In a way, Leroy has always been a mystery to the people who know him. Old friends find pulling information from him to be tedious. He is a warm man with a shy laugh who still plays regular matches of tennis at 73. He likes to tell stories from the past, but those stories come with a hint of distance. Attempts to get too deep are always rebuffed.
Questions about his life are met with a hasty “fine” and a change of the subject. He rarely entertains people at his own home in Southeast D.C., where he can look out the window and see the stadium where he once played. He says he has nothing left from his career, not a helmet or jersey or game program. He says everything was stolen or lost in moves.
His good friend Booker Edgerson, a teammate at Western Illinois who went on to a long career as a cornerback for the Buffalo Bills, still speaks to Leroy regularly. They meet once a year for a reunion for their college team. But even then there are topics that Leroy does not seem to want to address, among them his release from the Redskins and his wife, Dorothy, who died suddenly in 2009.
“The unspoken rule is that we don’t talk about it,” Edgerson says.
For years Mitchell has wondered about Jackson and Nisby’s experience in those days. What was it like for them? Whenever he asked Jackson about 1962, he was met with the same shrug and evasive non-answer Jackson gave everyone. Everything had been fine, Leroy told him, no real problems, which never made much sense.
“I know what I went through and it was hell,” Mitchell says. “Folks kicked my butt because they didn’t want a black star.”
Racism was everywhere for Mitchell. He was denied tables at restaurants. An ice cream man refused to sell his young son an ice cream cone. A man once approached him on the street to say: “I don’t like you being so high and mighty.”
“I was getting it 100 percent, they [Jackson and Nisby] should get something,” Mitchell says. “How many times did Leroy Jackson get refused a table in this town?
But they were living different lives. Leroy was single. Mitchell was married with children. At night he went home to a house, a wife and kids. When the Mitchells went out, they tried to go to nice restaurants where the staff didn’t always appreciate African-American football stars. Jackson went to black nightclubs in black neighborhoods. He wasn’t as famous as Mitchell. Nobody knew who he was.