Watch: 'Little Rock Nine' member has a message for Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones
After The Washington Post uncovered a photo of Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones during desegregation history, CNN interviewed one of the Black people seeking to attend a nearby high school.
"On the first day of classes at North Little Rock High, a crew-cut sophomore named Jerral Wayne Jones found his spot among a phalanx of White boys who stood at the front entrance and blocked the path of six Black students attempting to desegregate the school," The Postreported. "The confrontation occurred 65 years ago, on Sept. 9, 1957, during the same month that a higher-profile integration effort was taking place at Little Rock Central High in the capital city a few miles away. The story of the Little Rock Nine, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower dispatched federal troops to escort the trailblazing Black students past the spitting hordes, is regarded as a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. It overshadowed the ugly events unfolding contemporaneously at Jones’s high school on the other side of the Arkansas River — an episode mostly lost to history, though not entirely."
Little Rock Nine member Ernest Green was interviewed by CNN's Don Lemon and Kaitlan Collins on Black Friday.
"My view is that Jerry Jones has an opportunity to make that picture have a different ending by pursuing diversity and inclusion and involvement of the African-American community, people of color all throughout this country," Green said.
The story in The Post noted Jones has never hired a Black head coach.
"And I think that rather than talk to Jerry about what happened in 1957, let's go forward and see what we can do this year," Green said.
He added, "I think today, as head of the Dallas cowboys, he has an opportunity to have a tremendous impact on expanding opportunities in this country."
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