Rag Radio: Historian and Journalist Michael Hurd: 500 Years of Black History & Culture in Texas

Michael Hurd is an author, journalist, and historian. He is managing editor of the Texas Black History Preservation Project which is documenting the almost 500-year history of African-Americans in Texas, and is the director of the Texas Institute for the Preservation of History and Culture at Prairie View A&M University.

The author of Black College Football, 1892-1992, Michael Hurd is currently working with the University of Texas Press on a book about the storied history of football programs at Texas’ all-black high schools.

On the show we discuss the special historical role of football in pre-integration black high schools and historically black colleges. Hurd shares stories about Esteban, the black Moor slave and Spanish conquistador who was the first black African in Texas; the Afro-Mexicans who formed some of the first all-black communities in Texas; the Camp Logan riots in Houston; and the story of Juneteenth, when black slaves in Texas finally learned that they were free. We also discuss the rewriting of history through textbooks, the issue of Confederate flags and symbols, and the banishing of Jefferson Davis’ statue from the main mall at UT-Ausin.

Hurd was a sportswriter for the Houston Post, where his primary beat was covering small college sports, and the Austin American-Statesman, where he was also an assistant city editor; for 11 years he worked as a sportswriter for USA Today; and he worked as an editorial producer at Yahoo Sports.

Host and Producer of Rag Radio: Thorne Dreyer; Engineer and Co-Producer: Tracey Schulz; Photographer: Roger Baker. Rag Radio (www.theragblog.com/rag-radio/) is produced in the studios of KOOP 91.7-FM, an all-volunteer, cooperatively-run community radio station in Austin, Texas, in association with The Rag Blog (TheRagBlog.com) and the New Journalism Project, a Texas 501(c)(3) nonprofit. The syndicated show is broadcast (and streamed) live Fridays, 2-3 p.m. (Central) on KOOP (www.koop.org/listen-now), and is later rebroadcast and streamed on WFTE-FM in Mt. Cobb and Scranton, PA., on Houston Pacifica’s KPFT HD-3 90.1, and by KKRN, 88.5-FM in Round Mountain, CA — and as a featured podcast at VT (VeteransToday.com). Contact: [email protected]. Running time: 55:07.

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