In 1970, Duane Thomas took the field as the No. 1 draft choice of the Dallas Cowboys. His impact was immediate. The team finished the season playing in its first Super Bowl. The Cowboys returned a year later, winning their first championship, with Thomas scoring a touchdown and rushing for 95 yards in Super Bowl VI.
He was, at times, controversial and deliciously quotable. When a gaggle of sportswriters confronted him on the sands of Miami Beach days before Super Bowl V, they asked if he understood the significance of what they called the “ultimate” game.
Without hesitating, Thomas replied, “If it’s the ultimate, how come they’re playing it again next year?”
He once described his running style with words that resembled free verse: “I move through the shadows, then a flash of daylight. I run like in a dream. When I run, I am the dream.”
And during those two seasons, no one could argue. Thomas scored the first-ever touchdown in Texas Stadium in 1971, moving through the secondary of the New England Patriots on a 56-yard touchdown run that felt like poetry, as he navigated the interplay of light and shadows amid the roar of a sold-out crowd.
So, to some of us, it’s not surprising that Thomas is the father of Jamila Pamoja-Thomas, who wowed her fans last Saturday at Pan-African Connection in South Oak Cliff by reading aloud from her fine and powerful book The Evolution of Me: A Poetic Memoir.
Born in Dallas, Pamoja-Thomas grew up in Oak Cliff, graduating from A. Maceo Smith High School in 1997. Duane Thomas and her mother, Imani Pamoja, who died of a stroke in 2018, separated when Pamoja-Thomas was 6, a divorce she deems crushing, given her closeness to both.
In 2022, she endured her own divorce, ending a marriage that lingered for 20 years. She managed to raise four children — three boys and a girl, ranging in age from 15 to 22 — while earning two master’s degrees and a Ph.D. and writing 16 books.
Not that it wasn’t difficult. In many ways, her struggles have resembled those of a running back, given the obstacles put in her path en route to the goal line.
Soon after graduating from college, she landed her dream job — as an investigative reporter. Hired by a small, Black-owned newspaper, she was thrilled, she says, to feel the arrow pointing straight up. Until she got pregnant, which led immediately to being fired. The paper’s publisher labeled her condition “a handicap.”
For Pamoja-Thomas, the hurt became a rallying cry. Being the victim of outrageous sexism only fueled her mission, propelling her to a triple branding as a writer, motivational speaker and counselor. She has learned, she says, to practice what she preaches: “How to move forward in life — after everything has shattered.”
Her ex-Cowboy dad now lives in Arizona. Pamoja-Thomas, who makes her home in Atlanta, enjoys what she calls a beautiful relationship with her father and her “bonus mom,” Tapzyana Thomas, to whom the Cowboys great has been married for years.
Pamoja-Thomas says she benefited “enormously” from having birth parents who demonstrated how to be activists. Her mother was involved in what her daughter calls “the Dallas Black Arts Movement. Her activist perspective meant doing it entirely through the arts.” Pamoja-Thomas lists her literary influences as Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and her mother’s “prestigious writing.”
Her dad was also an activist, she says, citing his well-publicized criticism of the low amounts pro football players were paid in the 1970s. Early in his Cowboys days, Thomas discovered that despite being a first-round draft choice, he was earning less than two second-round rookies and a fifth-round choice.
His salary? $20,000 a year. In an act of defiance, he spent the 1971 season in silence, refusing to speak (with rare exceptions) to teammates, coaches or the news media. Soon after Thomas’ championship performance in Super Bowl VI, the Cowboys traded him.
What his daughter most remembers is her father “pawning his Super Bowl ring to provide for his family. And for that,” she says tearfully, “he has always been my hero.”
Harry Edwards, professor emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, speaking to The Dallas Morning News in 2003, said professional football players — Black players in particular — owe Thomas a debt of gratitude for having fought so valiantly for economic parity and power.
“Duane Thomas skewed to the more militant images of the day but, unfortunately, he never had a movement behind him,” Edwards said. “When Muhammad Ali defied the draft board in Houston, he had Jim Brown and Bill Russell by his side, coming forward to support him. Duane Thomas never had anything like that.”
Which is yet another reason Thomas’ daughter so admires him. He continues to be a rapt listener to her poetry, sharing professorial feedback mixed with a dad’s loving support. Now 76, he has become what she calls a wondrous painter, whose bold creations she vows to include in a future book of poetry.
“I identity with him from the perspective of being a black sheep — as he was. I always felt like an outsider — as he was. There is so much more to my father, and there is so much more to me. My dad is my dad, but he is so much more. The biggest reward in life is being able to share who you are, authentically. When you’re able to share who you are authentically, the potential of who you are begins to blossom and grow. And my dad, like me, knows that as well as anyone.”
