Copyright 2009- All Rights Reserved
George Henry Lennon, Jr. (March 31, 1907 – May, 1980)
Note on Photos: Daddy pictured alone, 1970. Group photo, circa 1940's. Mama, Daddy on front row with Austin's coaching staff.
He was Daddy to me. We played cowboys together, shooting it out in the living room. We wrestled and he was my opponent though I mostly lost because he got me in a hammer lock every time. He was my fellow conspirator at night in figuring out ways to get Mama to let me stay up way past my bedtime. He introduced me to two things I loved: the movies and Mr. Brown’s barbeque pork ribs. He was many things, but I want to talk about him here as Austin High School’s beloved Coach Lennon.
When I was growing up, I never really understood the depth of my father’s impact on Knoxville’s Black community—specifically, his impact as a high school coach in a segregated school system and what that meant for competitive athletics during Jim Crow’s reign. I didn’t then. But I do now.
From 1934 to 1968, Daddy was head coach at Austin High for football, basketball, and track, Austin’s sole Physical Education teacher, and its Athletic Director from 1958-68. Ironically, integration killed his career. But while he was coach, he was damn good. Excellent, at what he did and got his players to accomplish. I don’t think, though I could be wrong, that any other high school coach of that time and place—the South—came close to beating the record he set for winning. When his record was spoken of or written about, nobody stuck a qualifying adjective in there to “ghetto-ize” his record, to classify it and him according to race. His record was being compared to everybody…White and Black. Those who followed sports, the media, and people in the sports profession called him “The Winningest Coach in East Tennessee.” This is why.
In football, while he was coach, the Panthers (Austin’s nickname & symbol) were National Champs 3 times, Southern champs 5 times, State Champs 6 times. His teams racked up 221 wins, 7 ties, and only 63 losses. In basketball, they were State Champs 4 times and Runner-up for State Championship 11 times.
He told me that every year he set his goal to win championships. He expected and worked for it and let his players know he expected them to set the same goal. In his player-tryouts, he looked for a boy’s willingness to sacrifice time for practice, to train, and to stay in condition. Mostly, he looked for that burning desire to play and win. As a little girl and then a teenager, I remember watching him during game time pacing on the sidelines all through the game. Daddy didn’t allow his boys to mug it up with the crowd. He expected them to pay attention to what they were doing. If they let themselves get distracted and foul up a play, they’d get chewed out in one of his famous locker room sermons. That’s what the boys told me years later. Which was probably pretty funny on one hand because Daddy was a short man and, as a rule, most of his players were giants by comparison. But shortness of stature didn’t stop Daddy one bit. He was a little man with a big mouth, and he breathed fire and brimstone when it came to the game. Like all great coaches, he regarded the game as sacred. Any player who made it through the cuts to get to first squad had to be of the same mind. He always reminded those who made the team that they were Austin Panthers and that the panthers had a winning tradition…just like the New York Yankees or other professional teams.
I can’t help but be somewhat awed by Daddy’s attitude. What he told those Black boys was that they were just as good, better, really, than any White boy playing sports. What he expected of them was to set high goals and work for them. Forget skin color. That didn’t matter. Social class and money didn’t matter. All that claptrap about Black folks being inferior, or less than the next person didn’t matter. When I think about it, that was pretty radical stuff to put in somebody’s head back then. In fact, it’s still pretty radical stuff.
I asked him once what made a great high school basketball or football coach. He said you had to be a stickler for details, and that you had to have great insight and great foresight, but, most of all, you have to be a stickler for the fundamentals. Makes sense to me that whatever you choose to do—football player, coach, actress, musician, painter, writer—to do it well, you have to cover/know the basics. From there, you can play variations, make your own special pallet of colors, so to speak, on the fundamentals you’ve mastered.
I interviewed Daddy for a booklet I did on him (The Thrill of Victory) a couple of years before he died. His ambition, he said, was always to be a high school coach and teacher even though back in the 1930’s very little Physical Education was taught because there weren’t any gyms. Still one of his Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity brothers encouraged Daddy to apply for the P.E. job at Austin and, in 1934, he was hired. He'd gotten his bachelor's in 1931 at Bluefield State College where he'd picked up the nickname “Dusty” probably because he was, as he said, “pretty short for a football player” (Daddy was 5’4”.) People called Daddy either “Dusty” or “Coach” all his life. I never heard anybody except Aunt Helen and Aunt Claire call him by his given name, “George”—not even Mama.
Though I'm sure he could have coached at a college with the winning record he had and with his professional credentials (he not only had a bachelor's but received a master's in 1942 from the University of Wisconsin, no easy feat back then when teachers generally didn't have a master's degree and certainly not one from a White university in the midwest where Jim Crow was alive as well), interestingly enough, he never wanted to go into college level coaching because those careers were insecure then. Daddy said there was no tenure (permanency) and no long term coaching contracts paying substantial sums at Black Colleges (though there were at White colleges and universities).And he said that pension benefits were much better in a school system, even a Jim Crow one, than those at Black colleges. I wonder how much has changed now.
