Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 8: Jim Crow and the Spit Bucket

CHAPTER 8 Jim Crow and the Spit Bucket If you kept an ear cocked on the streets of New York City in the postwar period, you could hear the sound of racial barriers being smashed, or at least splintered—in sports and in general . Black troops returned from World War II expecting and eventually demanding the same freedom they fought for in Europe and the Pacific. Jackie Robinson, playing and starring for the Dodgers in Ebbets Field, where Clair Bee’s football teams once played, was on the 8 May 1950 cover of Life, featured in a piece about his role in the upcoming Hollywood film based on his life. Larry Doby, a Paterson, New Jersey, native who for a short time in 1942 was one of Bee’s Long Island University basketball recruits, was breaking barriers in the American League with the Cleveland Indians. In 1949 Althea Gibson, who grew up in Harlem, played in a previously allwhite tennis tournament, a debut that would culminate in Wimbledon and US championships in 1957 and 1958. Joe Louis’s reign as heavyweight champion ended in 1948, but Ezzard Charles had taken control of the belt. Joe Lapchick, who had just made the move from St. John’s to become coach 121 of the Knicks, was poised to sign Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton as the first African American to play for the New York NBA team, while also in 1950 the Boston Celtics drafted Chuck Cooper and the Washington Capitols drafted Earl Lloyd, the first African Americans selected for the league. Across the East River from Brooklyn, the United Nations Headquarters was being built and Ralph Bunche served as a prominent figure in the establishment and workings of the UN. And on 5 June 1950, the Supreme Court ruled in Henderson v. the United States that racial segregation in railroad dining cars was unconstitutional. For Bee, who virtually grew up on the Baltimore and Ohio line, the court’s ruling would have had special meaning.1 Moreover, by the 1950–51 season black players were becoming more plentiful and prominent on metropolitan college teams. Ken Norton, Bee’s former pupil, had a good big man in Junius Kellogg at Manhattan College. Nat Holman had Floyd Lane and Ed Warner back from the reigning NCAA and NIT champion City College team.And Bee was going into the 1950–51 basketball season with three blacks on his team —the incomparable, unstoppable Sherman White; LeRoy Smith; and Ray Felix, at six feet eleven. LIU and CCNY, Charley Rosen notes in The Scandals of ’51, were the only two New York City area schools that actively recruited black players.2 For his part, Bee was working in 1950 on his fifth Chip Hilton book, Hoop Crazy, the story of Chip’s senior basketball season at Valley Falls High and, of all the books in the series, the one most focused on racial issues. Ironically, it was a writing exercise that took Bee away from the events of 1950 and back to the 1938 season with his LIU Blackbirds and William “Dolly” King. Dolly King Emerges as a Star As the 1937–38 academic year began at LIU, Clair Bee was immersed in being the quintessentially “busy Bee.” He was 122 Bee at Long Island University teaching courses in the Business Department, where he had recently been promoted to associate professor of accounting.3 He was serving as athletics director; he was helping the New York Touchdown Club organize and promote its “small-ball” (literally a slightly undersized football that Bee felt would help boys develop a proper passing form) football program for boys twelve and under.4 He joined Holman and Lapchick in conducting clinics on basketball’s new rules (the biggest of which was the abolishing of the center jump after each basket).5 And, as late October came around, he was coaching basketball. LIU’s forty-three-game winning streak and the crushing loss to Hank Luisetti and Stanford University in Madison Square Garden the previous year were anything but distant memories as the season began. Coach John Bunn’s Stanford team, still boasting Luisetti and his tall, troublesome teammate , six feet five Art Stoeffen, together in the Indian lineup for the third straight year, appeared on the schedule again. It would be another Garden date set for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day.To make things even more difficult...