Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (18 page)

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 Bunion.

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.

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 (lid 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 he 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 he 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 fullpage 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, its incredible, amazin' and unbelievable, but the li'lfellers 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."