They were the 1974 Lake High Hornets football team, 29 players strong. But in Scott County, right there just off Highway 80, they are forever known, for good reason, as The Un-Team.

That's “un” as in: undefeated, untied, un-scored upon, and virtually un-challenged. The Hornets, coached by Granville Freeman, a maniacally demanding 26-year-old in only his second year as a head coach, out-scored opponents 312 to zero over 10 games. No opponent came within three touchdowns of Lake. This was before Mississippi had statewide high school football playoffs, but Lake was the undisputed champion of the old Cherokee Conference. The Hornets won the south division and were supposed to play French Camp for the league championship. Apparently, French Camp decided that discretion really is the better part of valor and declined to play.

Fifty years later, looking at the scores, it is difficult to blame them.

Said Freeman Horton, the team's best player, who later was a four-year starter at Southern Miss, a longtime coach, and now lives in Horn Lake, “We achieved something back then that can never be surpassed. Some other team, somewhere, might tie our record, but I doubt it. One thing's for sure, they can't beat it. There's no way.”

Coach Granville Freeman was an old school coach in some ways but decades ahead of most high school coaches in so many others, as we shall see. “When I went to Lake in 1973, I told them we would have a team that when opponents got ready to play us, they would be shaking in their shoes,” Freeman said. “I'd say we accomplished that in 1974.”

Old school? Lake ran out of a straight T-formation, nothing fancy. The Hornets played a standard four-man front defensively. Freeman demanded all-out effort, all the time. He drove the team bus to practice 5.3 miles away from the school. After what was usually a long, tortuous practice if he wasn't satisfied with the effort or performance, he followed in the bus, lights on, while the players ran all the way back to the high school. If they were going too slow, he'd rev the engine. If that didn't work, he might even bump a straggler's rear end. 

“You couldn't do that these days, could you?” Freeman said, chuckling. “I'd need a really good lawyer.”

He would also have needed a jury made up of avid Lake football fans who knew there was method to his madness.

Said Vance of his coach, “He coached 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And he was crazy smart.”

Horton, who starred as an outside linebacker on defense and left tackle on offense, was widely recruited. Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Southern Miss all offered scholarships. So did Bear Bryant at Alabama, and this will tell you much about Granville Freeman's crazy intellect. Bryant and Ken Donahue, his top recruiter, visited Lake to recruit Horton. Freeman was discussing Horton with Bryant and Donahue after practice when Donahue asked, “Coach, I don't understand why you don't you play your best athlete at middle linebacker? At Alabama, Horton would be playing in the middle.”

Responded Freeman, “Well, Coach, I'll tell you why. If I line up Horton in the middle, I don't have any idea which way the other team is gonna run. But if I line him up one side, I know for damn sure which way they ain't about to run. This way, we only have to defend half the field.”

Freeman says he looked over at Bryant. The legendary, old coach was chuckling, as he told Donahue: “Well, now you know, Coach, makes a whole lot of sense to me.”

Many in Lake thought Freeman really had lost his mind during the spring of 1974. That's when he called his players together and told them summer workouts would be different that year. Twice a week, a ballet teacher was going to come from Jackson and work them out in the gymnasium. Yes, they were going to take ballet lessons, and they would each pay for the lessons. “We thought Coach Freeman was nuts when he told us about it,” said Dewey Holmes, the team's star running back who rushed for more than 1,200 yards. “But we all did it.” These weren't rich kids, mind you. Many of the Lake players picked up aluminum cans on roadsides to earn the money to take ballet.

It made all kinds of good sense to Freeman. “Ballet is all about balance, about footwork, about flexibility and core strength,” Freeman said. “I thought it was perfect training for a football player. We called ourselves the twinkletoes Hornets.”

A lot of folks laughed when they heard about it. They weren't laughing a few months later, not after 312-0.

And nobody was laughing in the locker room at halftime of a game at Hickory. Lake led only 7-0 and Freeman was furious. So, he yanked the helmet off one player and threw it through a window. “I surprised myself with that,” Freeman said. “I thought, ‘Now, I've done it.'”

