Friday Night Lights

by H. G. Bissinger

  I hear people today complaining about the time their children will spend riding the bus, but I remember the time when minorities had to walk fifteen to twenty miles to attend school. Minority parents had to get up before the sunrise to till your land, pick your cotton, clean your house, and get their children ready for school, then walk to work. Tonight you see those who had to walk and get up early and return home late. If we had to sacrifice then, why can’t you sacrifice for our children to be a part of quality education through integration now?

  Why will white churches spend money to bus minorities and teach them that God loves us and all are equal in the eyes of God, then turn around and say God does not want me to go to school with you? How can you, who profess to be Christians, not allow the love for humanity to flow from the walls of your Sunday assembly to the community?

  The applause had been thunderous, the auditorium coming alive with yells of praise and whistles and joyful hoots. Brother Hurd had them going that night. With him heading the charge, they now had the courage to say to those white folks who ran Odessa that they were no longer going to accept the crumbs of their paternalism. Without him, who knows how long it would have taken to force the issue into the federal courts. Who knows how long it would have taken for a federal judge to conclude that the Odessa school board, by clear design, had maintained a segregated school system for close to sixty years.

  And where was Laurence Hurd today? What cause was he working on? Where were those spellbinding speaking talents and uncanny political instinct being put to use?

  In a prison yard selling pastries to help raise money for a little girl who had donated a kidney. And he had plenty of time for it, since he was serving an eighteen-year sentence for the armed robbery of a bank. Soon after the desegregation battle had ended, he got himself into criminal trouble, reviving a past way of life that he had worked hard to bury. In March 1983, he pled guilty to the burglary of a boot shop in Monahans and served seven months in prison. Less than six months later, he and two others were charged with the robbery of a bank in Hobbs, New Mexico. Hurd claimed he wasn’t involved, but an eyewitness identified him as having been near the scene and he was convicted by a jury.

  What had happened to Hurd, what had happened to Hammond, seemed symptomatic of a larger problem. When these men faded away, to the snickers of whites who had never trusted them and to the sorrow of blacks who had put their faith in them, no one came to take their place. “I feel we’ve lost ground,” said Gene Collins, the president of the Odessa chapter of the NAACP. “I feel we’ve lost energy. I don’t think we’re as determined as we were twenty years ago when King died. We have become less tolerant and less supportive of those who are less fortunate.”

  When Collins gazed across the racial landscape of the town, he saw a place where there were almost no black role models. He saw a place where the great panacea of school integration had turned into a numbers game in which the blacks and the Hispanics ended up paying the greater price. It was the minorities who had lost their neighborhood high school, Ector High, not the whites. Other than giving some blacks the opportunity to rub shoulders with some whites for several hours a day, what had integration accomplished? Collins didn’t know.

  “Integration has torn down some barriers,” he said. “There is not as much taboo in whites’ attitudes towards blacks. But I think that is all it has done.”

  Jim Moore, the last principal of Ector High School before it was closed down as a means of achieving desegregation, felt the same way. Moore, who was white, saw no great social motive in the desegregation effort. It had nothing to do with true assimilation of the races and everything to do with percentages—how many whites, how many blacks, how many browns—little numbers that could be written down and submitted to a judge as proof that there was no longer any racism.

  “There’s no integration,” said Moore. “There is desegregation. There is no integration in this community, the same as any community in America.”

  II

  In the sixties and seventies, during the social upheaval of freedom rides and cafeteria sit-ins and boycotts in Birmingham and marches on Selma, Odessa stood locked in time. When sporadic pushes came from the federal government to change the status quo, to break down the boundary of the railroad tracks, they were met with swift and well-organized resistance.

  “If there are those who insist on integrated schools, let them,” said the Odessa American in an editorial in the summer of 1970, shortly after a federal judge had issued a court order mandating the school district to make minor changes to hasten desegregation. (As it turned out, the court order had no effect whatever.) “Those who prefer all-white schools, or all-black schools, likewise should be allowed to exercise their choice. It’s the initiated force by government, from the levying of taxes to the compulsory attendance, that is wrong. With such an unholy foundation, the public schools cannot hope to educate or teach morality.”

  “We lived for too many years with segregation, too many years wrong,” said Lucius D. Bunton, who was a partner in the biggest law firm in town and the school board president when the U.S. attorney general’s suit against the school district was filed in 1970. “But it was there, and I think we really didn’t think much of it, that’s just the way it was.

  “I’m not real certain we were ready for the kind of desegregation that currently exists. I think it would have caused some bad feelings and potentially would have hurt the school system,” said Bunton, who was ultimately appointed a federal judge by President Carter and went on to issue a landmark decision finding the FBI guilty of racial bias in the treatment of its Hispanic agents.

  At that time there were three high schools in the town: Ector, which was located on the Southside and 90 percent minority; Odessa High, the town’s first high school, which was 93 percent white; and Permian, which served the newer parts of town and was 99 percent white. One obvious way of accomplishing desegregation would have been to shift students among these three schools and change the compositions of their respective enrollments. But in Odessa, the drawback of doing that was obvious.

