Douglass-Tulsa Washington football rivalry lives again

Stories about hundreds of fans riding in from Tulsa on a line of busses so long, there wasn't enough room at Douglass to park them all.

Stories of how the other all-black schools in town would play their games on Thursday, so they didn't lose fans to the big game.

Stories of Douglass' grade-school children getting dismissed early on gameday, almost as if it was a holiday. And in some ways it was. For a long time, Douglass held a parade before the game, stretching from the school nearly into downtown Oklahoma City.

Wells can tell stories about games from the 1940s. White owns an old school newspaper with an article discussing the game being played as far back as 1914.

After a decade of silence, the rivalry breathes life once again on Friday night, thanks to the work of people like Douglass coach Willis Alexander, former Tulsa Washington coach Darrell Hall, and other key figures at both schools.

More than a football rivalry, Douglass-Tulsa Washington became a piece of Oklahoma's cultural history that reignites nearly 100 years after it first began.

For the first 30 years of the rivalry, it was a necessity. The black schools couldn't play against the white schools, and they looked everywhere for opponents.

Before integration in the mid-1950s, Douglass' schedule consisted of teams from all-black schools in Amarillo or Wichita Falls, Houston or Kansas City, along with now-defunct Oklahoma teams like Ardmore-Douglass and Manual Training of Muskogee.

To Douglass people, it wasn't the game against Tulsa's Booker T. Washington High School. It was the game against Tulsa.

“We couldn't play a lot of the other schools, so it was kind of like they didn't exist in our minds,” said White, the longtime Douglass coach who is now retired.

It was the truest version of a rivalry game between the state's two biggest cities.

“Short of winning a state championship, you wanted to beat Tulsa more than anything,” Wells said. “The fans aren't as feverish as they used to be. As far as the teams and coaches are concerned, they would have rather kicked Tulsa than anybody.”

As a player at Douglass, White's first experience with Washington came as a sophomore in 1960. Not long after college, he began coaching at Douglass, eventually becoming the head coach from 1976-2003.

“My old coach, Moses F. Miller, who our stadium is named after, would tell us stories about that game and how intense it was back in its early days,” White said. “It stayed that way for a long time. The stands would always be packed, standing room only. It was a very important game to both communities.”