Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition by James W. Miller (review)

James W. Miller uses high school basketball as a lens to examine the Lincoln Institute, an African American boarding school, and desegregation in Kentucky. Miller has written an informative, albeit narrow, history of the school and its basketball teams aimed at nonacademic audiences.

Miller's examination of the Lincoln Institute focuses on the "paradox of integration" after the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision (p. 212). The narrative centers on two individuals in the school's history. The first is Whitney Young Sr., one of the school's first students and later the school's president. Young stabilized the school during the Great Depression, increased its enrollment and prestige during Jim Crow, and navigated the school through desegregation. The second person Miller follows is Walter Gilliard, Lincoln's athletic director and basketball coach from 1956 to 1960. Gilliard directed Lincoln athletics into the desegregated Kentucky High School Athletic Association in 1956 and coached Lincoln to the state basketball tournament in 1960.

From an institutional and athletic perspective, Miller describes Lincoln's growth during segregation and how desegregation ultimately led the school to close its doors in 1966, a few years after the school lost in the 1960 state tournament on a controversial call. He relies on Lincoln Institute archival collections at various Kentucky universities. Miller also conducted more than a dozen oral histories and used the Lincoln Institute Oral History Project housed at Berea College. He concludes, "Integrated education was long overdue and was the proper course to take, but the price was the loss of traditional institutions such as African American high school basketball" (p. 212). This was a "small price to pay," according to Miller (p. 212).

As a Kentuckian, I find that the story of the Lincoln Institute is informative and provides insight into why African Americans held the school and other segregated black high schools in such high esteem. However, as a scholar of African American history and sports, I am left wanting. Miller too often fails to explicitly make the connections between Lincoln's travails and the broader issues facing black education and athletics in the 1960s. The lack of scholarly analysis limits the value of the book to historians. For instance, Miller's analysis of school desegregation focuses on violent white resistance. Yet he fails to explore the effect of desegregation on black teachers in Kentucky. Miller, despite his research on the Lincoln Institute, too readily accepts integration as unquestionably good. He does not seem to take seriously African American alumni who touted segregated black high schools as better than their integrated counterparts. Miller's bibliography is missing texts from Derrick Bell, Adam Fairclough, Sarah Garland, and others who question the effectiveness of educational integration. He fails to separate the improvements in material resources from the decline in human resources. It was the teachers, administrators, and coaches like Whitney Young Sr. and Walter Gilliard who made Lincoln great. Nonetheless, when read with a critical eye, Integrated: The Lincoln Institute, Basketball, and a Vanished Tradition sheds important light on the quality segregated high schools and their athletic programs.