During the fight for school integration in the 1960s and ’70s, high school football teams were often caught in the crossfire.
But Don Albrecht, a former Texas A&M athletic recruiter, argues that many of the strides made in integration around high school have faltered over the past three decades.
He explores this in his new book, “Blinded by the Lights: Texas High School Football and the Myth of Integration.”
He joined Texas Standard to talk about the book. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Quite a powerful subtitle there, “the myth of integration.” What drew you to write about this project and how’d you go about it?
Don Albrecht: It’s something I’ve always been interested in. I was teaching a course at Texas A&M, sociology of sports, and we covered the racial integration.
I got interested in high school football and what occurred there. This was back in the 1990s and I started interviewing people. I interviewed hundreds of people. Good thing I interviewed them then, many of them have since passed away.
But I got busy, never got the book finished. A couple of years ago, I retired and was then able to sit down and finish the book.
But what I found is that between the ’90s and now, things have changed a lot. And the positive vibes I had about progress towards desegregation and the integration of schools and every kid in Texas having a chance, I found things were not as promising.
Fast forward to when you decided to pick back up with this project a couple of years ago. What did you find had changed since those initial interviews?
There are tens of thousands of Black and Latino kids in Texas who attend schools where virtually all other fellow classmates are minorities and virtually all of their fellow classmates are poor.
These schools don’t do very well on the football field either. And I think it’s all related that the resources and opportunities and everything are going to the suburban schools where the money is.
Why do you believe this resegregation is happening here? Where is the drift?
I think there’s three factors that occurred.
Number one is a lot of the laws that we passed in the ’60s and ’70s to integrate the schools, we’ve allowed them to lose their teeth or they’re no longer in effect.
Number two, the state has changed a lot demographically. Right now, the majority of Texas school kids are nonwhite and so that makes integration more difficult.
And then the third factor is economic changes. Since the ’80s and ’90s, we have gone from middle-class society to much more of a two-class society with the wealthy and the poor and not so much in between.
Are we talking about a kind of suburbanization of the white demographic, right? I mean, you’re talking about schools, especially in cities, where there are fewer resources and then you look at the suburbs and you find that there are wealthier suburbs where predominantly white Texas students go to school.
Yes. Right now, Dallas ISD and Houston ISD, both of them have only about 4% of the student body in those school districts are white.
And then you go out to the suburban schools. I use South Lake Carroll in North Dallas as an example. It’s an excellent school. They have a very wealthy neighborhood. Not only do they have good football teams, but they have baseball teams, tennis teams. Academically, they’re great.
The majority of the school is white and they have the best facilities. They can afford the best coaches. The kids can go to summer camps and have personal coaches and all those types of things.
You were an athletic recruiter. So when you went looking for the talent, you would find yourself what? In the wealthier suburban and mostly white districts where the players were?
Well, I was working with the football program at Texas A&M back in the ’80s and ’90s. And at this time, Coach Slocum was the head coach. And A&M became good during that era because he was going into the inner cities and spotting the talent. He’s getting kids out at Carter and Yates and those types of schools.
So that’s what I was seeing in those days. If you follow recruiting, when’s the last time you’ve seen a kid from Yates or Kashmere or Carter be heavily recruited?
Some people might say, why are we focusing on football? Why are we focusing on sports when we’re talking about some much bigger serious issues here? How would you answer this?
Number one is that I think sports can be the canary in the coal mine. I think I can use sports as a way to shed light on what’s going on in society. I think sport is a mirror of society. And secondly, I think there are individuals that are left out.
I give the example in my book of a young man named Marcus Allen. He’s now my good friend. He was a Black kid raised by a single mother in the inner city of Houston. He attended Aldine High School.
While he was there, he won a state championship in 1990. He was heavily recruited. He attended TCU. Bright kid, he worked hard. He graduated from TCU, went on and got a master’s degree. Now he is extremely successful in life.
Now there’s not a lot of us that have the skills and the physical talents to do that, but he’s an example of a kid where football gave him that opportunity. And if he is born a generation later and he’s attending Aldine High, last I checked, Aldine had lost 34 straight games and they typically lose by 70 to seven scores like that. Nobody’s going to notice a kid playing for a team like that.
“Blinded by the Lights: Texas High School Football and the Myth of Integration” will be featured at the Texas Book Festival in Austin during the weekend of Nov. 8-9.
