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 currently serves on the selection committee for the Black College Football Hall of Fame.

TEXAS SPORTS HISTORY

Michael Hurd

Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas

University of Texas Press

Hardcover, 978-1-4773-1034-2, 260 pages plus 49 b/w photos, appendixes, index; $24.95

October 2017

Reviewed by Chris Manno

Michael Hurd’s Thursday Night Lights is an important story wrapped up in a problematic book. In Texas, “Friday Night Lights” refers to the tradition of high school football on Friday nights, white student leagues only, not the black leagues that played on Thursday nights. Hurd does a commendable job crafting a historical narrative that reflects careful research and documentation — much of which appears in the appendices which, along with the introduction, make up a whopping 30% of what is already a fairly brief text, considering the years covered. That leaves the reader to wonder if the add-ons are redundant or recursive, a question that zeroes in on the primary flaw of Thursday Night Lights: either the factual information or the narrative itself is unsettled to the extent that readers need more substantiation than Hurd offers.

Still, I was captivated by the specifics of leaders and selfless players that populate the historical thread, men like Charles Brown and his wife Carolyn who not only fed his teams and laundered their uniforms in their own home, but also led team after team to championships with Coach Brown learning the job as he went. The bridge years between the folding of the all-black Prairie View Independent League (PVIL) into the University Interscholastic League (UIL) enriched not only Texas high school football but by extension, college and even professional football with Al Davis of the Oakland Raiders signing Eldridge Dickey to back up then–Super Bowl quarterback Darryl Lamonica in 1968.

Thursday Night Lights is a rich who’s-who of college and pro-football throughout the boom years of televised football in America in the late 1960s and early ’70s. The common denominator of players like Dickey, “Big Cat” Ladd, “Night Train” Lane, and “Sloppy Joe” Johnson was equal measures of talent and unstoppable drive, both in epic doses. Hurd widens his scope to include regional black leagues in the pre-integration years, documenting the uncommon purpose and dedication that yielded winning results for teams and communities around the state and some other regions of the nation. He traces the roots of latter-day National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football that fed into the National Football League as a dominant player talent pool that continues to this day.

The book is at its biographical best when carefully documenting the rise of talented, dedicated black athletes and coaches, but at its most problematic when a recurring sociopolitical thread undermines the narrative: the reader is left confused as to whether the termination of the PVIL mandated by legislated desegregation in the 1960s was another blow in a long history of racial oppression — or an act of social progress. In the end, the epic success story of gifted athletes and dedicated coaches is at best overshadowed if not outright swamped by the spectral freight of an unannotated racism (for example, an incendiary quote—no who or when: “Whites would rather put a bullet in a black man’s head than see him educated”) that comes and goes with neither attribution nor citation.

Sports history desperately needs this triumphant story and essential, detailed black history narrative, but the careful reader is forced to wade through deep and fast-flowing subjective waters to access the objective account. In the end, I think the former drowns out the latter, a flaw that subverts the worthy premise of the book and leaves too many difficult questions unanswered.

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