Wade Hudson: "Run, Ray, run," I yell. Back pedaling, clutching the football in my small right hand. Ray dotted down the field, and I threw the ball as far as I could. It reached his hands while he was in stride, but he dropped it. The ball was right in his hands and he dropped it.

One big unified groan from our team greeted the miscue. "That was a touchdown, Ray. You dropped the touchdown," PG cried out. "What's wrong with you, boy?" Crow complained. "We needed that score."

The opposing team broke out in loud clapping and back slapping. "Ray can't catch a cold in the dead of winter," one of them joked. "He needs some glue on his hands."

Acting cool, Ray shook his head and walked back to our huddle. "I'll get the next one," he proclaimed.

During the afternoons and the evenings when leaves have begun to fall, the hot summer days that folks complain about, had gone, and our new school year had started, we could usually be found playing football on the large lawn at Mr. and Mrs. Blow's house. We were the boys who lived on or near Mary Street, one of the major roads that ran through the east side of black Mansfield.

Mr. and Mrs. Blow's house was unlike the houses that dotted Mary Street. The remodeled brick structure stood out among the wooden dwellings. It looked more like the houses that had sprouted up in white suburbs across the country during the 1950s and 1960s.

We saw them in popular magazines, such as Good Housekeeping and the Saturday Evening Post. Black folks couldn't live in those white only suburbs, but that didn't stop those who had the money from building their own suburban looking homes.

That's what Mr. and Mrs Blow had done. They were both school teachers, but it was the Blows' lawn that we cared most about. We claimed it as our own football field. Wide and with a lot of space on which to run like a real one. We could throw long passes, cut across it to dodge tacklers, and even punt on fourth downs. The grass was bright green and deep like the carpeting in rich folks' homes. It was always neatly cut.

Determined to keep our games going, we sometimes played until it was so dark, we could barely see each other. Only Sundays were unavailable to us. Sunday was the Lord's Day. Our group included my brother PG and other boys our ages seven, eight and nine years old.

In the fall and winter, we played football. When spring came, we turned to baseball and played until the weather started to change, and football made its appearance again on television. Our baseball games were played across the street from the Blows' house directly in front of Ray Bogan's on a vacant lot next to our other neighbors, Mr. Otis and Ms. Ella Lee's house.

For all of us, football and baseball players were role models. In football, we idolized Jim Brown, Olly Manson, Willie Galimore, Lenny Moore, and other black players who had established successful careers in the sport.

In baseball, it was Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, Don Newcombe, and Roy Campanella. They all had overcome racism and discrimination to play in the highest professional leagues in sports.

Their exploits were featured in Jet and Ebony magazines, two national African American publications. They were in the sports pages of white newspapers that wouldn't cover any positive stories about other black people. Even the daily newspapers in segregated Streetport, the city north of Mansfield, covered them.