PVIL high schoolers found glory under Thursday night lights
Texas league served segregated black community’s athletes, coaches and fans for half a century
The Wednesday- and Thursday-night games author Michael Hurd saw at Jeppesen Stadium, the players and coaches, were what he knew about high school football. So Hurd was puzzled the first time he heard the phrase “Friday night lights,” he writes in his new book, “Thursday Night Lights.” Most black high schools in Texas played on nights other than Fridays unless they had their own facility, but only a few did. This excerpt relates part of the history that inspired Hurd — a 1967 graduate of Worthing High School — to write this book.
Iremember a cold, drizzly December night in 1961 at Jeppesen. I was twelve, and sat bundled up next to my dad in the stands as Orsby Crenshaw and the Austin L. C. Anderson Yellow Jackets won a 20–13 contest against Yates for the PVIL Class 4A state championship. Anderson was coached by Raymond Timmons, who that night bested the great Andrew “Pat” Patterson, whose team had come into the game undefeated. It would be the last of four state titles for the Yellow Jackets, and the only state championship game I ever witnessed.
That was my high school football experience growing up, attending segregated schools in the 1960s.
It had nothing to do with Friday night lights.
More to the point, as one PVIL alum put it, “Friday night lights? That’s white folks.”
This book is about “black folks” who coached and played high school football behind the veil of segregation in Texas for half a century, 1920–1970, as members of the all-black Prairie View Interscholastic League, whose games were played primarily on Wednesday and Thursday nights in most towns, Tuesdays in others, some on Saturdays, but rarely on primetime Friday nights, when games for white schools were played. The book’s title, “Thursday Night Lights,”
is not just a riff on “Friday Night Lights,” but also identifies a defining reality of high school football games played in racially charged times when even the midweek scheduling of games for black teams carried a “less than” feel. The PVIL’s genesis was as the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools, organized three years after white policemen and citizens’ mistreatment of black soldiers from the 24th U.S. Infantry led to the horror — seventeen people shot and killed — of the Camp Logan mutiny and Houston riot of 1917, and folded in 1970, one year after the University of Texas fielded its last all-white football team.
Emotionally, I have been writing this book since adolescence, and the first time I saw PVIL greatness up close and personal in David Lattin and Otis Taylor, Worthing and Sunnyside heroes. I remember a profusely sweating “Big Daddy D” jogging coolly in his own world around the school track on a hot spring day to whatever groovy tunes were streaming through his transistor radio earplug, and Taylor, back in the ’hood, sitting at the wheel of his new candyapple red Thunderbird convertible as the fellas in Reedwood took a break from playing basketball to crowd around and admire the vehicle purchased after he signed his rookie contract with the Kansas City Chiefs. Both guys would show up on the big stage. Lattin threw down a monster dunk to set the tone for Texas Western’s destruction of Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats in the 1966 NCAA championship game, an upset for the ages that is credited with ushering in the recruitment of more blacks by previously allwhite programs. Taylor, a strong but graceful receiver, was among the cadre of players from historically black colleges who helped bring the American Football League to life. In Super Bowl IV, Taylor, a prototypical big, fast receiver, caught a short pass from Len Dawson, broke tackles by cornerback Earsell Mackbee and safety Karl Kassulke, and high-stepped down the right sideline to the end zone, securing the Chiefs’ 23–7 upset win over Minnesota.
Lattin and Taylor were local heroes, and I followed their careers, but I had a vested interest in following other PVIL football players from the Houston area, too, as a fan and then as a sports writer. I read team depth charts and player bios, noted high school affiliations, and had flashbacks of sitting in the stands at Jeppesen while watching some of those teams play. “Thursday Night Lights” reveals the PVIL quilt that was a patchwork of athletic, academic and social achievements pieced together for a black community striving to succeed, to take care of its own despite the era’s racism. For me, its history became a simmering narrative bred in familiarity, born from segregation.
I had to tell this story.
Michael Hurd is the director of Prairie View A&M University’s Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture, which documents the history of African American Texans. He has worked as a sports writer for the Houston Post, the Austin American-Statesman, USA Today and Yahoo Sports. Hurd’s previous books include “Black College Football, 1892– 1992: One Hundred Years of History, Education and Pride.” For more than a decade, he served as a member of the National Football Foundation’s Honors Court for Divisional Players, the group that chooses small college players for the College Football Hall of Fame, and he serves on the selection committee for the Black College Football Hall of Fame.