Before integration, the Prairie View Interscholastic League provided opportunities for minority athletes.
PVIL boasts rich history, numerous athletes who went on to have professional careers
Robert Brown’s dining room has turned into a museum.
The Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association chairman has a piece of everything from the 20th century African-American high school athletics governing body.
There is a hand-woven letterman jacket from the 1930s. There are clips of old articles detailing triumphs from numerous PVIL powerhouses in a variety of sports. Gold medals that haven’t lost a bit of shine are framed. The championship trophies are a bit rusty but what they stand for hasn’t lost a bit of shine.
Brown starts spouting names as if he’s a human encyclopedia.
“Eldridge Dickey played at Booker T. Washington,” Brown said. “Mean Joe Greene. Temple, Texas. I think it was Dunbar, Kenny Houston. I worked with Kenny Houston at Sterling. Dick “Night Train” Lane from Austin Anderson. Charley Taylor, Washington Redskins, Grand Prairie. Gene Upshaw. He was over the (National Football League) players’ association. And Emmitt Thomas came from Angleton. He played for the Kansas City Chiefs. Otis Taylor from Worthing.”
From Ernie Banks on the diamond to Debbie Allen in the classroom, the PVIL has its hands on every corner of history. In 1951, Ollie Matson from San Francisco University, by way of Yates, became the first black athlete to receive a Heisman Trophy vote.
The first black quarterback to be drafted into the NFL was Charlie Brackins from Prairie View A&M via Dallas Lincoln. Dickey was the first black college quarterback to be drafted in the first round of the NFL draft.
Brown could go on for hours. For days. Names whose origin of fame can be traced back to a time when the only outlet and saving grace for black athletes was the PVIL.
The dining room Brown is in as he spouts these famous names isn’t big enough to hold every note and trophy linked to the PVIL. Maybe no room is. The league’s rich history goes much deeper than anyone could imagine.
Ever the wise man who’s spent a lifetime in football and athletics, Brown quipped a few words to live by.
“One thing I love about this,” Brown said. “It’s a lot of things we don’t have to do, but we do them. We enjoy doing them.”
That sums up his involvement with the PVIL. These days, more than anything, it’s about keeping the PVIL memories alive.
The league dates back to 1920 when the governing body for athletic and academic competitions for the state’s black high schools was formed and called the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools or TILCS. PVIL became the official name because everything the league did was housed under what is now known as Prairie View A&M University.
The PVIL modeled itself after the University Interscholastic League. But PVIL schools pooled their resources. Basketball games were at 2 p.m. Football games were on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, not Friday nights.
The PVIL offered black students a chance they would otherwise be denied, though.
When school integration started in the 1960s, so did the merge of PVIL and UIL. Smaller schools played under the PVIL umbrella until 1970 and then the PVIL was no more. Soon after, a lot of the predominantly black schools anchored by great PVIL programs were gone.
“Every small town, 90 percent of them don’t have a clue what happened to the black school,” Brown said. “They bulldozed it down and you never know they existed.”
PVIL teams never had the opportunity to match up against UIL teams. Integration actually afforded the closest comparison.
There was no better example of this than Wheatley boys basketball. The Wildcats won 12 PVIL titles — including six straight from 1950-1955; when integration took place, they won UIL titles in 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973 and 1978.
“The first few years of integration, you could match up and you could see the difference,” said Charles Herbert, a Wheatley basketball product from the 1950s. “Basketball-wise, Wheatley went the first three or four years. A predominantly black inner-city school won the state championship in the largest class. It took a while in football to make but the Beaumont schools did well.”
Brown credits a lot of the transition success to former (Houston Independent School District) athletics director Joe Tusa, who’s still a revered figure in Houston today.
“He was about five years before integration and 30 years after integration,” Brown said.
That transition led to other great accomplishments.
The 1985 Yates football team — remnants of the PVIL and segregation — went 16-0 and became the first historically black high school to win the UIL Class 5A state title. That team is regarded as one of the greatest ever in the state.
The PVIL’s history is American history. Except for Brown, it is dismissed too often and even more absent from the public’s mind today.
Having all those trophies and pictures and memories to show is one way to keep the PVIL alive.
Gathering records is part of that effort. Former coach-turned-historian Walter Day is credited with gathering those records, which wasn’t easy. In 2005, PVIL records were included with UIL records.
The annual PVIL Hall of Honor and Hall of Fame Banquet inducts legends of yesteryear annually, making sure they have a place in history, too.
Famed Wheatley product Frederick Taylor, who was on the team’s 1966 state championship basketball team, said he always wanted the PVIL to be remembered more than he was.
“(There were) a lot of great athletes after me that came through,” said Taylor, who played for the Phoenix Suns and Cincinnati Royals. “But (there also were) a lot of great athletes before me that never got the recognition.”
In an odd way, UIL realignment is keeping those PVIL memories alive.
Yates and Wheatley were in two different classifications in 2015, but in 2016 the schools share a district.
It’s arguably the rivalry that defined the PVIL. It was a Thanksgiving tradition during the height of the league. The game was a “gala” with 40,000plus people in attendance, Brown said.
“It’s not the rivalry like it used to be,” Brown said. “When it was segregated, people would move out of Texas, go to California, they go to Chicago, they go to Detroit. But when Thanksgiving came, they all came back home to see Yates and Wheatley.”