People's perception of small town Texas is generally an area consumed by high school football and racism. H.G. Bissinger's Friday Night Lights is the story of one man's experience with both segregation and football at Permian High School in Odessa, Texas. Bissinger's novel describes the lengths that a high school football team and it surrounding community went through to eventually abandon their pro-segregation ideals for the good of their football team. .
The novel is set in what is described to be an average Texas town during the time of the Civil Rights movements. Bissinger describes Odessa as being a segregated town where the whites reside on one side of the town and the non-whites naturally on the other. This town even happen to be split by the railroad tracks, which made what side you were on abundantly clear. True to form, there was a nice high school and a not as nice high school, and up until the late 1900's, when the state and federal governments created desegregation mandates to receive funding, only white students attended the nicer Permian High. The story goes on to detail what history tells us to be the normal reaction from parents and students; the parents went to school boards and town meetings while the students made it their goal in life to get the non-whites to drop out of the school that they didn't belong in. True to form, redistricting and racial percentages started to equal out and the once clear class distinction as dictated by the railroad tracks began to blur. .
Like many southern towns during the civil rights movement, the whites were up in arms and now racial tension in Odessa was beginning to peak. This is until both races found they had something in common, other than being human, it was their love of high school football.