This is the third and final part in a series of three articles detailing the difficulties inner-city programs in Texas face in pursuit of on-field success. Check out the first part here and the second installment here. 

Carl Davis still vividly recalls his excitement and anticipation as a young Houston kid in the 1960s going to the Turkey Day Classic.

“I remember running across the street with my uncle as a kid, trying to get to the game,” Davis said. “There’d be a big parade that morning, and then everyone went to the game that evening. It was like a Super Bowl.”

When the Yates Lions faced off against the Wheatley Wildcats, the final score signified more than the game’s result. It showed which Houston ward was best.

Houston was carved into four political wards when the city was established in 1836. The Fourth Ward became a Black community known as Freedmen’s Town in the late 1860s once formerly enslaved people flocked to the region. Later, as more and more African Americans migrated to the Fourth Ward to escape the harsh Jim Crow segregation laws in the Deep South, they filtered into the newly created Fifth Ward and already established Third Ward.

By the time Davis was a young man attending the Turkey Day Classic, Jack Yates High School was the pride and joy of the Third Ward, while Phillis Wheatley High School represented the Fifth Ward.

But both were powerhouse all-Black high school football programs in the Prairie View Interscholastic League. Yates made four PVIL state championship appearances in five years in the early 60s, while Wheatley made it to three between 1941-1954. Over 35,000 people packed Jeppesen Stadium in their finest attire to root for two teams representing their community.

Of course, Davis was always clad in Yates’s signature crimson and gold. By the time he finished high school, he was the third generation of his family to graduate from Yates High School.

“My family members lived to attend Jack Yates,” Davis said. “It’s a school pride thing and family pride.”

The football dominance continued long after Davis graduated and Yates was integrated into the UIL.

Yates made the state championship in 1981, 1985 and 1992. While they were competitive throughout the decade, the 1985 team is entrenched in Texas high school football lore as one of the greatest teams ever assembled.

The first Class 5A football team to win 16 games in an undefeated season, Yates outscored opponents 659-79 under legendary coach Luther Booker. They punctuated the perfect year with a 37-0 victory in the state championship against Odessa Permian, the high school football dynasty later chronicled in H.G. Bissinger’s “Friday Night Lights.”

As the Houston Astros bumbled to a middling record and the University of Houston Cougars finished 4–7, Yates High School became the most popular team in the city. Over half of the 36 seniors on the team played college football and five went on to play in the NFL.

For over three decades, the 1985 Houston Yates squad was the last predominantly Black, inner-city football team to win a state championship.

Then South Oak Cliff went back-to-back in 2021 and 2022.

"When you think about Yates High School, you think about football,” said Jeffrey L. Boney, president of the Jack Yates National Alumni Association. “Just like when you think about South Oak Cliff, you think about football.”

And yet, the two schools with storied traditions sowed on the gridiron couldn’t compete on the same field today.

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When Carl Davis graduated in 1972 from Jack Yates High School, there were 2,500 students and 560 in his graduating class. Today, there are 822 students enrolled.

As desegregation started in Houston, the city opened up the boundaries so students could attend other schools, such as the nearby Austin High School and Lamar High Schools. Today, Houston ISD is an open enrollment district, which means that students in the city can choose to attend any school in the area even if they aren’t technically zoned to it. Over a decades-long process, open enrollment policies and zoning maps that continued to cut into Yates’s feeder pattern caused the high school to hemorrhage students. Austin High has over 1,500 students, while Lamar High has over 2,800.

Houston also has six public charter high schools in the city that students can choose to attend instead of Yates. 

And as Yates continued to lose students, their football prowess waned. In 2015, Yates’s 38-year playoff streak ended with a 4–6 finish. The team’s last playoff win was in 2011. Whereas coaches such as Jason Todd joined South Oak Cliff in 2013 as defensive coordinator and has stayed on staff since, Yates has cycled through six different head coaches in that same period, including three in the last three years.

A 2012 Houston ISD bond program called for Yates High School to be moved from Sampson Street, the building Davis graduated from that had stood since 1958, to a new $59 million campus a couple hundred yards away on Alabama Street. And while the new building has all the new features in two competition gymnasiums, a performance wing and an auditorium, it is much smaller than the old school. When HISD studied the enrollment numbers, it approved a campus that could hold 1,300 to 1,500 students on Alabama Street, more than 1,000 fewer than the Sampson Street building held.

But Davis and Jeffrey L. Boney are working to bring students back to the new Yates High School campus.

In a partnership with the Port of Houston, the pair created a Maritime Academy at Yates High School, a four-year magnet program for kids who want to gain real-world experience in the industry or take dual credit courses in maritime logistics at Houston Community College. They also helped bring a multi-million-dollar radio and television studio as part of the Magnet School of Communications.

Both efforts are intended to entice talented students not zoned to Yates to come to the campus for magnet programs, using the same open enrollment processes that have bled their student population.

Everything about Yates differs from when Davis left in 1972 and Boney graduated in 1991. The days of a packed Jeppesen Stadium for the Turkey Day Classic are gone, as are the undefeated seasons where cars and buses flooded the highway en route to cheer on the greatest team ever assembled. Even the school building is new.

But now the pair are trying to update the one aspect that’s stayed the same through all eras of Yates High School: the football field.

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It felt like the final domino in a year-long process had fallen when the Houston ISD Board of Trustees approved renaming the Jack Yates football field to the George Perry Jr. Athletic Community Field on September 9, 2021.

