When Black Texans Gathered Under “Thursday Night Lights”

Why the Lone Star State Has Forgotten Its Proud Tradition of African American High School Football

I had only been in and out of Houston since leaving our Sunnyside neighborhood on the city’s southeast side, in 1968, to begin eight years of Air Force service. Whenever I returned, I made only casual note of neighborhood and city changes, such as the sad state of the mom-and-pop “candy store” where we used to hang out after school, now boarded up, or a new skyscraper for a Houston skyline dotted with cranes, or another congested freeway opened to relieve existing congested freeways.

As a sportswriter, during my visits …

Want to Find New Audiences? Keep Trying New Things

A Risk-Taking Arts Administrator Came to Texas, and Soon the Galleries Were Louder, Full of Med Students—and Open All Night

Experiment—constantly and fearlessly, every single day.

That’s the best advice I can offer from my own career working in museums to connect the arts to different people, communities, disciplines, and places. …

When I Say “Dallas” … You Think “Cowboys!”

How Football Helped the “City of Hate” Recover From JFK's Assassination

Watching my Dallas Cowboys fall to the Green Bay Packers last Sunday on the last play of the game in an instant classic of an NFC Divisional Playoff, I couldn’t …

Professor, Get Your Gun

Dealing With Threatening Students Used to Be Hard. In Today's Era of Gun Rights, It's Frightening

Now that Texas’ “campus carry” law, that bit of cowboy legislation that empowers everyone over 21 with a concealed handgun license to carry a pistol into a public university classroom …

In the Birthplace of Juneteenth, I Learned the Value of the Holiday

The Annual Commemoration of Slavery’s End Should Be Celebrated Far Beyond Its Texas Island Roots

When my husband and I moved to Galveston, an island city on the Gulf Coast of Texas, in 1991, I was exhausted by racial hatred and violence, and Juneteenth was …

Element

The wind would be water and fire,
would be earth—sand and gravel,
mud churning, even magma—

as I held my hand out from
the car on drives back to Texas.
The …