Carl Maxey: A Fighting Life

5. King Carl Wins the Crown

he used his athletic prowess to get where he wanted to go: the University of Oregon in Eugene. Exactly how he arrived there is a matter of some conjecture. According to one story Maxey used to tell, he received a track scholarship to the University of California. He was on the way to Berkeley when he passed through Eugene, saw the green and mossy University of Oregon campus and said, “I’ve never seen a more beautiful place.” He didn’t go a step farther. Somehow he wangled a track scholarship at the university and got admitted. Lou Maxey considered this story to be perfectly plausible for Carl, especially the young and impetuous Carl. The more likely story is that he had decided on Oregon long before, for two reasons. First, Maxey had his sights on being a track star and the University of Oregon had a record of nurturing black track stars. Mack Robinson, Jackie Robinson’s brother, had come out of the university and won a silver medal in the 1936 Olympics. The second reason , and maybe an even bigger one, was that Bob Gibson was planning to reenroll at Oregon. He and Carl remained the closest of friends after they were discharged from the army. Carl went to Tacoma several times to visit Gibson and his sister and father. He bunked in their home and stayed up late into the night, talking, talking, and talking. The fatherless Maxey got along especially well with Gibson’s father, a mechanic for Greyhound . “My dad just loved the guy,” said Gibson. “Carl was good at relating to everybody, but he was especially close to my dad.” Gibson said it was during these late-night sessions that Maxey decided to join Gibson at the University of Oregon. Gibson had already put in a year before he entered the army and was heading back on a football scholarship . They became roommates during the spring semester and summer session of 1946 and then again during the 1946–47 academic year, which turned out to be Maxey’s last year at the University of Oregon. That year and a half had a tremendous impact on Carl’s path, both in terms of his intellectual life and his personal life. The University of Oregon had a reputation as a liberal bastion. In those heady years after the triumph of democracy over fascism, the campus was particularly walking right into trouble 51 giddy with liberalism. Wayne Morse, later to become Oregon’s maverick U.S. senator and a fierce critic of the Vietnam War, was the dean of the law school and an influential force for many students, including Maxey. “It was great just listening to him speak,” said Maxey. “He expressed concerns about people and the world, and it was sort of my advent in both law and politics.” Maxey joined the One World Club, dedicated to liberal ideals and social justice. The school brought the great black actor, singer, and activist Paul Robeson to campus, at a time when such an invitation was practically a radical act in itself (Robeson’s passport was revoked in 1950 because of his friendship with the Soviet Union). The university also had a much more tolerant policy toward black athletes than many schools of the era, which is one reason why Gibson and many other out-of-state black athletes gravitated there. Maxey’s track career at the university never panned out, partly because of some nagging injuries and partly because of a clash with the coach, who was from Texas and was considered by Maxey to be a racist. Yet Maxey’s academic career progressed steadily, if not spectacularly . He was B and C student, with an occasional A thrown in when he took a course that really captured him, such as U.S. history. Yet the drive that Father Byrne noticed ten years prior was now in full flower. Gibson remembered that Carl methodically set out to make himself into the kind of speaker, and the kind of man, that he wanted to be. “He used to memorize a new word every day and try to use it in his daily language, so he would have that in his vocabulary,” said Gibson. “He used to tell me, if you’re going to be a lawyer, you need to have the words.” Even while his athletic aspirations stalled, his romantic aspirations flourished. Not long into that first (and last) academic year, he met Ninon King, a senior...