LEGENDS IN THE LOCKER ROOM. Pastor Kyev Tatum Appointed to Help Carry the Prairie View Interscholastic League’s Extraordinary Legacy Into the Future.
LEGENDS IN THE LOCKER ROOM. Pastor Kyev Tatum Appointed to Help Carry the Prairie View Interscholastic League’s Extraordinary Legacy Into the Future. Link: https://youtu.be/-6zkhzwbNL0
The Fort Worth pastor, former collegiate athlete and African American history advocate will lead legacy tours and help identify deserving PVIL Hall of Fame nominees
FORT WORTH, TEXAS — Every old locker room holds stories.
They linger in scarred wooden benches, dented lockers, fading photographs and championship trophies whose shine has softened with age. They live in the memory of coaches who demanded one more lap, one more block and one more ounce of effort. They echo in the voices of athletes who once pulled on their school colors and carried the hopes of an entire community onto a football field, basketball court or running track.
In the locker rooms of Black Texas, those stories carry an even greater weight.
They tell of young people who competed during segregation, when their schools received fewer resources but expected no less excellence. They tell of coaches who became teachers, counselors, surrogate fathers and community leaders. They tell of marching bands, debate teams, literary competitors and student-athletes who traveled across Texas representing schools that no longer exist—but whose legacies refuse to disappear.
Those stories belong to the Prairie View Interscholastic League.
Now Pastor Kyev P. Tatum, Sr. of Fort Worth has been appointed to help ensure they continue to be told.
Pastor Tatum, a longtime advocate for preserving African American history, has been selected to serve as a Legacy Coordinator for the Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association. Texas High School Coaches Association Hall of Honor inductee Coach Robert Brown of Houston, chairman of the PVIL Coaches Association’s board, invited him to join the organization’s work of preserving and promoting one of the most consequential—and too often overlooked—chapters in Texas history.
The appointment places Pastor Tatum inside a statewide effort to recover names, records, photographs, championships and personal stories that might otherwise disappear with the passing of time.
“I am deeply honored to help preserve the stories of the coaches, athletes, educators and schools that made the Prairie View Interscholastic League one of the most important institutions in Texas history,” Pastor Tatum said. “Their accomplishments must never be forgotten. Their names deserve to be remembered, their stories deserve to be told and their legacy deserves to be celebrated.”
For Pastor Tatum, this is more than an honorary appointment. It is an assignment.
As a Legacy Coordinator, he will help organize and promote the PVIL Legacy Tour, bringing the League’s history into schools, churches and communities throughout Texas. He will also help identify and nominate deserving former athletes, coaches, administrators and supporters for induction into the PVIL Hall of Fame.
It is fitting work for a pastor who has devoted much of his public ministry to searching for stories that history neglected to preserve.
But to understand the importance of that work, one must first understand what the Prairie View Interscholastic League meant to Black Texas.
A League Born in Segregation—and Built for Excellence
Long before integration reshaped public education in Texas, Black students competed in a separate world.
Their schools were often underfunded. Their facilities were frequently inferior. Their textbooks and equipment were commonly handed down after white schools no longer wanted them. Yet inside those unequal institutions, generations of Black educators created environments of extraordinary achievement.
The Prairie View Interscholastic League became the structure through which much of that excellence was organized, measured and celebrated.
In November 1920, members of the Colored Teachers State Association of Texas met with L.W. Rogers, first assistant state superintendent of education for the Division of Negro Schools. From that meeting came the Texas Interscholastic League of Colored Schools, established to govern athletic and academic competition among the state’s Black high schools.
Its formal name was TILCS, but within Black communities it became known as the Prairie View Interscholastic League—the PVIL.
Prairie View stood at the center of its world. League records were maintained there. Academic competitions brought students to the campus. Basketball teams arrived each February. Track-and-field athletes came each spring. For many young Black Texans, traveling to Prairie View offered their first opportunity to visit a college campus and imagine themselves belonging there.
The first state track-and-field meet was held at Prairie View Normal and Industrial College in April 1921. Two years later, the organization came under the authority of Prairie View A&M College and formally became the Prairie View Interscholastic League.
