Black Participation in College Basketball - Collegiate Play

Collegiate Play

At the college level, African-American athletes such as Paul Robeson at Rutgers University, Wilbur Wood at Nebraska, Fenwick Watkins at the University of Vermont and Cumberland Posey at Penn State and Duquesne became basketball stars before World War I in white major-college programs.

George Gregory, Jr., the 6'-4" captain and center of the Columbia University team from 1928–1931, became the first African American all-American college basketball player, in 1931.

Big Dave DeJernett, the 6-4 captain and center of integrated Indiana Central University, which won the mythical Indiana college conference championship with a 16-1 record in 1934 (Notre Dame and Purdue finishing 2nd and 3rd), became the first Afro-American four-year collegiate star to sign with a top-level professional contender when he agreed to play for the New York Rens in 1936.

Several black college basketball programs stood out. Xavier University of Louisiana won 67 games and lost only two between 1934 and 1938, and Alabama State University, Lincoln University in Missouri, Morgan State University in Maryland and Wiley College in Texas all produced exceptional basketball programs.

From the 1920s until 1947, few African-American players were allowed in major college programs. One notable exception was Jackie Robinson, a multi-sport star (1939–1941) at UCLA just before World War II, who went on to greater fame for breaking Major League Baseball's 20th-century color line. Robinson's honors at UCLA were impressive: for two years highest scorer in basketball competition in the Pacific Coast Conference, national champion long (then "broad") jumper, the school's first athlete to letter in four sports, All-American football halfback and varsity baseball shortstop. He left UCLA in 1941 because of financial pressures, not many credits away from a bachelor's degree. UCLA also had Don Barksdale, the first African-American consensus all-American basketball player in 1947. Barksdale would later be the first African-American to win an Olympic basketball gold medal (1948), a Pan-American basketball gold medal (1951), and would be the third African-American to sign an NBA contract after Chuck Cooper joined Boston and Earl Lloyd signed with Washington. He was the first African-American to play in the NBA All-Star Game.

In 1947, William Garrett integrated big-time college basketball by joining the basketball program at Indiana University. He broke the gentlemen's agreement that had barred black players from the Big Ten Conference, at that time college basketball's most important conference. While enduring taunts from opponents and pervasive segregation at home and on the road, Garrett became the best player Indiana had ever had, an all-American, and, in 1951, the third African-American drafted in the NBA. Within a year of his graduation from IU, there were six African-American basketball players on Big Ten teams.

Despite the examples set by DeJernett, first Indiana Mr Basketball George Crowe, and other Hoosier hoops stars like Muncie's Jack Mann, Whiteland's Ray Crowe, and Anderson's Jumpin' Johnny Wilson (not to mention Davage Minor and Chuck Harmon), Indiana was an unlikely place for a civil rights breakthrough. It was stone-cold isolationist, widely segregated and hostile to change. But in the late 1940s, Indiana had a leader of the largest black YMCA in the world, which viewed sports as a wedge for broader integration; a visionary university president, who believed his institution belonged to all citizens of the state; a passion for high school and college basketball; and a teenager who was, as nearly as any civil rights pioneer has ever been, the perfect person for his time and role. Slowly from there, Division I college basketball became integrated.