By Gary Smith

	Little Rock Central Tigers, 2006 Courtesy of Little Rock Central HS

This is the photograph of today's team. This is the picture that everyone coming to the 50th anniversary wants to see. Forty-four of the 67 players are black. One's a Turk. One's the son of an Iranian. One's parents are from Nigeria. One's a white country boy who hunts ducks at dawn on school days. Another's father is Korean, his stepdad black, his mother white. All playing for a school that owns the second-most state football championships -- 32 -- of any school in the U.S.

These kids know the story of the Little Rock 9 by heart. They've seen the plaques honoring them in their school's entry, the benches dedicated to them out front, the statues of them on the state capitol lawn. They've seen films, read books and written reports about what the nine endured so that Central High's team picture could look the way it does today.

But those white boys in that vanished photo, their Tigers predecessors ... who are they? What happened to them that fateful year and the even more wrenching one that followed? Today's team hasn't a clue.

What if Little Rock Central added a wrinkle to its 50th? Imagine if everyone in those two team pictures sat elbow to elbow at dinner in the school cafeteria and tried to understand what happened from both sides, what might be learned.

No, not Hollywood's or history's version. Not what happened to the heroes or the hatemongers, not the black-and-white version. The story of the gray, the people in between, the majority that ends up drifting toward one side or the other and determining history, often without even knowing why. The ones we need to understand most, because they're us -- the kids we likely would've been had we grown up white in the '50s in the South -- and because we, too, might drift when our moment comes. Just teenagers, so absorbed in their search for love and identity that they hadn't even begun to take stock of the injustices swirling around them, to understand the forces about to sweep them off their feet. Teenagers just hungry to feel part of a group, the one that gave their town its greatest pride: its mighty football team.

Sure, it would be awkward for everyone at first. It's a subject the old-timers barely talked about for years, and then only among themselves. Some haven't set foot on school grounds since everything splintered. But if they pulled up in front of Central High, they'd shake their heads and feel like 17-year-olds again ... because that grand old fortress looks just the way it did back then, when it was on postcards instead of the front page of The New York Times. Two long city blocks of edifice, seven stories of yellow brick and stone, 370 tons of steel, a 1927 castle gussied up in Art Deco and Collegiate Gothic: America's Most Beautiful High School. That's what the American Institute of Architects crowned her.