Chess instills new dreams in kids from rural Mississippi county

aurora-0 (41)in #education • 7 years ago

A place where children learn how to play chess its a chess country all kids are just playing chess...

Chess has been around for 1,500 years but until a couple of summers ago the ancient game was still mostly a mystery to the folks of rural Franklin County, Mississippi. Few had ever played chess before, many confused it with checkers. A chess board was as out of place in the county as a skyscraper. But as we first reported in March, that all changed when a tall stranger arrived from Memphis to bring chess to the country with a belief that the game could transform a community. He was initially met with bewilderment. Who was this six-foot-six outsider and why would anyone come to Franklin County to teach chess? Two years later, a chess boom is underway in the unlikeliest of places.

Tucked deep in the southwest corner of Mississippi lies remote Franklin County, where the trains don't stop any more. Half the county is covered by a national forest, the other half it seems by churches.

This is the buckle of the Bible belt. Seven thousand people live here and no one's in a hurry. There are only two stop lights in the entire county and one elementary school.

So imagine everyone's surprise when Dr. Jeff Bulington showed up at school to teach the kids of Franklin County a new subject: chess.

Jeff Bulington: So everybody say, "Checkmate."

Kids: Checkmate.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Before Dr. B came to town, had you played chess before?

Braden Ferrell: I didn't have a clue how to move the pieces or nothing.

Donovan Moore: Only time I saw it was on TV…

Donovan Moore, Braden Ferrell, Parker Wilkinson, and Benson Schexnaydre didn't know what to make of Dr. B, as he is known, when he first appeared in 2015.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What did you think of Dr. B when you first met him?

Benson Schexnaydre: This 12-foot man.

Sharyn Alfonsi: The 12-foot man.

Parker Wilkinson: Whenever he came into the room saying he was planning on teaching us chess, I was like, "What? Why would somebody come down here?'

Sharyn Alfonsi: In the middle of nowhere. You're a logical guy, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

Jeff Bulington: If there are people there, it's not "nowhere." This is somewhere. It's just a somewhere that doesn't get a lot of attention.

Jeff Bulington was lured to Franklin County by a wealthy benefactor, who wishes to remain anonymous. The benefactor had seen how Bulington had molded chess champions in Memphis, in one of the most distressed zip codes in America, and wondered if chess could take hold in the country.

Jeff Bulington: Where can you put the king?

He convinced Bulington to give a few demonstration lessons in Franklin County…

Bulington, demonstration: Does that stop him from coming here?

Jeff Bulington: Afterwards I was asked, so hey, what do you think? Do you think this, these kids have it? Could you have a chess program here? And I was, yeah, of course. They're as smart as any other kids I've ever met.

Motivated by the challenge, Bulington signed a 10-year contract with the benefactor and left the city for the country.

Bulington has taught chess for the better part of 25 years.

Jeff Bulington: What's so wonderful about the bishop and why might we think of it as an archer?

He may not be a grand master, but he's a master of using chess to tell a narrative, especially with beginners.

Jeff Bulington: This is a story about a little girl, and the stranger and the little girl's daddy.

Jeff Bulington: Elizabeth and the stranger is just my adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood to the chess board.

Bobby Poole: All the statistics, everything you look at, Mississippi is the poorest. It's the dumbest. It's the fattest. We know that the rest of the nation has that conception of us.

Parker Wilkinson: People said that country kids couldn't learn chess.

Sharyn Alfonsi: And?

Parker Wilkinson: We showed 'em different…

Benson Schexnaydre: We proved them wrong. We proved 'em wrong.

Proof came last year in Starkville, where Bulington's team of mostly elementary school kids from Franklin County faced off against much older high school players at the Mississippi state championships. Rebekah Griffin was in the fifth grade.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What was their reaction when they saw you, a little fifth grader sitting across the table from them?

Rebekah Griffin: One of them started bragging to their friends about how he got easy pickins'…

Sharyn Alfonsi: Is that a little scary, playing somebody who looked that much older than you?

Rebekah Griffin: I didn't really think about it until somebody told me, 'You played a guy with a beard?!'

Sharyn Alfonsi: You guys roll in, and they say, 'Who are these kids,' right?

Braden Ferrell: They were basically, like, trying to say we were a joke cause we were kids. But after the game, we usually beat 'em and they were like very shocked.

Sharyn Alfonsi: Don't you guys feel bad you beat all those older kids?

Braden Ferrell: Never…

Parker Wilkinson: No. I don't want that to make me seem like a cruel person, but I'm, I really am just OK with crushing people's spirits.

In the end, Franklin County dominated the state championships.

Mitch Ham: What happened is a bunch of hillbillies beat the snot out of a bunch of really highly educated, sophisticated people. So that's what happened…

Mitch Ham was among the many parents in Starkville…he thinks the victories served as a milestone for Franklin County's kids.

Mitch Ham: That was very sobering for them, to suddenly realize, 'Wow, we are good.' So them having the realization of their own potential was a beautiful moment.

Sharyn Alfonsi: How did the teachers, the other teachers, react?

Jeff Bulington: Over the course of my career in teaching chess people say things like, "I did not know that he could do something like that, or even something as simple and as crass as I did not know he was smart or she was smart," or something like that.

Sharyn Alfonsi: What does that tell you?