Jerry Jones is in a picture of a demonstration at North Little Rock High School, where several white boys have blocked six black students from desegregating the school, has been circulated. Famed Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones can be spotted in the crowd of this infamous event that occurred in the 9th of September in 1957, the same month as the Little Rock Crisis, where the Little Rock Nine were prevented from entering segregated Little Rock Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Jerry Jones himself did not deny that he was the one spotted in the photograph, although he stopped short of making an apology. His father, John Watson “Pat” Jones, ran a supermarket in North Little Rock; he believed in racial integration of grocery stores, but not of schools. Jerry’s grandfather, Joe Israel Jones, was a part of the Capital Citizens’ Council, a Little Rock offshoot of the Arkansas branch of the White Citizens’ Council. The Capital Citizens’ Council notably protested against desegregation of schools; the Council’s leader, Amis Guthridge, described racial integration as a communist plot “founded in Moscow … to mongrelize the White race in America.”
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the White moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”