March Madness: A Secret Game and Segregation

And, then there were four. Duke and Michigan State, Wisconsin and Kentucky will battle it out for a spot in the NCAA Basketball Championship Game. Millions will watch. But, the game that foreshadowed interracial basketball games was played in secret in the Spring of 1944. Two remarkable college basketball teams — one Black and one White — changed the way college basketball is played.

The North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University in Durham) basketball team, coached by the late Basketball Hall of Famer John McLendon, met an all-white military team from Duke University’s Medical School at an undisclosed location to play ball. Both were great teams. Both were forgotten until now.

Scott Ellsworth is the author of The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph. It is an extraordinary book that reveals the history of basketball, a full decade before the birth of the Civil Rights Movement. Most importantly, Ellsworth presents the bravery of African American and white basketball players who defied racism and fought against segregation by playing a basketball game that was forbidden to take place. TheVillageCelebration interviewed Ellsworth about his book.

Ellsworth: I was working on writing a book about college basketball and race relations in the U.S. I was interested in the 1950s, and then I went to the Basketball Hall of Fame up in Springfield, Massachusetts to do some work. [Then] I met an elderly African American gentleman, by the name of John McLendon. McLendon is the hero of the The Secret Game. He is one of my great heroes, someone I got to know quite well in the last five years of his life. We talked for a little bit, and I heard a lot about him. He’s not as well known as he needs to be … . I arranged to write a story about him for the New York Times about the 50th Anniversary of the CIAA Tournament. And the things those guys went through was an important story, and it was a nice little story.

I went to interview him in Cleveland, Ohio. And we sat down and he showed this list of all these ‘racial firsts’ in basketball, where he was the first African American assistant basketball coach on an U.S. Olympic Team. He was also the first Black college coach to win a desegregated national basketball championship. He showed me all kind of stuff … and on the top of the list was 1944, the first integrated college basketball game in the South, North Carolina College for Negroes (NCCU) against the Duke Medical School.

This was eleven years before the Montgomery bus boycott …. three years before Jackie Robinson desegregated major league baseball and this is in the North; and thirty years before a white southern school had a Black player.

I wrote this book for everybody to read. I tried to write this book, so high school students will read, and college students can read.

Ellsworth: I think it is essentially important! These books give us a different perspective and understand it’s a process … . You can’t divert history, you got to share it. There is a lot of history that doesn’t show up in history books. To get that history, often times you gotta go to the archives [or the library] and talk to elderly people because they were the ones who were there.

The Secret Game is important because it was an amazing breakthrough in  basketball that people don’t know about. What I discovered is that in the South, throughout the South, and during World War II — it [referring to The Secret Game] was a precursor to the Civil Rights Movement. It is often forgotten. There were a lot of African Americans and some white allies who were starting to push back against Jim Crow and push back against segregation, saying they are not going to have it anymore. This is a vital part of our heritage. It can help not just help give us a part of who we are — it can inspire us to make things better.

One other thing that’s important is that John McLendon is not only this great pioneer in helping to desegregate basketball, but he is also this brilliant innovator. He was ahead of his time, and everyone else, in what we see in basketball today.

When he starts to coach in the late 30’s, people were starting to have a “fast break.” His fast break was three times faster than everyone else … . He introduced this blistering fast, fast break, a very tenacious full court pressure offense. He also invented a play to keep the ball away, this was before the shot clock. Other teams called it “two in the corner” and that later became the “four corners” by Dean Smith. He gave McLendon credit for that.

What people forget about, and don’t realize, is that John McLendon was at the University of Kansas — when there were just a handful of African American undergraduates there in the 1930’s. John McLendon was the last student of James Naismith. Naismith was the old timer that no one listened to anymore. He was not that crazy about what was going in basketball. He did not like the commercialization.

 John McLendon also coached at Tennessee State A & I University, Hampton Institute, Kentucky State, and Cleveland State (a predominately white college). He coached in the pros, too, at the Cleveland Pipers (ABL) and the Denver Rockets (ABA). McLendon was brilliant enough to realize that this man here had some ideas that could help basketball. What McLendon did was took some of Naismith’s ideas, and he used them as the basis for helping reinvent basketball.

Ellsworth: To begin with, the Baseball Hall of Fame got to where they break down the Negro Leagues, etc. We need to have that happen in college basketball, where great Black college basketball teams were not given credit to and not allow to prove themselves in the NCAA and NIT. One thing we need to do is realize that we must let people know where this great basketball came from — it came from Black college basketball schools. It’s time to recognize that these great Black college basketball schools came from the segregation days.

Ellsworth: Yes, these players deserved respect because they are good. They are really good! The coaches and players of highly ranked predominately white schools really get it … and they know that they are playing a good team. They will give credit where it is due. Today’s predominately white basketball teams don’t know about John McLendon, but the old coaches of those days knew who he was.

Here’s a little story: The Secret Game started in March of 1944 in Durham, and it was supposed to be a secret. But the word got out that a new type of basketball was being played at NCCU and white college basketball players, very good ones at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, sneaked out in their cars to play pick up games at NCCU’s gym.

So what happened was they saw this game first hand. Then when they got the Army and the Navy to go back to Philadelphia, they started bringing McLendon to a wider audience. McLendon is father of the modern game.

Ellsworth: No, I don’t think we are there yet [as Ellsworth is referring to Black coaches getting the respect they deserve today], but I think we are heading in the right direction.

When college basketball starts to desegregate in the late 60s and 70s, some of the most talented African Americans who used to play at HBCUs are now playing at predominately white schools. There has been a talent shift … . That being said, I am a huge fan of seeing [African Americans] going to the NCAA.