Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream (17 page)

Out where she worked as a secretary for a petrochemical
plant, many of the blue-collar workers used the word all the
time. She didn't know how to get them to stop so she hit them
back where it hurt, saying "Goddamn Jesus Christ!" with the
same bitter snap in the voice. It bothered them, and they
frankly didn't know how a decent person could say a thing such
as that, show such utter disrespect for the Lord. But nigger?

What was wrong with the use of that word? Wasn't that what
they were? Wasn't that what they always had been? Let ajudge
shove school desegregation down their throats. Let the federal
government have all the free hand-out programs it wanted. It
wasn't going to change the way they felt.

Look at how they lived down there on the Southside, in those
shitty little shacks where the only thing that was missing was pig
slop. Look at how you turned on the national news and saw
another bunch of 'em being arrested for raping an innocent white girl in Central Park or running a crack house or blowing
each other up in some gang dispute because one of them was
wearing his hat tilted to the left instead of the right. What the
hell was racist about calling 'em niggers when they acted like
that? It was just the truth.

Dwaine Cox, who owned a restaurant downtown, had been
raised in Odessa. He had graduated from Permian in 1962
back in the days when it was an all-white school. That was the
way he figured it would be for his son, Michael, until the federal government stuck its fat nose in and started telling everybody what to do whether they liked it or not.

Dwaine was proud of his son, who had started at defensive
tackle for Permian in 1987 when the team, the biggest bunch
of overachievers ever, had gone all the way to the state semifinals. Michael was tough as nails, pushing his way past offensive linemen who sometimes weighed ninety more pounds than
he did. Michael was equally fearless off the field too, getting
into frequent fights and once showing up for practice in a shirt
covered with blood after an altercation with some kids over at
Odessa High. Dwaine wasn't so proud of that. He wasn't sure
what the hell motivated Michael to get in trouble all the time,
but he suspected that the federal government's desegregation
plan had something to do with it. And he, like many others in
Odessa, resented the federal government's coming in and telling good, hardworking people how they should live and who
their children should go to school with.

Dwaine pegged the start of his sc 's problems to 1982, when
the junior high school he went to got desegregated as a result
of the fight that had taken place in the courts. "He would not
even go to the bathroom in junior high. He wouldn't even go
to the bathroom, because he was afraid of the niggers and the
Mexicans. I think he just decided that lie wasn't going to put up
with that crap," said Dwaine Cox.

"You take these kids out of their schools and put them with
blacks from the Southside and Mexicans. . . . They dragged the
whole school down. They didn't want to be here anymore than we wanted 'em. It just dragged the whole school down. You
don't take kids like that, the way they've been raised, and put
em with Michael, the way he was raised, he'd never been
around 'em. I don't see how it could have gotten anything but
worse.

"I live over here because I want my kids to go to school near
here and I live here because I want to live with people like me
and I don't want kids bused in from the black side of town living in a seven-thousand-dollar home. The majority of people
over there, they don't better themselves, they're busy with their
food stamps.

"My God, Mexico's nothin' but a big goddamn pigpen," said
Dwaine Cox. "Hell, look at Africa. They've been here a lot
longer than North America and they could be civilized and
they're the same way they were three or four hundred years
ago."

Some also blamed desegregation for irrevocably changing
the character of Permian Football.

Daniel Justis, a dentist in Odessa, had been an All-State running back at Permian on the 1970 team that went to the state
finals. He knew all about Mojo pride. He knew all about Mojo
tracfition.,Justis had traveled with the team for a couple of years
in the early eighties. To him, enormous changes had taken
place since his own playing days. He believed discipline had
broken down. He believed the coaches allowed certain players
to get away with murder. He believed the very essence of' Mojo
had changed, and he pinpointed the cause of its destruction.

"I blame it on the niggers' coming to Permian," said Justis.
"People say you can't win without the blacks, but we did."

The black population of Odessa was quite small-about 5
percent. Since the majority of blacks still lived below the tracks,
it was easy for white adults to go about their daily lives, particularly if they lived on the northeast side of town, and never see
a single one, not in the mall anchored by Penney's and Sears,
not in the supermarket, not in the video store on a Saturday
night. The lack of contact created distrust and fear, and only further reinforced the images whites heard about and read
about and had been in the town's psyche since the early days
when blacks were run out. They found further justification for
these feelings as a result of the activities of several blacks who
had gained public positions.

Willie Hammond, Jr., had become the first black city councilman in the history of Odessa in 1972 and later the first black
county commissioner in the history of the county. Those who
knew him, like Lanita Akins, thought lie was a brilliant politician who had provided blacks in Odessa with their first real
public voice.

Few then could fathom his arrest and subsequent conviction
on arson conspiracy and perjury charges in connection with the
burning of a building that had been the tentative site for a new
civic center. According to testimony, after the bond issue for
the civic center failed, Hanunond was in on a scheme to torch
the building in order to collect insurance money. Hammond
claimed he was innocent, the victim of a political setup. His first
trial ended in a hung jury, but in the second one it jury Convicted him.