So he did it some more. He grabbed more helmets, threw them through more windows. Final score: Lake 42, Hickory 0. Of course, Hickory wanted those windows fixed and when the bill arrived, Lake Hornets fans raised the money to pay.

Another time, after a scoreless first half with Stringer, Lake players feared what would happen in the locker room. They expected another tirade. Instead, Freeman walked in and told them he was so disgusted he was quitting on the spot. So, he walked out of the locker room and took a seat in the stands. And that's where he was when the Hornets returned to the field and proceeded to score 40 straight points.

Why? Burnout was surely one reason, and there were at least 485 more. His last monthly paycheck at Lake was for $485. Said Freeman, I did the math and figured out what I was making per hour. I was coaching the junior high and high school teams, mowing and lining the fields, watching film, carrying it to Jackson to be developed, doing scouting reports, washing uniforms, running the summer program, teaching, driving the bus. It came out to 17 cents an hour. I wasn't sleeping much.”

As many coaches in Mississippi have, Freeman stopped coaching and started selling insurance. Fourteen years ago, when he explained the reasons for his his early retirement from coaching, the interview was interrupted when someone knocked and slipped a payment under the door of his State Farm office. Freeman never missed a beat, laughing and telling this writer, “You know, that right there never happened back when I was coaching.”

Now 77, he has retired also from State Farm. The insurance money was far better in those later years but nothing ever happened to come close to the satisfaction of that unparalleled autumn half a century ago.

Undefeated. Un-tied. Un-scored upon. Perfect. That's why all 26 living players are coming back. That's why end Dexter Brown is traveling from Frankfurt, Germany, to take part. That's why Holmes, the star running back who later rose to the rank of full-bird colonel and traveled the world in the U.S. Air Force, is coming from his home in Tucson, Ariz.

“We grew up together, we achieved together,” Holmes said. “I wouldn't miss this.”

So many stories will be told, none more than what follows.

Nobody had come really close to scoring on the Lake Hornets until the final game, when a fourth quarter fumbled punt gave Edinburg the ball at the Lake 8-yard line. Three plays later, the ball was still on the 8, and Edinburg, trailing 38-0, lined up for a field goal. Moochie Weidman, the Hornets' nose guard who might have weighed 140 pounds, broke through the center of the line so quickly he blocked the kick with his chest.

How did it feel, someone asked Moochie, after he regained his breath. He answered with a grin. “It hurt so good,” he said.

Freeman Horton says it remains probably his favorite memory of that un-season. “Moochie was our smallest guy, the one you'd least expect, and he was the hero,” Horton said.

Sadly, Moochie Weidman is one of the three deceased 1974 Lake Hornets, but he will be remembered, ever so fondly, Saturday night.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

April 25, 1959

Days before his scheduled trial, Mack Charles Parker, a 23-year-old Black truck driver, was lynched after midnight by a hooded mob of white men in Poplarville, Mississippi. 

Parker had been accused of raping a pregnant white woman and was being held in a local jail. A deputy reportedly unlocked the jail, enabling a white mob to enter Parker's cell. The mob dragged Parker head first down the stairs, leaving a bloody trail. The mob then beat him, took him to a bridge, shot and killed him, then weighed his body down with chains and dumped him in the river. 

FBI agents identified the jailer, Jewel Alford, as giving the mob the keys. Another alleged participant was J.P. Walker, elected sheriff of Pearl River County four years later. Other suspects included “Crip” Reyer, L. C. Davis, “Preacher” James Floren Lee, his son James Floren “Jeff” Lee, Herman Schultz and Arthur Smith who supplied the names of Walker, Preacher Lee, L.C. Davis and the names of others who were in the two cars. Smith told agents that Lee, Reyer, Davis and Walker were in the lead car that carried Parker from the jail. 

Howard Smead's book, “Blood Justice,” tells the story. Parker is among 40 martyrs listed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, and is also listed at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

The state Senate on Wednesday agreed to restore voting rights to four people who have completed their prison sentences and paid restitution for disenfranchising felony convictions. 

