DALLAS — The 65-year-old photograph of Jerry Jones standing on the wrong side of history doesn’t make him a racist now any more than it did then, though it begs the question. He tells us he was simply curious. And that’s supposed to explain why he bounded up the steps and around the Black students trying to enter North Little Rock High before they were denied by a blockade of white male students. The photo ran on the cover of The New York Times in the fall of ‘57. Only days before he turned 15, Jerry had already made the big time.
His excuse for showing up in the wrong place at the wrong time is that he simply wanted a better view. Even if he wasn’t down front leering over the shoulder of the guy with a cigarette in the corner of his smirk, Jerry didn’t try to help, either. He was only a teenager, you say. So was most of the crowd. His peers. Hard to imagine any time in his 80 eventful years when Jerry didn’t wield considerable influence among his own, good or bad.
If he was guilty of anything then, it’s the same as his culpability now:
