On Saturday, I attended a parade here in La Porte celebrating Black History Month. Attendance was sparse, with few participants and fewer still spectators. Still, it was educational for me and a reminder that a shameful part of our past wasn’t so long ago.
The Grand Marshall of the parade was Eugene Washington, a former NFL player for the Minnesota Vikings. You can find his career statistics here. He was a very good football player and I recall watching his graceful running style and wanting to be just like him.
What I didn’t know until Saturday was the route that he took to get there. I didn’t know that there wasn’t a high school in La Porte in the early 1960’s that allowed blacks to attend. The nearest “negro” high school was Carver in Baytown. He, along with every other black teenager in La Porte, was bussed through the old tunnel in order to get an education. But there were no busses returning from extracurricular activities, such as track and football, so the schools coaches had to arrange return transportation.
Think about the internal drive it took for Eugene Washington to achieve what he did, in the times that he did it in. It is an amazing story. So, today, I’m thankful that there is still a remnant of people that celebrate Black History Month and remind us of people like Eugene Washington. And I hope that next year’s parade in La Porte will have hundreds of citizens turn out to remember a past that really wasn’t so long ago. Perhaps it will help us all understand that obstacles still exist for blacks and motivate us to eliminate them.
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How old is Washington? I'm trying to figure out the time frame of being bussed.
David, thank you for acknowledging the accomplishments of a great man and helping us all to remember a very important struggle in American History.
Thank you David for reminding so many of us why we celebrate Black History Month. I cannot imagine what Gene Washington or the other black athletes had to endure to accomplish what they did. And what about those students who were not gifted athletes, what were the extracurricular activities that were available to them.