“I think we all have failed at some point in our lives,”  Democratic Sen. Juan Barnett of Heidelberg said on the Senate floor. “I think we all have asked for forgiveness. And these individuals now who are before us on these suffrage bills are asking us to forgive them of those things.”

The GOP-majority chamber overwhelmingly approved the bills, and they now head to the House for consideration. 

Sen. Mike Seymour, a Republican from Vancleave, was the only person in the 52-member Senate who voted against all of the suffrage restoration bills. Reporters attempted to ask Seymour why he opposed all of the suffrage measures, but he churlishly walked down three flights of stairs without substantively answering the questions. 

The only thing he said in response to the media's inquiries was a cryptic and confusing remark that he believes “everybody should have the same right to suffrage.” He declined to elaborate what that meant and darted into an office. 

The four people the Senate restored voting rights to were:

• A Newton County man who was released from prison in 1989 for escape, burglary and larceny convictions  
• An Oktibbeha County man who was released from prison in 1997 on an embezzlement conviction 
• An Oktibbeha County man who was released from prison in 1994 on a false pretenses-communications conviction 
• A Walthall County man who was convicted of grand larceny in 1977; Lawmakers said the conviction occurred so long ago that the Mississippi Department of Corrections did not even have all of the documentation in its possession to show how many years he served and when he was released from custody. 

Senators voted down a bill to restore voting rights to a Yazoo County man who was convicted of possessing stolen goods and attempted armed robbery in 1995. He was released to parole on September 16, 1997, and discharged on February 13, 2000. 

Sen. Walter Michel, a Republican from Ridgeland, and Sen. Chad McMahan, a Republican from Guntown, told reporters they voted against restoring suffrage to the Yazoo County man  because they believe attempted armed robbery is a violent crime, and they oppose restoring voting rights to people convicted of violent crimes. 

“If you put a gun to somebody's head or somebody murders somebody, then I'm going to vote against restoring suffrage,” Michel said. “But if they stole some money, and it was 35 or 40 years ago, I'm fine with that.”  

A senator held the defeated measure on a procedural measure, so the chamber could reconsider the issue at a later date. 

The Senate's decision to reject an effort to restore suffrage to the Yazoo County man comes a week after Kenneth Almons, a Jackson resident who was convicted of armed robbery and aggravated assault at 17 years old, testified before a legislative committee.  

At 51, Almons has run his own business, currently works for the city of Jackson, has raised three children and has not been convicted of any other crime for nearly three decades. 

Lawmakers who attended the hearing asked Almons, who served five years in state prison, what it would mean if the state restored his voting rights.  

“It would mean I'm no longer a nobody,” Almons responded. “And if you can't vote, you're nobody. And in the public's eye, I'm a nobody.” 

Michel said he would advise Almons that he can attempt to persuade a lawmaker to introduce a suffrage restoration bill on his behalf and let the bill work its way through the state's lawmaking process. 

Michel, who represents a part of Hinds County, said he would not be willing to introduce such a measure for Almons. 

Senators authored around nine suffrage restoration bills, and Senate Judiciary B Chairman Joey Fillingane, a Republican from Sumrall, decided to bring five of those bills up for debate. Members of the committee voted to advance all five suffrage bills with no opposition. 

The Senate bills will now head to the House for consideration where House Speaker Jason White will likely refer the measures to the House Judiciary B Committee for consideration, which is led by Rep. Kevin Horan, a Republican from Grenada. 

Horan previously told Mississippi Today that he will not restore suffrage to people convicted of violent offenses or those previously convicted of embezzling public money. Additionally, Horan said people must have completed the terms of their sentence and not have been convicted of another felony offense for at least five years to be considered. 

The committee Horan leads advanced 27 House suffrage bills out of the committee, but he has not presented them for consideration in the full House chamber. Lawmakers can debate suffrage bills until the final days of the 2024 session. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.