Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.75 (883 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1477310347 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 260 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-11-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
He covers fifty years (1920–1970) of high school football history, including championship seasons and legendary rivalries such as the annual Turkey Day Classic game between Houston schools Jack Yates and Phillis Wheatley, which drew standing-room-only crowds of up to 40,000, making it the largest prep sports event in postwar America. The segregated high schools in the Prairie View Interscholastic League (the African American counterpart of the University Interscholastic League, which excluded black schools from membership until 1967) created an exciting brand of football that produced hundreds of outstanding players, many of whom became college All-Americans, All-Pros, and Pro Football Hall of Famers, including NFL greats such as "Mean" Joe Green (Temple Dunbar), Otis Taylor (Houston Worthing), Dick "Night Train" Lane (Austin Anderson), Ken Houston (Lufkin Dunbar), and Bubba Smith (Beaumont Charlton-Pollard).Thursday Night Lights tells the inspiring, largely unknown story of African
He has worked as a sports writer for the Houston Post, the Austin American-Statesman, USA Today, and Yahoo Sports. 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. Hurd’s previous books include Black College Football, 1892–1992:
Hurd ‘does right’ by providing them belated, much-deserved acknowledgment. Thursday Night Lights is a winner." (Brad Buchholz, feature writer for the Austin America-Statesman, Inside Sports, Texas Football, Texas Monthly, Sports Illustrated, and other publications) . These coaches and players, these schools and stories, have been overlooked—or discounted—in other accounts. "Through a skillful telling of the stories of legendary and lesser-known Black Texan high school football players and coaches, this book reveals how sport enabled African Americans to survive and even thrive during the era of Jim Crow segregation in Texas. It shows how the under-resourced black schools turned out not only All-Star and Hall of Fame caliber athletes but also exemplary citizens. Hurd’s accessible and entertaining writing style brings African American experiences under Jim Crow to life in a way that readers across the racial spectrum will profit from." (