As kind of a golden age of high school sports, the 1920s are a really interesting time to look at this question. This is the era when school-level sports associations were streamlining into state-run governing bodies, interscholastic competitions became national news complete with popular underdog stories, and girls' competition sports enjoyed a brief period of controversial flourishing before they were mostly suppressed for decades. More broadly, by . 1920 high school was legally and culturally entrenched as a path for everyone, not just the college bound--and it was seen as a place to make moral and ethical citizens. So more students than ever before flooded into schools, and sports were promoted as a way to both keep marginal students in school and to, yes, build character.
Of course, all of these developments occurred in a US of de facto or de jure segregation, and race affected the competitive sports experience both north and south of the official segregation line.
Robert Pruter uses Illinois as his focus in The Rise of High School Sports and the Search for Control, which makes a great comparative case study: most of the state had legally integrated schools, but the southern tip (Little Egypt, for any Midwesterners out there) was segregated.
The Great Migration of black Americans from south to north around World War I affected the racial dynamic of Chicago schools and thus sports teams. Before the war, individual black athletes often made newsworthy contributions to mixed scholastic teams. Reception was not uniformly positive. Hyde Park school, for example, chose to cancel games on occasion rather than give in to opposing teams' demand to bench their black players.
The concentration of African-Americans in specific Chicago neighborhoods led to a stricter split between sports teams and "all-colored" sports teams. Predominantly black and white schools did play each other in intra-league play, although not without the occasional clash. Or, well, riots involving fists and knives. There was particularly pride attached to end-of-season tournament play. Chicago's black elite were immensely proud of their successful sports teams, especially boys' basketball, but for two years the league managed to block their participation in the tournament.
In the 1920s, it was also common for colleges to host tournaments and meets for high school students--or, especially in the case of girls' sports, mixed high school and collegiate competition. These tended to be segregated by race. Lincoln University in Missouri hosted an annual track meet that attracted schools from all over the Midwest, from both legally segregated and integrated areas, because this was Midwestern black runners' major chance to compete in interstate-level competition.
Pruther also notes that even well north of the Mason-Dixon line, the leagues governing sports involving contact like wrestling and swimming were more likely to deny black student athletes the chance to compete against white ones.
In the legally segregated south, the proliferation and then streamlining of sports leagues preserved segregation. Black schools that wanted to compete in interscholastic athletics--and they did, even in the face of less funding and older facilities--were left to form their own leagues. (Interestingly, so were Catholic schools, and not just because they tended to be smaller than public ones. De La Salle in New York was rejected not only from the local public schools' leagues but even the private schools' one because of its Catholic affiliation.)
Charles Herbert Thompson has argued that geographic location played a major role in the development of athletics in black schools under segregation. He sees the "border states," rather than the Deep South, as the engine of black interscholastic athletic development--but even then, there could be significant variation. The one constant, of course, was the role of race governing competitions.
Washington, D.C. became the early hub of black high school athletic competition. More generous funding for its black schools, a history of providing four years of education instead of just two (as in states like Kentucky prior to World War I), and a significant population density provided athletes with better facilities and more robust competition than elsewhere. The first all-black sports league was established in DC in 1906. Like white leagues of the time, it united high school, collegiate, and club teams in competitive play. This league was followed closely by an all-high school one in 1910.
Other regions were slower to get organized, tournament-hosting athletic competition, but interest was high and growth rapid once it began. The West Virginia leauge's basketball tournament included only 11 out of 24 black high schools in 1925 but 22 only five years later.
For the most part, individual team match-ups were segregated. There was some regional variation. The schools in the Kansas-western Missouri league, for example, sometimes did get to play all-white schools in one-on-one competition.
But the unbreakable barrier was end-of-season tournaments. This burden fell hardest of all on the black athletes in Illinois' "Little Egypt" region, which maintained segregated school systems unlike most of the state. The black schools banded together as the Southern Illinois Conference of Colored High Schools for interscholastic play, but the league was absorbed by the overall Illinois High School Athletic Association in 1928 as part of the general streamlining trend. The de jure black schools looked forward to inclusion in the official state tournament, with the de facto all-black schools in the north--but found themselves locked out anyway.
Although most research on this time period (and there isn't that much) focuses on boys' sports, there are a few intriguing notes from the girls' side. The 1920s witnessed a brief blossoming of girls' interscholastic competiton in high school and college, but it was quickly and adroitly suppressed (especially in cities) because girls were argued to be too weak for competition. Of course girls continued to compete in their sports, when they were able, but they were banned from representing their schools (and accessing the funding and facilities that schools offered). However, at least some of the college-sponsored tournaments for black student-athletes continued to offer black girls the chance to compete for their schools on an interstate level. Girls' non-school sports were typically segregated. In cities like D.C. and Philadelphia, local YWCAs stepped up to sponsor teams where schools would not, and in the 1920s there were separate Colored YWCA branches.
As high school sports achieved national prominence and news time in the 1920s, black student-athletes were every bit as involved as their white counterparts. But sharing the playing field was an entirely different question.
Further Reading:
Additional question: Did the sports offered tend to vary by whether the school was white or black?
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