Delaware State athletes of the past disappointed that little seems to have changed in the South
The bus carrying a Delaware State University athletic team was traveling north, heading home on a southern highway after a game.
Those aboard saw the flashing lights and heard the sirens of police cars straddling the bus, and the driver knew to pull onto the shoulder of the road.
Next thing coaches and athletes on board knew, their belongings were being searched by law enforcement personnel.
This was not April 20, 2022, when a bus carrying the Delaware State women’s lacrosse team home from a season-ending game in Florida was stopped on Interstate 95 in Liberty County, Georgia, for an alleged traffic violation.
Sheriff’s office deputies, brandishing a narcotics-sniffing dog, then determined the bus should be searched for drugs, with several bags opened and players quizzed by an officer on board the vehicle before they were permitted to continue their trip north after nothing illegal was found and no citation was given.
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When Joe Purzycki heard about that incident, it stirred unpleasant memories from a similar stop in South Carolina and other racially motivated injustices from his stint as the Delaware State football coach from 1981-84.
He and fellow coaches and players from those years empathize with the DSU lacrosse team members, understand the terror they felt and firmly believe it was an example of racial injustice very similar to what they experienced.
"That’s a traumatic event for these girls," said Purzycki, who made national headlines in January of 1981 when he became the first white man hired as head football coach at one of the nation’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities. "It is intimidating and frightening."
As Purzycki recalled, the Hornets were returning from a game at Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference rival South Carolina State.
After they were pulled over, police informed Purzycki and other coaches that those who ran the hotel where the Hornets stayed called to report the team had stolen "a whole list of things," he said. All but a handful of players and coaches on the bus were Black.
"It's more like the fear of the unknown," Purzycki said. "Our guys are like, ‘What in the hell is going on?’ ... Here’s what they found. They found two towels."
Purzycki was an assistant coach for three years at the University of Delaware before he went to Delaware State and then head coach at James Madison for five years after he left. Never, he said, was a bus pulled over "and I’m sure some kids kept a towel."
It wasn’t unusual for the Hornets to have such experiences, said Frank Burton Jr., who remembers that bus stop and how "you would have thought that we were terrorists," he said.
As both a baseball and football player at Delaware State from 1981-85, Burton traveled south as much as anyone. What’s so disappointing to him is that this still happens.
"You would think that it would be different now," Burton said. "That is what really kind of blew me away about this DSU bus thing. You would think that by now we would have gotten beyond that, but it looks like we haven’t really."
Burton went on to become an FBI agent in its civil rights division, where he frequently dealt with similar situations. The Delaware Attorney General's Office and DSU have filed civil rights complaints with the U.S. Department of Justice.
They have a good case, Burton said, adding the Department of Justice is likely to cite its "color of law" Section 242 of Title 18 that "makes it a crime" for law-enforcement officials "to willfully deprive a person of a right or privilege protected by the Constitution or laws of the United States."
That includes, Burton said, "unreasonable searches and seizures," which is what he feels the DSU lacrosse team endured.
Burton said that language and actions of deputies on and outside the bus, captured in video taken by a DSU player and a deputy’s body camera video, clearly demonstrate "microaggression" by the officers that indicate "implicit bias."
It was particularly evident, he said, when deputies removed a wrapped package from a gift bag from one player’s baggage and brought it onto the bus. They summoned the player, senior Aniya Aiken, to the front and asked what was inside. When she said she didn’t know and offered to open it, the astonished deputy said, "You don’t know what it is?," then later added, "You see? That kinda seems like ‘What’s going on?’ . . . This is the type of stuff we look for."
The deputy then walked outside and to the back of the bus, where the package was unwrapped to reveal a box with the words "Book Safe." He pulled out what appeared to be a plastic case with "The New English Dictionary" on the front.
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"It is the verbal behavior or environmental slights, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate derogatory, hostile or negative attitudes toward a culturally marginalized group," Burton said. "And so when he starts asking about that box, and he said, ‘You don't know what your aunt put in that box, so you see why this is suspicious?’ C’mon man. No, she doesn’t see why this is suspicious because maybe her aunt gave her that."
