ACC Basketball: The Story of the Rivalries, Traditions, and Scandals of the First Two Decades of the Atlantic Coast Conference

7. The Integration of ACC Basketball

· 224 · 7 THE INTEGRATION OF ACC BASKETBALL On December 1, 1965, twelve years after the first ACC basketball game, another milestone event took place. Billy Jones, a 6′1″ guard from Towson, Maryland, became the league’s first black varsity basketball player by appearing briefly for the University of Maryland in a road game against Penn State. Three days later, when Jones came off the bench and scored two points in a rout of Wake Forest at Cole Field House, he became the first black player to participate in a varsity game between two conference schools. In retrospect, Jones’s pioneering performances were critical steps toward shattering the racial barriers that had prevailed in ACC basketball since the founding of the league. At the time, however, the Washington and Baltimore newspapers that covered Maryland athletics and the university ’s student paper, The Diamondback, gave Jones’s signal contribution to ACC basketball history almost no attention.The only mention of his appearance was in the account of the Wake game in the Baltimore Sun, and it merely noted in passing that he was the “first Negro to play basketball in the A.C.C.”1 THE INTEGRATION OF ACC BASKETBALL · 225 The exclusion of black players from ACC basketball teams before 1965 reflected the customs and attitudes of ACC schools, where racial integration had occurred gradually and grudgingly, though peacefully. With the exception of a single applicant admitted to the University of Maryland under threat of a court order in 1951, no conference member accepted black students as undergraduates until after the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, which struck down the “separate but equal” approach to education that was standard practice in the South and some parts of the North. Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and NC State began to accept black undergraduates in small numbers in the mid-1950s; Duke, Wake Forest, Clemson, and South Carolina followed suit in the early 1960s. Most ACC schools did not recruit black basketball players for several years after they desegregated, despite the growing concern of coaches that they were missing out on a rich pool of talent. There were, in addition, a series of other racial issues surrounding athletic events in the ACC, including segregated seating in arenas and housing arrangements for visiting teams that had black players on their rosters. In all cases, administrators sought to resolve those problems in a way that would meet legal requirements without frontally challenging racial norms in the South or causing racial incidents. Eventually, this delicate balancing act became an anachronism, but the integration of ACC basketball did not happen quickly or easily. Race Matters in College Basketball BeforeWorld War II, few blacks played on the basketball teams of predominately white colleges and universities. Most who played basketball attended black colleges that had their own leagues and tournaments. Many teams at black schools favored a style of play that featured fast breaks, quick ball movement, and jump shooting. This required that coaches place a great deal of trust in their players to improvise and make spontaneous decisions. John McLendon, who studied with James Naismith at the University of Kansas during the 1930s, used the fast-break style with great success after he became coach at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham in 1940. McLendon did not play at Kansas, which prohibited blacks from participating in intercollegiate sports. But Naismith recognized his abilities and tried to ameliorate some of the worst discriminatory practices that McLendon faced as the first black student in physical education at the university . McLendon graduated from Kansas in 1936. 226 · THE INTEGRATION OF ACC BASKETBALL When McLendon began coaching at North Carolina College, the center jump after every basket had been eliminated only three years earlier. Drawing on what he learned at Kansas and on his own ideas, he stressed conditioning to build up the strength of his players, a running offensive attack, and relentless defensive pressure to wear down and demoralize the competition . “Contrary to its reputation,” he once wrote, “the fast break is not an ‘aimless,’ ‘helter skelter,’ ‘run and shoot,’ ‘fire horse’ game. . . . It is a planned attack with multiple applications; it is a designed offense which can be utilized in one or more of its several phases each time a team gains possession of the ball.” McLendon’s teams were so good and so...