As the NFL Draft approaches each year, it’s always a fun escape to use some of that lost productivity at the office to go back and look at selections of the past.
The first-round flops and fiascos and the third-round lemons abound. Then there is the guy taken in the seventh round whose likeness will defy mortality in Canton, Ohio.
Isn’t that right, Rayfield Wright?
The 1967 draft stands out for a different reason. With the first pick, the Baltimore Colts selected Bubba Smith, the colossus from Michigan State who for nine years left offenses emotionally disturbed. (As an aside, his brother, Tody, would be drafted by the Cowboys in the first round four years later.)
With the seventh pick in the first round, the Lions nabbed UCLA running back Mel Farr. Right after at No. 8, the Vikings took wide receiver Gene Washington, another from Michigan State.
With their pick in the second round, the Rams went with Texas Southern running back Willie Ellison.
Each of them was a product of the Prairie View Interscholastic League, better known as the PVIL, the state of Texas’ athletic association for black high schools during the age of Jim Crow school segregation from 1920 to 1967. It was the equivalent of the UIL, which allowed membership only to white schools.
By the time the final selection in the 1967 NFL Draft had been unveiled, at least a dozen former PVIL players had been selected, including David Lattin, the Texas Western basketball star who led the Miners to basketball glory in a stunning victory in the 1966 national championship game over Kentucky coached by Adolph Rupp. The legendary coach was a mentee of both Phog Allen and James Naismith who lacked, it was said, like too many in his day, both a social conscience and good sense.
Others from the PVIL already had places on NFL and AFL rosters, among them Charley Taylor, the future Hall of Famer who played at Dalworth High School in Grand Prairie. A who’s-who awaited, including Jerry LeVias from Beaumont Hebert, Joe Green of Temple Dunbar, and Joe Washington of Port Arthur Lincoln.
The PVIL is the subject matter of author Michael Hurd’s Thursday Night Lights, a desperately needed reminder of an institution whose history has been shoveled to the ash heap, mostly because it coincided with a period of American shame.
Its title, a take-off from the title of Buzz Bissinger’s best seller that traced football as culture at Odessa Permian, is all you need to know about segregation in Texas: The black schools weren’t allowed to play on Friday nights, which were reserved as “whites only” for high school football. Instead, the all-black schools were relegated to games on Thursdays and sometimes Wednesdays or Saturdays.
Whatever it took not to inconvenience the all-white schools that, by state law, took priority.
Brown v. the Board’s finding in 1954 that segregation was separate but not equal could just as easily have been applied to the PVIL and the UIL, but in a different context. The athletes of the UIL were not equal in ability to the PVIL, as the 1967 NFL draft so clearly illustrated.
“We didn’t question it. There wasn’t anything we could do about,” said Lester Beene, a retired coach in the Fort Worth school district who coached at Kirkpatrick High School, the last team from the city to win a state football championship, in 1962 and ’63. “That was the law. If they told you to play, you played. That was the whole thing. We wanted to play, to show off our talent.
“We never really dwelled on [not being able to play the white schools]. Naturally, we wondered if we could compete. We would have enjoyed doing that. Not necessarily to say we were better, but just to find out how the won-loss records would be.”
At risk today, as Hurd pointed out, is losing a proud history and part of the proud identity and culture of black America, even if both were born out of such a ugly past.
Now 84, Beene wondered openly with some lament why it took so long even after Brown.
Like other states in the South, the Texas Legislature had since 1925 formally forbid mixing of the races in just about every facet of life, including, of course, education. For college, graduates from the black schools either went to a segregated black school, such as Bishop College, Prairie View or Grambling, or they went north where they were welcome. That’s how Bubba Smith and Gene Washington wound up at Michigan State and Mel Farr at UCLA.
As it concerned sporting events, whites could attend a game between black schools – and many did in the Houston and Beaumont areas, Hurd wrote, though not so much in Fort Worth, according to Beene – but blacks were not permitted in white events.
More than 55 years after Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act, it’s hard for one to wrap his head around such an arrangement.
Even after Brown, white Texans in high places fought like the devil to avoid integration.
Mansfield, whose black students — like every other who lived in Tarrant County — were forced to go to high school at Fort Worth’s I.M. Terrell, was ground zero for the first of a number of ugly incidents involving integration. Ordered to integrate by a U.S. district judge in 1956, the then-tiny town between Dallas and Fort Worth was faced with a crisis when 400 showed to stand down the attempt of three black students to enter the front doors of Mansfield High School.