That exchange and other comments by deputies reminded Burton of his Delaware State trips south, in particular to football and baseball games at North Carolina A&T in Greensboro.
That city had been the scene of a deadly incident on Nov. 3, 1979, when five people – three who were white, one Black and one Hispanic – were shot and killed and five others wounded during a "Death to the Klan" march.
It became known as "the Greensboro Massacre" and members of the Klu Klux Klan and American Nazi Party were later arrested and charged with various offenses. But the state acquitted five on murder charges in 1980, and a federal civil rights trial in 1984 also led to acquittals.
"We understood and our coaches understood," Burton said. "When we go to North Carolina A&T, we did not leave the campus."
Burton remembered a football team trip in the south during which the bus pulled into the parking lot, which was packed with cars, of a large restaurant along a highway. As players started exiting the bus, a "closed" sign suddenly appeared on the entrance. As the bus pulled away, it was removed.
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"For me, that was par for the course," Burton said, mentioning a time when he was Brandywine High quarterback and he and several friends were walking to a Salesianum football game at Baynard Stadium in Wilmington. A vice squad with a dozen patrol cars descended on the group and detained them, with guns drawn, mistaking Burton for someone who’d committed a robbery nearby, they said.
Bill Collick, who served on Purzycki’s staff and then succeeded him as the Hornets’ head football coach, said it’s important to take notice of the lacrosse bus incident as a reminder that racial equity remains an elusive goal.
"We live in the greatest country in the world but for 400 years we’ve been kicking this can, we really have," Collick said. "The thing for me is the constant systematic devaluing of people, that we have no history and we’ve done nothing significant in this country. It’s certainly the opposite and that’s what I’m so dismayed about. I just don’t think we’re far enough along."
After Collick became football coach, Delaware State began flying to more southern destinations, which lessened travel concerns and made for quicker trips, he said. What happened to the DSU women’s lacrosse team made Collick think of his three granddaughters, including a third-grader whom, he noted, every morning at school recites her Pledge of Allegiance with the words "and liberty and justice for all."
Matthew Horace, who played on the offensive line for Purzycki’s football teams, later spent 28 years in law enforcement in Arlington County, Virginia, with the Justice Department and as a senior executive at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. He is co-author of "The Black and the Blue," which delves into racial injustice and law enforcement.
Horace, who frequently discusses such issues on CNN, had spoken with women from the lacrosse team and other DSU sports about social justice and how to handle interactions with police two years ago after George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police officers.
He was so stunned to see the lacrosse players actually have such an encounter, and what it entailed, that it brought him to tears, Horace said.
"What happened there is just beyond me," he said. " . . . Nowhere in my wildest imagination did I ever think that those young ladies that I was speaking to would have to endure this."
Like Burton, Horace was disgusted with the suggestive nature of the deputies’ comments. That included what was said to players on the bus regarding possibly having marijuana and one officer remarking, body-camera video picked up, "There’s a bunch of dang schoolgirls on the bus. There’s probably some weed, maybe."
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"For the sheriff’s office to release that video showed they didn’t have a problem with it," Horace said. "I have a problem with it. So does everybody else in America."
Echoing others, Horace added that had the team been from a non-HBCU school, such as Navy or Delaware or Towson, the search wouldn’t have happened. The deputy told DSU team members that they regularly pulled over commercial vehicles because drugs, “large amounts of money” and children being trafficked may be on board.
"Common sense went out of the door as soon as they opened up the bus door," Horace said.
Horace experienced his own bout with questionable police tactics in Philadelphia in his early 20s when, emerging from a subway stop after a parade, he was attacked by a police dog and left in the street bleeding, suffering injuries that required a week’s stay in the hospital.
At Delaware State, he remembered hearing N-word shouts at students from drivers on Route 13 passing by campus.
Collick recalled growing up in Lewes, Delaware, and he and his Black friends and family not being allowed to enter certain restaurants.
He, along with Burton and Purzycki, agreed that the DSU lacrosse bus search was improper and should be exhibited as proof of the need for change.
"We can’t let this die," Burton said.
Follow Kevin Tresolini on Twitter @kevintresolini.