Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas by Michael Hurd (review)

Thanks to Buzz Bissinger's 1990 book and a subsequent movie and television show, Friday Night Lights has achieved iconic cultural status, immediately evoking images of Texas's obsession with high school football. But if Friday nights in Texas have long been associated with the pageantry of interscholastic gridiron battles, only in the past few decades have they included black athletes. Until the end of the 1960s, Friday night lights were for white people; to see Texas's black football stars one needed to show up on Wednesday or Thursday. In Thursday Night Lights, Michael Hurd—director of Prairie View A&M University's Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture—documents and details the forgotten history and eventual demise of black high school football in Texas.

Hurd's book centers on the black players and coaches who competed in the Prairie View Interscholastic League (PVIL) from 1920 to 1970. Relying primarily on interviews supplemented by newspaper sources and a handful of published and unpublished books and articles, Hurd reconstructs the experiences of the PVIL's participants and the institutional context in which they operated. His first chapter details the historical structure of black education in Texas and the formation of the PVIL, while his final chapter depicts its integration-wrought end. In between, Hurd includes four chapters loosely centered on particular themes: the PVIL's star players (chapter 2), its coaches (chapter 3), its strength in the "Golden Triangle" area (chapter 4), and Yates vs. Wheatley, its most intense rivalry (chapter 5). At the heart of each chapter are the voices of the players and coaches, as Hurd uses their words to present in vivid detail the world of black high school football in the Jim Crow era.

Thursday Night Lights will appeal most to scholars and general readers interested in sport history and Texas history. Because it illuminates an understudied aspect of African American life in a Great Plains state, it will also be useful to scholars of the Great Plains. However, Hurd does not make broader connections or comparisons between black high school football in Texas and other Great Plains states, and his book is more of a celebration than a critical analysis. With no footnotes, Hurd is not as interested in entering into historiographical debates and conversations as he is in presenting a forgotten history to the public.

But if Thursday Night Lights leaves room for other scholars to expand on Hurd's work, it also provides a valuable and insightful look at a neglected subject. Using the lens of football, it offers a glimpse into the lived experience of segregation, and also a reminder of what was lost when integration dismantled black institutions and discarded much of their history. In America's current Colin Kaepernick–inspired moment, with sports once again taking on a conspicuous role in debates about black citizenship and the persistence of white racism, this book is especially timely and important.