In this month’s issue of the Texas Observer, I have a feature on the history of race and football in Austin. It was months in the making and I’m proud of the work. You can now read it online at their site.
The feature goes from the segregated Jim Crow days of the early 1940s through to the present day and the hire of Charlie Strong as the first black head coach of a men’s team at UT, which just happens to be the most lucrative team in all of college football. Austin has a long, troubled history with segregation and inequality (and inequity) that is still very much alive in the geography of the city, inequality in education and income levels, effect of skyrocketing land values and subsequent property taxes, etc. Austin also has a pretty amazing football history that highlights a lot of the changing social landscape of this place over the last century. I tried to bring all of this together in the piece.
Print publishing is a strange phenomenon when you are used to writing something, sending it off to an editor, and seeing it online within a day, if not hours. I’ve been sitting with this completed story for a month or so now. And the first draft was due on August 1 and then there were a series of edits (and bless my editor, Brad, who worked on this piece with me – I sent him a mess and he polished it into this final form).