Were there any advantages to teaching and coaching in a racially segregated school system? Yes, he said. For one thing, you could get some extra motivation from them by appealing to race pride, to community pride. And he and the players were like family and because the Black community was segregated, everybody knew one another. The players and their families knew that he was interested in seeing them do the best job they could and that he expected them to do no less than their best. But he said he wished that Austin could have played the best White teams.
Well. For a while, they did play a White school on the Q.T. (Quiet Time) way up in the Smokey Mountains. But those games never got reported to the media because White and Black teams weren’t allowed to play each other. Somehow, the Tennessee Secondary Schools Athletic Association (TSSAA), which excluded Black teams/schools, got wind of the sneak games and they threatened to drop the White school from membership in TSSAA. The jig was up for that. So Austin continued pull together games with the few and scattered member Black schools for the Tennessee Negro High School Athletic Association (TNHSAA). Ultimately, Austin had to go out of the district, region, and out of state (as far as Roosevelt High in Gary, Indiana on some occasions) to make their game schedules.
I asked Daddy to tell me about three high points in his life that gave him great pleasure. One was when he was in college at Bluefield State. He ran a 60 yard touchdown against Virginia State that won the game for Bluefield. As a coach, he remembered when his football team defeated parker High of Birmingham, a school of 5000 students. Austin had only 600 students. The Panthers upset their lead of 13-0 and came from behind to win14-13. The next day, Daddy and the team got off the train to be greeted with a parade that Knoxvillians had put together. They all rode through Gay Street, downtown, in a victory celebration…something you just didn’t see done in “Jim Crow” Knoxville, Tennessee. The third high point was in 1977, after Daddy retired, when Austin-East High School’s stadium was dedicated to and named after Daddy.
Ultimately Austin High became Austin-East High School because Austin High was phased out in 1968, thanks to integration. Most of the students and teachers were sent to East High which had been all White. Daddy says before the phase-out, he could see the writing on the wall.
Here’s the skinny. Like other Black schools being integrated, Austin was scouted, Daddy said, to take their best players. In this case, East high got them. Plus, to make matters worse, Austin’s junior high feeder schools (Beardsley and Vine Junior) were scouted and their best players bribed and given favors to attend White schools. That left Daddy with very little material, so it was a struggle just to put a team together for those last few years.
Finally, the axe fell in 1968. Daddy wasn’t assigned to a school until a week before school opened that fall. Why? Whatat was going on? No school wanted Daddy, a Black coach on his staff who, for years, had the best coaching record in the city, Black or White. East High was out because the head coach there already had a White coaching staff; plus, they thought that there’d be trouble if they hired Daddy as Assistant Coach with his former players on East’s team now. (He had been Athletic Director and Head Coach for decades, mind you!) At the last minute, Daddy was assigned as Assistant Coach at Fulton High. His duties, I remember, consisted of being in charge of study hall every day. In effect, his coaching career was phased out with Austin High. Not only did they take his positions, they took the money, too. That first year at Fulton, his salary remained the same as before at Austin. But not after the first year. From then on, the pay level for being Head Coach and Athletic Director was revoked and he was paid as a regular teacher until he retired in 1974.
Integration as an idea of leveling the playing field, giving everybody an equally fair chance was thought to be a good idea. In theory. Because White folks were never going to give up the advantages that Jim Crow segregation afforded them, in practical application, integration turned out to be a bad idea, I think. Only because you never force your opponent to come to the bargaining table still able to summon and use all his power. Why wouldn’t he, then, turn the situation to his advantage?
What do I remember about Daddy as a coach? I spent many evenings watching Daddy nervously pick at his dinner before a football or a basketball game and I rejoiced when we won and despaired when we lost. After school, if I didn’t want to walk directly home from Vine Jr. High, I’d sometimes hang around Austin’s practice field or gym watching him relentlessly drive his players at practice. Daddy was a disciplinarian as a coach. If a player was caught drinking or smoking, he was off the team. If Daddy caught a player out late at night during the season, the next day, Daddy would run him around the track until he was ready to drop in exhaustion. I remember the endless traveling that Austin’s teams had to do to compete with other Black teams and fill out the schedule for the season. I remember that there was never any public housing for the teams when they went somewhere overnight. No motels or hotels. There were no places to eat unless somebody’s wife invited them for a meal. There was no money for uniforms either. The school system wasn’t about to provide anything in the city school budget for us Colored folks. Even though we paid taxes just like White folks did. And I remember that players who’d graduated would always come back, come by our house to see Daddy because they respected and admired him. I think he was a man to be respected and admired. It couldn’t have been easy to accomplish what he did in the Jim Crow South. But he did. I know there are those that thank him for it.
