60 years later, Worthing alum reflects on chess team that desegregated Houston high school league

Rodney Griffin gets a wistful look in his eye when discussing his old high school chess team, which desegregated Houston high school sports 60 years ago. But he positively glows when a curious young man steps off the basketball court at Sunnyside Park to ask about the timeworn trophy resting on his picnic table that he’s brought with him to reminisce about old times. “Worthing High School, ever heard of it? We played in the first Black and white chess competition in the city of Houston, came in third place in 1962,” Griffin tells him. The basketball player, a slender man in his 20s who declined to give his name, reveals that he played on the chess team at Chavez High School, and that they once placed 12th in a national competition. The pair are soon engaged in a conversation about chess, name dropping masters from Bobby Fischer to Magnus Carlsen. Griffin is absolutely beaming. “Pleasure to meet you! Keep up the good work, young warrior. Each one reach one, now,” Griffin tells him, as they part ways. King Arthur appeal, with unlimited strategies For Griffin, 75, the exchange encapsulates everything that is so important about the game of chess, and Worthing’s role in expanding it to everyone. The pair may not have known each other, but they are bound by a love for the king’s game and a history that, in Houston, starts with Griffin and his teammates. Griffin says chess first piqued his interest when he was about 11 or 12, when he read a passage on the game in an encyclopedia his parents had bought from a door-to-door salesman. He was deep into medieval lore at the time, having read books about King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and the game’s artistic pieces, along with its history, fascinated him. “I didn’t realize what 1600 years of history really meant, until I began to see how layered the game was. How it had been built over centuries, in terms of the unlimited strategies and tactics there were. There was nothing finite about the game, and it lent itself to creativity,” Griffin said. By the time he had enrolled at Worthing, Griffin had already developed a passion for the game, and his mother, a teacher at the school, pointed him in the direction of Aeroanita Bell, a language teacher and sponsor of the school’s chess club. Soon, he was playing chess with teammates Elmo Jackson, Ollie Polk and Eddie Jones most days during lunch and before and after school. Eventually, Bell learned about the Houston High School Chess League through a man named Robert Brieger, a chess master and tournament director at the Houston Chess Club, which sponsored the months-long tournament. Brieger invited Bell to enroll her students in the league, despite the fact that in 1962, Houston was still operating under racist Jim Crow laws. He’d even occasionally come by Worthing to offer chess lessons to her students, Griffin said. We want to foster conversation and highlight the intersection of race, identity and culture in one of America's most diverse cities. Sign up for the HouWeAre newsletter here. The teams competed in weekly double matches at St. Thomas High School. In those halcyon days of printed news dailies, The Houston Chronicle even had a chess writer, George H. Smith, who covered the league’s developments, and Griffin proudly keeps his report from the season opener in January 1962 on a framed plaque. The headline reads “School League Opens; Negro Team Entered,” and the reporter lays out the details about how Worthing beat Lamar High School, a white school in Upper Kirby, by a score of 5-3. Griffin contributed a point by winning one of his two matches. The following week, the principals of Lamar and Jefferson Davis High School, named for the president of the Confederacy, asked that their schools’ names be dropped from the competition because they did not want to be affiliated with an integrated competition. The teams dropped out of the league soon after. Griffin, a ninth grader, was a full year younger than his opponents. At the time, Worthing was a combined junior and senior high school, serving seventh through 12th grades, while the white schools they competed with were reserved for 10th through 12th graders. “Beating Lamar caused quite a stir,” Griffin said. “We were defeating older white kids, which wasn’t supposed to happen given what chess represented as a ‘thinking person’s game.’” The Worthing students were somewhat aware of their position as trailblazers, but weren’t overly concerned with it, Griffin said. They were just trying to play chess. “We had some sense of the the history of it, but not the magnitude. We just loved playing chess and we felt we were second to none,” Griffin said. “Our conversations were just that we were going to go to the second floor library of St. Thomas High School and they’re going to know who we are.” By the season’s end, Griffin and his teammates had made good on that promise, making it to the “Winner’s Circle” as third-place finishers. Keeping up the habit Griffin would transfer to Jack Yates High School the next year and fell out of touch with his teammates at Worthing. Jones died in a fire as an undergraduate at Dillard University in New Orleans, Griffin said, and last he’d heard, Jackson had moved to Austin and Polk to California. For his part, Griffin went on to be one of the first Black students at the University of Texas-Austin, where he played chess with his roommates in the Kappa Alpha Psi house and students across campus, Black, white and brown. Sometimes, he’d even win a few bucks on a game — mostly from “white folks who had the bread” and were foolish enough to bet against him. “I could play the game in more ways than one. You could say I could buy a lot of scotches, a lot of Cutty Sark,” he said with a laugh. Now a commissioner on the Missouri City Planning and Zoning Commission, Griffin doesn’t have much time for chess these days, but before he left Sunnyside Park on a recent evening, another man, older than the first he’d chatted with, approached him with a challenge. “I’ll beat you. I’ve been playing chess for 25 years,” said the man, who identified himself as Eric Curry. “We ought to have a chess tournament.” Griffin laughed, but the pair had to take a rain check. He’d been so caught up in his conversations about chess, he was late to pick up his wife. sam.kelly@chron.com - How Texas became the testing ground for Post-Roe America - Biden says human smuggling crackdown will intensify after San Antonio migrant deaths - Houston to pay contractor $7 million to clean homeless encampments - Sheriff Ed Gonzalez withdraws from consideration as ICE chief - Harris County's district clerk hoped to honor jurors. Instead her event led to a mistrial in a murder case.

60 years later, Worthing alum reflects on chess team that desegregated Houston high school league

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