Dr. J.G. Osborne, principal of Prairie View, served as the League’s first sponsor and director. What began with approximately 40 schools grew rapidly. By 1927, when Prairie View Principal W.R. Banks became the second League sponsor, nearly 300 schools were participating.
The PVIL would eventually grow into a 500-school organization stretching across Texas.
That growth represented far more than the expansion of an athletic conference. It created a statewide network connecting Black schools and communities during an era when nearly every major public institution was segregated.
The League modeled many of its programs after the University Interscholastic League, but the PVIL created its own traditions, rivalries, champions and legends.
On football fields, players competed with such intensity that entire communities organized their weeks around game night. On basketball courts, gymnasiums filled with students, parents and neighbors. On tracks, runners carried school pride around every curve and down every straightaway.
The competition extended beyond athletics.
PVIL students participated in debate, typing, literary events, band and music competitions. The New Farmers of America, an organization that prepared Black students for leadership and agricultural careers, also held statewide competitions at Prairie View.
These events provided Black students with something segregation attempted to deny them: a public stage upon which their intelligence, discipline, creativity and athletic ability could be seen.
During the League’s early football years, there was no statewide playoff system. Championship guidelines were loosely defined, leaving different regions to recognize more than one state champion during some seasons between 1921 and 1939.
The system eventually became more organized, but the larger meaning of the League was never dependent upon a championship bracket.
The PVIL gave Black Texas a place to compete—and a place to belong.
For 50 years, it served as the principal governing organization for interscholastic competition among Black high schools in Texas. It produced scholars, musicians, educators, coaches and athletes whose influence reached far beyond their campuses.
Some became professional athletes. Some became college coaches. Others became teachers, principals, business leaders, ministers and public servants. Many returned to the same communities that raised them and invested in another generation.
The League’s official life ended in 1970 as integration changed the structure of Texas public education. In the years surrounding its conclusion, Colquit Dubois Yancy, E.B. Evans and Oscar John Thomas helped carry its organizational leadership forward.
But integration brought an unintended consequence. As Black schools were closed, consolidated or stripped of their identities, many of their trophies, records, photographs and traditions were lost.
The students entered new schools. The old buildings sometimes disappeared. The names of celebrated Black coaches and athletes began slipping out of the state’s official sports memory.
The PVIL had ended—but the responsibility to remember it had just begun.
Coach Robert Brown and the Work of Remembering
Few people have carried that responsibility more faithfully than Coach Robert Brown.
Brown is a life member of the Texas High School Coaches Association and an inductee into its Hall of Honor. He became chairman of the Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association in 2004 and brought with him an expanded vision for preserving the League’s history.
He believed the Association should honor more than coaches. The outstanding athletes who brought distinction to their schools also deserved recognition. So did the administrators, educators and supporters who sustained the programs.
Under Brown’s leadership, that broader vision took shape.
The Association expanded its Hall of Fame recognition and established scholarships to support deserving high school athletes. Its annual banquet became more than an awards ceremony. It became a reunion of a community bound together by shared history—a place where old teammates could reconnect, rival schools could remember their battles and younger generations could meet the people whose shoulders they stood upon.
Brown also understood that history requires evidence.
Memories matter, but memories are strengthened by photographs, uniforms, programs, trophies, newspaper clippings, records and other artifacts. Over the years, he assembled an extensive collection of PVIL memorabilia representing the League’s five decades of existence.
From 2010 through 2017, the University of Texas housed the collection at the Marvin C. Griffin Building in Austin.
The collection is more than an assortment of old objects. Together, the materials tell the story of an educational and athletic institution created by Black Texans who refused to allow segregation to define the boundaries of their excellence.
Brown’s commitment to the PVIL is rooted in his own life.
He graduated from Texas Southern University in 1962 with a bachelor’s degree in physical education and later earned a master’s degree in administration. In 1963, he began a teaching and coaching career with the Houston Independent School District that would span nearly four decades.
In 1968, at only 28 years old, Brown became the youngest head coach of a Class 4A high school in HISD when he was appointed to lead the program at M.C. Williams High School.
He coached football, basketball, track and baseball at several Houston schools, including M.C. Williams, Jefferson Davis, Ross S. Sterling and Robert E. Lee. After retiring in 2002, he continued coaching basketball for AAU programs and private schools throughout the Houston area.