The mob hung each of the three in effigy from the school building.
One of the three students, Floyd Moody, remembered 60 years later, telling a news reporter of his encounter with superintendent R.L. Huffman: “I can remember the conversation was very short. It didn’t take very long for this man sitting across at the end of that table with those thick eyebrows saying, ‘You will never enter this school.’ Those were his words.”
Mansfield managed to put off integrating until 1965.
Administrators in Fort Worth tried to skirt integration by increasing the number of black high schools. Terrell was the only one in the county, but after 1954 the school district converted Como, Dunbar and Kirkpatrick middle schools into high schools.
“They didn’t specifically say that was the reason, but any dummy could figure that out,” said Beene. Former Dunbar coach Robert Hughes has said the same thing, as did Gerald Beal, Kirkpatrick’s football coach who eventually became the school district’s first black administrator in the athletic department.
Athletics turned out to be the most important channel for the ultimate transition. For three, four and, in Terrell’s case, five school years in the late 1960s and early ’70s before they closed, Fort Worth’s black schools competed against the traditionally white schools and, “It wasn’t a big deal.” The kids didn’t see color. They just saw a peer lined up on the other side of the line, Beene said.
“As far as treatment, we couldn’t have been treated better,” he said. “We were given welcomes when we got to the schools. It was just really nice. It really was. It makes you wonder why they held back so long.”
Despite it all, black schools worked hard to do the best they could with what they had. Beal, who died in 2011, said in an interview that he insisted his players and students not complain about their circumstances. The uniforms, helmets and cleats were all hand-me-downs from the white schools.
At Kirkpatrick, the equipment came from North Side and the uniforms from Paschal.
“I don’t think there was any better spirit and pride anywhere than in the black high schools in Fort Worth . . . that’s true, that’s a fact,” Beene said. “The community enjoyed the high schools, not necessarily just the athletics. It was amazing to see how supportive the parents and the people in the community were to us.”
The support was so strong that Hughes, the legendary Dunbar basketball coach, remains adamant to this day that Terrell never should have been closed.
Terrell, under Marion “Bull” Bates, won the 1940 state championship game, the first official PVIL state title game, a 26-0 victory over Austin Anderson. Hughes won three basketball championships there.
At Kirkpatrick, the Wildcats lost PVIL Class 3A title games in 1959 and 1961, but came back to win in 1962 and 1963, the last football state championship won by a Fort Worth public school.
Johnny Ray Jones (Michigan State), James “Metoe” Millard and Carl Williams, the future QB at UT Arlington, were key players. In 1963, there was also Margene Adkins, a future Dallas Cowboy, though at first a reluctant football warrior, his coaches recalled.
“They made him play football. He didn’t want to,” Beal remembered in 2010. “He wanted to play basketball. The principal saw him out in P.E. and called his mother and said this boy needs to play football. He was an exceptional athlete.”
TCU coach Abe Martin called those Kirkpatrick teams the best he had ever seen. If only he could have recruited them.
“Coming from Abe, it was a great feeling” to hear that,” Beene said. “And he was pretty truthful because we had a heckuva ballclub.”
With names and a team like Kirkpatrick had, it was no wonder that many didn’t want to split up when the time came in 1967, the year the PVIL and UIL merged. While the traditionally black schools remained open for a few more years, their students were given the option of attending a traditionally all-white institution.
There was the identity they had established, said Beene, even though they recognized the fact that segregation was unsustainable for their race and it was different and wrong. “But something built up in the black community that they didn’t want to cut lose. That was part of that pride.”
As a basketball coach at Kirkpatrick, Beene won three 3A PVIL titles. His successor Bert Williams won a UIL title in that first year, 1967-68.
When the PVIL disbanded, very little of its records were kept for posterity. Walter Day, a former football coach at Terrell and Fort Worth school district administrator, collected a lot of stuff for a self-published book three decades ago.
There is, of course, some irony that some fear this part of history of a terrible past will be lost.
But these are the great stories that bear witness to the depth and compass of the character of a people who triumphed over their circumstances partly because of the way they approached their work on the football field.
A research inquiry at the Central Library in Fort Worth might portend the worst fears.
“I don’t see anything about Kirkpatrick High School in our system,” the library associate said. “Are you sure it was a high school? I’ve lived my whole life here, and I’ve never heard of it.”
That is as shameful as the past itself.