What was the end result of school desegregation in Odessa?

This chapter reflects how competitive the positions on the team are and how pressured the coaches are to replace a kid who doesn’t live up to his billing with someone waiting in the wings to take his place. It’s all about winning and this brings out the racist attitudes in the whites, when they are replaced with black players. Desegregation becomes a deciding force in the school.

The irony of the desegregation movement was the realization by men like Laurence Hurd that the minorities were as against it as greatly as the whites. Not because they didn’t believe in it, but because the school board planned to close their high school, Ector, if forced to implement the concept. And this time, they weren’t willing to just fall in line. A futher irony was that an important meeting took place at Ector High School during which black parents showed up to tell the board that they were not to be feared, that they were actually very much like the white parents of the own. However, this important meeting was totally overshadowed by Permian’s third State Championship win in 1980, a team which represented all the values of the white working class. The football team wasn’t just a team, but a sacrosanct white institution.