  “That would have destroyed the football program, and that’s why we didn’t do it,” said Bunton.

  The issue of race in the schools did not come up again for almost another ten years. The federal government’s suit sat untouched in the federal court. Then it came to the forefront again, spearheaded by a total stranger.

  III

  The minute Laurence Hurd set foot on the Southside of Odessa in the late seventies, he knew he had been there before. He had been there when he grew up in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where it was called New San Jose. He had been there when he lived in Denver, where it was called Five Points. The names were different. The towns were different. But the characteristics were the same, as indistinguishable as one white suburban shopping mall from another.

  Hurd knew where he was from the antiquated and dilapidated houses with peeling layers of paint, like a set of yellowing teeth falling from the gums because of rot, exuding the stench of decay. He could tell from the yards, which were infested with weeds and litter and looked like tufts of greasy hair on an old man too weak to comb it. He could tell from the vacant lots and the lack of new businesses. He could tell from the whole feel of the place, which simply seemed to sag, as if all hope had been given up long ago—if there had ever been any to begin with. Yes, he had been there before.

  As the new minister at the Church of Christ on Texas and Clements streets on the Southside, he undertook the challenge of desegregating the schools and obliterating the boundary of the railroad tracks. He must have known when he took up the cause that his past would one day float to the surface, that as he became more and more vocal, influential white people in town would raise questions about him, want to know a little more about this stranger who started raising hell the second he got here and probably was some plant by those commies over at the NAACP. He knew it was the kind of town where influential white people could find out anything they wanted.
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  It was only a matter of time before some of those bitterly opposed to court-mandated desegregation were told by a local official that Hurd had an arrest record as long as a football field. In addition to nearly fifty arrests on everything from theft to suspicion of murder, Hurd had been in prison in Colorado separate times for stealing, possession of narcotics, and a parole violation.

  But it didn’t matter to him if people knew about his past—his life as a hustler that had evolved after he was discharged from the Marines in the middle fifties and realized that the only job he was deemed suitable for in Denver was as a pantry man at an all-white country club; about his almost constant games of cat and mouse with the Denver police in the sixties. Odessa was it, his last shot to do something worthwhile, to stay off the heroin that had ravaged him and make something of himself, to resist the lure of the streets where he had thrown dice and pickpocketed and pimped with the best of them. His survival back then had been based on a certain creed: “I wasn’t no snitch, was polite to prostitutes, and did not take things that weren’t mine.” Now he wanted to live his life a different way.

  He threw himself headlong into the desegregation effort, his rhetoric and speech unlike anything minorities here had ever been exposed to. He became the organizer of a group called CRUCIAL, which ultimately entered the desegregation suit as an intervenor and finally brought it into the courtroom after eleven years. He talked and talked and talked, hopping from one meeting to another. Through the efforts of Hurd and a handful of others, the Southside began to organize and come together. Suddenly, desegregation became an issue that was not going to disappear.

  During one incredible week at the end of 1980, everything the town stood for—the barrier of the railroad tracks, the separation of white from black and brown, the religion of Mojo football and who could worship and who could not—came into question with the sudden, uncharacteristic refusal of the minorities to fall obediently in line. At the upper end of Odessa that week were the delirious fans of Permian, virtually all of them white, preparing themselves for that greatest moment of all, a state championship game. At the lower end of town were residents of the Southside, virtually all of them minority, demanding desegregation on their own terms.

  On Tuesday of state championship week, the regular meeting of the Permian booster club was interrupted by numerous standing ovations. The first came when Jerry Thorpe and Tommy Mosley of the city’s largest and almost exclusively white church, Temple Baptist, presented Coach John Wilkins with a plaque that named him WORLD’S GREATEST COACH. A bonfire was announced for six-thirty the following Thursday evening over at the sheriff’s firing range on Yukon. Arrangements were also made for chartered planes and buses to go to the game at Texas Stadium in Irving.

  The next night a different type of frenzy swept Odessa in a different part of town. The people at this particular meeting didn’t believe in Mojo, for its magic, like everything else in Odessa, had never extended across the railroad tracks. They were not part of the great Mojo myth, which was the virtually exclusive preserve of white fans and white kids. But they did believe in something that had become just as sacred, Ector High School. The school was 99 percent minority, with 298 blacks, 463 Hispanics, and nine whites. Some 85 percent of the blacks who lived in Ector County and attended high school went there, and so did 44 percent of the county’s Hispanics.

  The minority residents of the Southside who attended the meeting clung to Ector High with all their might in the face of threats that it might be closed under a desegregation plan proposed by the school district. It was as uncharacteristic a display of passion on the Southside as anyone could remember, all of it revolving around a school that they had come to love and treasure, the only institution, outside of the black churches, that was truly theirs. They were in favor of desegregation, but not at the expense of losing their school.