When George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020, a consortium of four groups had banded together to honor the former Yates High School basketball and football player who competed on the school’s last team to make it to the state championship in 1992.

Carl Davis, the director of the Houston Society for Change, and Jeffrey L. Boney, the Jack Yates National Alumni Association president and a high school classmate of Floyd’s, had already helped start the maritime and communication programs. But now, two more groups had entered the fold to revamp a football field that hadn’t been updated since the 20th century.

Davis, Boney, Change Happens and a group called 88 C.H.U.M.P, composed of four of Floyd’s high school teammates, approached Harris County Commissioner Rodney Ellis with a plan. After every football season, the Houston Texans donated their field turf to one entity in the area that could best utilize it. If Commissioner Ellis advocated for Yates to be the first inner-city high school to receive the donation, they could immortalize Floyd and provide a new field to a former football powerhouse desperately in need.

And the field wouldn’t just be of use to Yates athletes. The “Community” in the name on the scoreboard signifies it’s open to anyone in the Third Ward.

“The purpose for our field is to bring inner city kids together so they can channel their energy as opposed to being on the street corner and creating bad habits,” Davis said. “They can be on the field having a good time and learning skill sets.”

In May 2021, the opportunity was granted. The NFL Grassroots Foundation and the Texans awarded $450,000 to resurface Yates’s field. On top of that hefty sum, local actors took up the cause. U.S. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee also campaigned to pitch in an additional $100,000. The Invest in Others Charitable Foundation chipped in $25,000, and Texas Southern University put up $10,000.

So on that September day when the unanimous vote was announced, Jack Yates High School was set to receive a new field valued at $1.25 million for a Third Ward community desperately in need. It would make up for the fact the bond program, which had renovated the high school, hadn’t included any upgrades for the athletic facilities.

It’s the same formula Principal Johnson and South Oak Cliff have implemented, using athletics to bring students back to a historic Black school that has fallen by the wayside in the inner city. Football is king in Texas, but once students return to Yates they can see the maritime and communications programs that Yates has implemented to strengthen their academics.

Athletics doesn’t need to compete with the classroom. Instead, they can work hand in hand.

“Sometimes it takes certain things to grab people’s attention,” Boney said. “And we believe this field will serve as that attention grabber for so many individuals who may not have considered Yates as a landing spot to further their education and be a part of this rich legacy.”

Almost two years later, there’s been no progress.

The grant calls for Yates to use Hellas Construction to install the field, which costs just over $880,000. Even with all the grants received, the Yates community must raise an additional $674,000 for the project to be completed.

Certain community members have vocalized that they were unaware the Third Ward had to put up additional funds for the turf field to happen. But at this point, one thing is sure.

If Yates can’t come up with the money by May 2023, the grant money goes away. The football field that’s stood as is since before integration will stay the same.

“This is a point of adversity, and it definitely is a sense of urgency,” Boney said. “But we see it as an opportunity to try to rally us together and figure out who all in the community sees this as worthy of getting behind.”

There’s a fundraising campaign for the George Perry Floyd Jr. Athletic Community Field renovation on the Change Happens website. The stated goal is to raise $400,000.

As of May 2023, they were 50 percent of the way there.

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South Oak Cliff is the shining example of a predominantly Black football team that bucked the trend of metro-suburban school dominance. Houston Yates is a once-former power that doesn’t have the resources to return to glory.

While they have the same minority enrollment and economically disadvantaged student populations, comparing them is unfair.

Both compete in the two largest ISDs in Texas, which consist primarily of inner-city schools, and have storied athletic traditions with dozens of famous alumni. But Dallas ISD has actively tried to compete with the blooming North Texas market for quality teachers and coaches.

South Oak Cliff has kept their coaching staff intact despite back-to-back championships partly because Dallas ISD, in February 2022, made a $15,000 salary adjustment to all football head coaches while increasing the starting pay to $95,000. They passed a $103 million budget that summer that mandated new teacher salaries to start at $60,000 and provided up to $3,500 in retention incentives for every veteran instructor.

Houston ISD has yet to start any initiatives of the sort as the Texas Education Agency constantly threatens a state takeover of its Board of Trustees. That’s why Jeffrey L. Boney and Carl Davis needed to seek outside funds for a renovated athletic complex.

Still, Houston Yates is embarking on many of the same steps South Oak Cliff once took to get to the powerhouse status they own now. They’re fighting for updated facilities to bring students back home, compete for championships on the gridiron and send more kids to college on the back of their brand.

Whether this year or the next, South Oak Cliff’s state championship run will eventually end. Jason Todd isn’t so unrealistic as to expect to win the title every year. His goal is to compete each season into late November, to be the new brand of a Texas high school football blue blood.

If they can do that, they’d continue to honor the students, alumni, staff and community who sacrificed over six long years and two different school-wide moves to get South Oak Cliff where it is today.

They are the blueprint for how hard an inner-city school must work to reach the same playing field as the state’s suburban dynasties once thought to have forever left them behind.

“We’re not just playing for the metroplex of Dallas,” Todd said. “It also gives hope to the guys in Houston to say, ‘It is possible.’ Where a lot of people told you it would never happen. And a lot of people told us it would never happen. ‘We couldn’t do this at South Oak Cliff.’ But you know what? We kept going.”