His influence did not end when he left the sideline.
Brown continues to remind young athletes and coaches that the opportunities they enjoy were built by people who competed when the rules of society were deliberately stacked against them.
His life away from athletics also reflects endurance and commitment. Brown and his wife, Barbara, have been married for more than 60 years and are the parents of three adult children.
The preservation of the PVIL has become one of the defining missions of his life.
He has spent years gathering the physical evidence of the League’s existence, reconnecting former participants and advocating for the recognition of people whose accomplishments were too often excluded from mainstream accounts of Texas sports history.
His dream now includes a permanent museum where the PVIL’s photographs, records, trophies, uniforms and memorabilia can remain protected, together and accessible to the public.
It would be a permanent locker room of legends—a place where the names never fade from the jerseys and the stories never disappear from the walls.
Michael Hurd and the History Behind the Lights
If Coach Brown has gathered many of the artifacts of Black Texas athletics, historian Michael Hurd has helped supply the written record.
Hurd, a Houston native, journalist, author and historian, served as the first director of Prairie View A&M University’s Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture. The Institute is devoted to digitally documenting and preserving 500 years of Black history in Texas.
His path to becoming one of the state’s leading chroniclers of Black sports history began long before he entered an archive.
Hurd is a United States Air Force and Vietnam War veteran who received the Air Force Commendation Medal. After his military service, he earned a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin and built a distinguished career as a sportswriter.
He began at the Houston Post before becoming a member of the founding staff of USA Today in 1982. He later wrote for the Austin American-Statesman and Yahoo Sports.
Over the course of his career, Hurd covered nearly every level of major American sports. His assignments included eight NBA Finals, two Super Bowls, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, the 1984 Summer Olympics and numerous NCAA events. He reported on major college football bowl games, postseason basketball tournaments and the Final Four.
But some of Hurd’s most important work concerned the games and athletes mainstream sports history had overlooked.
His first book, Black College Football, 1892–1992, offered a comprehensive history of football programs at historically Black colleges and universities. The book became an important source in 1996 when the National Football Foundation began inducting Black college players into the College Football Hall of Fame.
Hurd later turned his attention to the fields and communities of segregated Texas high school football.
His book Thursday Night Lights: The Story of Black High School Football in Texas documents the coaches, athletes, schools and traditions that flourished under the PVIL. The title itself recalls an era when Black schools often played on Thursday nights because white schools received priority access to stadiums on Fridays.
Yet Hurd’s book makes clear that the night of the week did not diminish the quality of the game.
The lights still came on. The bands still marched. The stands still filled. Communities still gathered, and the athletes still played with everything they had.
Hurd’s scholarship has carried him from Texas classrooms to national institutions. He serves on the selection committee for the Black College Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. He has served as a board member of the Writers’ League of Texas and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
He has spoken about Black history before community organizations, high schools, colleges and universities, including the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Texas at San Antonio and the University of Texas at El Paso.
He has delivered keynote addresses for the East Texas Historical Association Fall Meeting, the Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association Hall of Honor Banquet and the New Braunfels Martin Luther King Jr. Association’s annual march and program.
His expertise has also reached the screen.
Hurd appeared in First and Goal in the Bronx, a CBS Sports documentary about the historic 1968 football game between Grambling and Morgan State at Yankee Stadium—the first Black college football game played in New York City.
He was also featured in Rites of Autumn: The Story of College Football and served as a panelist in Washington, D.C., for the National Archives program Breaking the Line: Black College Football and the Civil Rights Movement.
Through his reporting, research and books, Hurd has recovered history that segregation tried to confine to the margins. He has shown that Black football history is not a footnote to the story of Texas athletics.
It is one of its foundational chapters.
The Pastor Who Knows the Power of a Team
Pastor Tatum comes to the PVIL assignment as a historian and minister—but also as a former athlete.
He competed at both Tarleton State University and the University of North Texas. He understands the language of locker rooms: preparation, discipline, sacrifice, teamwork and accountability. He knows that a coach can shape a young person long after the final whistle and that a team can become an extended family.