  It was the night Laurence Hurd rose up to attack the whites in the audience for their hypocrisy, for using religion as a thin veil for their own racism.

  It was the night the Reverend Curtis Norris, pastor of the House of Prayer Baptist Church on the Southside, rose up to tell the school board, “Our last stand that we have as a community is Ector High School.”

  It was the night Dorothy Jackson, a parent whose children went to school on the Southside, rose up to tell the board: “We would like for you to know that not only can we be good sprinters but we too have the minds to become doctors and lawyers and city officials. Please don’t be afraid of us. We’re very much like you.”

  The meeting at Ector received extensive coverage in the Odessa American. But it was overshadowed by events continuing to unfold across town during state championship week; a full-page photo spread was given to the bonfire, a school pep rally, and a Mojo Christmas tree that had little bulbs with the numbers of the players on them.

  That Saturday, roughly ten thousand people were part of the caravan that made its way from Odessa to Texas Stadium by car and motor home and bus and chartered plane, a phalanx of support that was numbing even by Texas standards. Permian scored three touchdowns in the second half to defeat Port Arthur Jefferson 28-19 and win its third state championship in one of the great upsets in modern Texas high school history.

  “Today Mojo reigns supreme over Texas schoolboy football,” wrote sports editor Ken Broadnax in a front-page story in the paper.

  A team of “Little Big Men” has shown that mind can indeed win out over matter.

  Those Panthers . . . those itsy, bitsy football players . . . those hearty, gutsy guys from the oilfields . . . what about ’em? Yep, it’s incredible, amazin’ and unbelievable, but the li’l fellers do occasionally catch the best end of the stick.

  All the reasons for the phenomenal support of Permian had been embodied by this 1980 varsity team. They were a classic bunch of overachievers who had become living proof of all the perceived values of white working-class and middle-class America—desire, self-sacrifice, pushing oneself beyond the expected limit. They were the kinds of values that the Permian fans harbored about themselves. What made those boys great on the football field had made the fans great as well. Just as the boys had produced against all odds, so they had produced in the oil field against all odds, not with brains and fancy talk but with brawn and muscle and endurance and self-sacrifice.

  Such symbolism wasn’t lost on Laurence Hurd as he continued to fight for school desegregation. It wasn’t necessary to live in Odessa for long to realize that the Permian football team wasn’t just a high school team but a sacrosanct white institution. “Mojo seemed to have a mystical charm to it,” said Hurd. The school itself was 94 percent white in 1980, with 14 blacks and 94 Mexican-Americans out of 2,031 students, and he truly believed there would be “blood in the streets” before Permian supporters would allow their school to be tampered with in any way that might be even remotely perceived as detrimental. Another key figure in the desegregation battle, Vickie Gomez, who in 1976 became the first minority candidate ever elected to the school board, had come to a similar conclusion. “The thing was to preserve Mojo’s whiteness,” said Gomez. The school board and the administration “were determined that whatever happened, Mojo was not going to suffer in any way.”

  In the spring of 1982, U.S. district judge Fred Shannon ruled that “the failure of the [school district] to dismantle its formerly dual school system is very clear in this case. The historically black schools have never been desegregated, and since 1954 have remained either all Black or virtually all Black and Mexican-American.”

  In no less than six different areas, Shannon concluded on the basis of testimony, the school system “not only continued to fail to meet its duty to dismantle its dual school system, but actually increased the segregation in its schools of both Blacks and Mexican-Americans.”

  It was a moment of euphoria for the minority community, until Shannon strongly hinted at a solution. Opposed to increased busing, Shannon concluded that the quickest, surest way to achieve desegregation was to close Ect
or High School, since it had a relatively small population. As a result, its students were dispersed across the railroad tracks to the remaining two high schools in town, Permian and Odessa High.

  As a school, most whites never had much use for Ector once it had become pegged as the minority school. It was on the Southside, and the less heard about the area the better. “I think the community perceived it as a minority place, a place they wouldn’t travel into,” said Jim Moore. “I think most of them perceived it as a place to keep ’em over there and let ’em have their school.”

  But with Ector’s closing, members of the white community suddenly began to see enormous value in some of its black students. It had nothing to do with academic potential. It had everything to do with athletic potential.

  Once the plan was announced, a hotly debated aspect of it wasn’t curriculum, or how minorities would fare in schools that had always been predominantly white. Instead there was remarkable focus on which school, Permian or Odessa High, would ultimately get the greater number of black students, and thereby the greater number of black football players. The answer depended on how the Southside was divvied up between the two schools in the aftermath of the court battle. The curious zigs and zags of the proposed division gave Permian a clear edge over Odessa High in the number of blacks assigned to go there based on where they lived. Gomez said the line was drawn that way not for the cause of desegregation, nor to satisfy any academic purpose, nor even to meet any racial quota, but to ensure Permian a greater number of black running backs down the road than its rival.