Akins, who was extremely active in local Democratic politics,
would never forget the night she had sat in the Zodiac (]tub oil
the Southside with Hammond and his lawyer after it became
clear that Ham►nond's political career in the city was finished.
She remembered how horrible she felt, not only for Ha►nmond
but for the blacks who had supported him, who had seen him
as something of it savior in it city that was dominated at every
level by whites. What struck her most was their attitude of fatalism, as if this was how it always turned out, whatever the
initial promise or potential.

"They thought they had one chance in this world and it was
Willie, and when he lost they felt terrible about that. And they
accepted it. 't'hey just accepted that they'd lost somebody else."

Laurence Hurd, a Church of Christ minister, came to Odessa
and galvanized the Soutliside minority community into demanding it desegregated school system. In 1980, twenty-six years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of
Education, sixteen years after passage of the Civil Rights Act,
and ten years after a federal suit had been filed against the
school district, Odessa's schools weren't remotely close to being
integrated. Nor, until Hurd calve to town, had any significant
public pressure to desegregate the schools been placed on the
school board and administration by the minority community.

The very presence of Hurd, the way he spoke with such passion, the way he could zero in on the hypocrisy of whites not
with anger but with a biting cynicism, made him a wonderful
figure on the Southside-their Martin Luther King, their Jesse
Jackson. How could those who had been there forget the night
at the school auditorium on the Southside when he had stared
those whites dead in the eye and exposed them for using the
cloak of Christianity, and the issue of busing, to justify that it
was all right in Odessa to have two school systems, one for
whites and one for blacks and Mexicans? How eloquent he had
been that night, how sweet the rhythm of his words as he went
to the very edge of emotional outrage but never crossed over
into it, never lost control.

I hear people today complaining about the time their children will
spend riding the bus, but I remember the time when minorities had to
walk fifteen to twenty miles to attend school. Minority parents had to get
up before tee surmise to till your laud, pick your cotton, clean Your
house, and get their children ready for school, then walk to work. Tonight you see those who had to walk and get up early and return home
late. If we had to sacrifice then, why can't you sacrifice for our children
to be a part of quality education through integration now?

Why will white churches spend money to bus minorities and teach
them that God loves its and all are equal in the eyes of God, then turn
around and say God does not want me to go to school with you? /law
can you, who profess to be Christians, not allow the love for hum anity
to flow front the walls of your Sunday assembly to the connuunity?

The applause had been thunderous, the auditorium coming
alive with yells of praise and whistles and joyful hoots. Brother
Hurd had them going that night. With him heading the charge, they now had the courage to say to those white folks who ran
Odessa that they were no longer going to accept the crumbs of
their paternalism. Without him, who knows how long it would
have taken to force the issue into the federal courts. Who
knows how long it would have taken for a federal judge to conclude that the Odessa school board, by clear design, had maintained a segregated school system for close to sixty years.

And where was Laurence Hurd today? What cause was he
working on? Where were those spellbinding speaking talents
and uncanny political instinct being put to use?

In a prison yard selling pastries to help raise money for a
little girl who had donated a kidney. And he had plenty of time
for it, since he was serving an eighteen-year sentence for the
armed robbery of a bank. Soon after the desegregation battle
had ended, he got himself into criminal trouble, reviving a past
way of life that lie had worked hard to bury. In March 1983, he
pled guilty to the burglary of a boot shop in Monahans and
served seven months in prison. Less than six months later, he
and two others were charged with the robbery of a bank in
Hobbs, New Mexico. Hurd claimed he wasn't involved, but an
eyewitness identified him as having been near the scene and he
was convicted by a jury.

What had happened to Hurd, what had happened to Hammond, seemed symptomatic of a larger problem. When these
men faded away, to the snickers of whites who had never
trusted there and to the sorrow of blacks who had put their
faith in them, no one came to take their place. "I feel we've lost
ground," said Gene Collins, the president of the Odessa chapter of the NAACP. "I feel we've lost energy. I don't think we're
as determined as we were twenty years ago when King died. We
have become less tolerant and less supportive of those who are
less fortunate."

When Collins gazed across the racial landscape of the town,
he saw a place where there were almost no black role models.
He saw a place where the great panacea of school integration
had turned into a numbers game in which the blacks and the Hispanics ended up paying the greater price. It was the minorities who had lost their neighborhood high school, Ector
High, not the whites. Other than giving some blacks the opportunity to rub shoulders with some whites for several hours a
day, what had integration accomplished? Collins didn't know.

"Integration has torn down some barriers," he said. "There
is not as much taboo in whites' attitudes towards blacks. But I
think that is all it has done."

Jim Moore, the last principal of Ector High School before it
was closed down as a means of achieving desegregation, felt the
same way. Moore, who was white, saw no great social motive in
the desegregation effort. It had nothing to do with true assimilation of the races and everything to do with percentages-how
many whites, how many blacks, how many browns-little numbers that could be written down and submitted to a judge as
proof that there was no longer any racism.

"There's no integration," said Moore. "There is desegregation. There is no integration in this community, the same as any
community in America."

II