “If you look at Ole’ Miss and Mississippi State, their teams are almost all black now.”

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Finding the players has been an ongoing struggle at Compton Community College. Those in the public spotlight, the ones who went on to play pro ball, were easiest to track down. And sometimes, it is their children who have kept them more visible long after their own glory has faded. McNeil’s daughter is tennis star Lori McNeil.

Mack’s son, Shane, plays for the Minnesota Twins. Another of his four boys, Quinn, is a promising player in the Seattle Mariners’ farm system. Mack lives in Inglewood and works as a baggage handler for American Airlines.

Others have been harder to find. Billy Brown is a question mark, though there is a story that he worked in a copper smelter for many years. Washington has been difficult to track down, though Mack said he heard he had died.

Lewis played for the Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Colts, but neither team has a record of what happened to him later.

Sampson has been working to find the players who are left. Compton, spurred on by the Mississippi reunion, is trying to find all the players--black and white--from the 1955 team. The plan is for a reunion here next year.

Waddell said he is even looking forward to finding the Jones player who kicked him in the eye in the first quarter of the game. He wants to buy him lunch.

As the cobwebs have receded for Waddell about those days, it occurred to him that it was the Jones Bobcats who deserved the praise, even though they lost the game.

In a sense, a visit by the Compton players is a testimony to that time when the Jones Bobcats took a vote and decided that they would rather play football and risk the consequences of blatant racism.

“They are the ones who had to show a lot of courage,” he said. “All the rhetoric before the game was pressure put on them from their own state and town.”