Basketball's African American Pioneers

Amid burning crosses and Confederate flags of the 1960s, Perry Wallace, currently a professor at American University, became the SEC's first prominent African-American basketball player. (By Jonathan Newton -- The Washington Post)
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"A black guy going to Vanderbilt?" wondered former Bullet Bob Dandridge. "Little things like that made you take notice."

Amid burning crosses and waving Confederate flags and all the bile and hate of the 1960s, Wallace became the Southeastern Conference's first prominent African American basketball player.

The cheerleaders at more than one SEC school led a racist chant specifically targeted at him. "There was so much," Wallace said. "I just tried to ignore everything when I was playing."

He wasn't immune to racism in Nashville, either. Wallace attended a church while at Vanderbilt, until several deacons and elders ushered the young student athlete into a side room.

"They said, 'Some of the older members of the congregation will write us out of their will if you keep coming to this church,' " he said in the film.

At his office yesterday morning, he added: "I just understood those were the times. I was conscious of the idea I was a pioneer. You dealt with racial epithets. This is where slavery and cotton were once king."

And yet, there is no lingering resentment in Wallace today, not even for the white teenager zooming by in a car with friends, the kid who pointed a handgun at a 10-year-old who thought he was going to die.

"Not letting go of that will eventually destroy you," he said. "My father had an interesting way of putting it. He said, 'If you hate anyone, I'll kill you,' " Wallace said, laughing.

Drafted by the 76ers in 1970, Wallace never made the opening day roster. But while in Philadelphia, he met Jack Ramsay, the Hall of Fame coach, who was honest enough to tell Wallace he could be an NBA journeyman but that he would rather recommend a purposeful and bright man like Wallace go to law school.

He earned his degree at Columbia, came to the District in the mid-1970s, worked as a lawyer for the Justice Department and eventually ended up at American, where he quietly taught law until a socially conscious filmmaker from New York wanted to tell his story and others, so no one would forget.

And one night last week, during Black History Month, he walked into that small reception room and took his rightful place alongside Monroe, Love and Dorothy Height, the 95-year-old civil rights activist, who wore her signature bonnet.

And Joanna McLendon, the widow of John McLendon, the legendary coach who once played for James Naismith at Kansas and later organized "The Secret Game" in Durham, N.C., in 1944 -- at the time an illegal, interracial scrimmage between an all-white Duke medical team which prided itself as the best in the state and McLendon's all-black YMCA crew. (Duke went down hard, 88-44.)

And Ben Jobe, the best coach almost nobody knows, who once beat Bobby Cremins while at Southern.

Howie Evans, the longtime sports editor of the Amsterdam News, one of the nation's oldest black newspapers, said it best as he entered the reception room last week.

"If the stories don't come out of this room, they're going under," he said.

By the end of the film, we learned Wallace's Pearl High School team in North Nashville competed in the state playoffs the first year they were desegregated in Tennessee. Pearl won it all, "on the exact same night Texas Western beat Kentucky in 1966," he said.

Change had come, in basketball and society, and they had all played a part in it.