A Step Too Slow (Unabridged‪)‬

It was 1971, and a new high school had just been regally constructed to provide education and refuge to the children of a small southern town’s rich and powerful people. But Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement had put a serious dent in those plans. Integration was now the law of the land, along with "forced busing".

Few if any could be called happy campers on the first day of school. Black teachers and students had been uprooted from their community and made to travel into unfamiliar and hostile territory, while white teachers and students simply felt invaded. Even the most optimistic among them had serious concerns about how the coming events would unfold. But never in a million years would anyone have dreamed that the first week of school would become a “week of hell!” But the actions of a third-string football player do more than all of the politicians and educators put together to ease the pain of coming together.