He also understands what can happen when a community loses control of its own story.
Much of Pastor Tatum’s historical work has centered on people and places that were overlooked, neglected or nearly erased from public memory. His ministry stretches beyond the pulpit into community advocacy, historical preservation and the recovery of stories whose importance was not always recognized by established institutions.
The PVIL assignment brings those strands of his life together.
As Legacy Coordinator, he will help take the League’s story directly to the public. Through the PVIL Legacy Tour, schools, churches and communities will have opportunities to learn about the athletes and academic competitors who once represented Black high schools across Texas.
The tour can also become a statewide search.
Former PVIL students are aging. Family photographs remain packed inside boxes. Newspaper clippings are folded inside Bibles and scrapbooks. Trophies sit in closets. Uniforms hang in the backs of wardrobes. Stories survive in the memories of sons, daughters, grandchildren, former teammates and neighbors.
Every year, more of that history is at risk of being lost.
Pastor Tatum’s work will include helping identify people whose achievements deserve consideration for the PVIL Hall of Fame. Some nominees may have been celebrated in their hometowns but never recognized statewide. Others may have quietly built lives of service after their playing days ended. Their statistics may be difficult to find, but their impact remains visible in the people and communities they influenced.
The work demands more than searching through record books. It requires listening.
It means asking elders what they remember. It means visiting old school sites and examining yearbooks. It means finding the families of coaches who died before their contributions were formally honored. It means recognizing that the history of a school cannot be measured only by victories and championships.
“This is more than sports history,” Pastor Tatum said. “This is Texas history. It is the story of Black excellence, determination and resilience during an era when our schools were separate and unequal—but our students, educators, coaches and communities still found ways to rise, achieve and win.”
The Names Still Waiting to Be Called
The Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization whose guiding declaration is simple: “Remembering the Past With Pride.”
Its mission includes preserving the glory years of the PVIL, increasing cultural awareness of the League’s heritage and recognizing the former coaches, athletes and other individuals whose accomplishments helped define an era.
The Association also works to identify PVIL coaches who have been inducted into the Texas High School Coaches Association Hall of Honor and continues pursuing the dream of a permanent museum.
But beneath those formal objectives is a deeper purpose.
The Association is trying to restore a historical record fractured by segregation and integration.
Segregation forced Black students to build excellence apart from the state’s white institutions. Integration opened doors that should never have been closed, but it frequently came at the cost of Black school names, traditions, faculty positions and community identity.
The PVIL Coaches Association stands in that gap.
It reminds Texas that integration did not mark the beginning of Black achievement. Black students had already been winning championships, mastering academic competitions, filling stadiums and producing leaders for generations.
Their accomplishments did not become important when the rest of Texas finally began paying attention.
They were important all along.
That is why the Hall of Fame matters. That is why the memorabilia matters. That is why the books, documentaries, tours and oral histories matter.
Every recovered photograph returns a face to the story. Every documented championship restores a school’s pride. Every Hall of Fame induction tells a family that the accomplishments of its loved one have not been forgotten.
For Coach Brown, preservation has been a calling sustained across decades.
For Michael Hurd, it has been the disciplined work of research, journalism and storytelling.
For Pastor Tatum, it is now an appointment to carry the story into communities and help find the legends whose names are still waiting to be called.
The locker room door remains open.
Inside are the coaches who taught young men and women to believe in themselves. There are athletes who carried entire communities on their shoulders. There are scholars, musicians, debaters and agricultural students whose achievements demonstrated the breadth of Black excellence.
There are 50 years of victories, sacrifices and memories.
From 40 schools in 1920 to a 500-school league that shaped generations of Texans, the Prairie View Interscholastic League built a legacy too large to be confined to the past.
Its history is still speaking.
Coach Brown has guarded it. Michael Hurd has documented it. Pastor Kyev Tatum has now been appointed to help carry it across Texas.
The legends are still in the locker room.
And their stories are ready to be heard.
Remembering the Past With Pride—while carrying the PVIL legacy into the future.
Contact Information
For additional information about the Prairie View Interscholastic League Coaches Association, the PVIL Legacy Tour or PVIL Hall of Fame nominations, please contact:
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