The Real Hoosiers, page 28
Crowe struck a balance between being tolerant and being a hard-ass. He threw Oscar out of practice but also gave him the ball and let him run the offense. His record seems like a misprint: 193–20. He coached for seven years and made the final state game three times. Only one of his teams, in the 1952–1953 season, lost two games in a row. He never lost a game in the regional and won six of seven titles in the sectional, perhaps his most striking achievement and the one that stuck in the craw of opponents. Yes, he had a string of very good players and one great one. So does every coach who wins.
But this startling fact remains: Ray Crowe was never voted Indiana’s coach of the year by the Indiana Sportswriters and Broadcasters Association, not in his state title years of 1955 and 1956 and not the next year, 1957, when an Oscar-less team went all the way to the championship game, where it lost to a powerful South Bend Central team. Some said that was Crowe’s best coaching job.
There seems to be no other logical explanation than this: he was Black. It was too difficult for some at that time to accept that a Black man could outcoach a white man. Acknowledging the athletic brilliance of Oscar and Merriweather was one thing; appreciating the coaching pedagogy of Crowe was something else again. “The people doing the voting were usually white males and a lot of them thought we had no business playing basketball anyway,” Oscar was quoted as saying in the Crowe biography. “I guess it’s no surprise Ray never won one.”1
Crowe lived a long and productive life. In 1967, he was elected to the Indiana House of Representatives and became chairman of the House Education Committee. He became director of the Indianapolis Department of Parks and Recreation in 1976 and served on the Indianapolis City-County Council from 1983 to 1987. He was named to the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1968.
But the athletic side of his life at Attucks could have—should have—turned out better.
To this day it’s not clear if he was nudged out of his coaching job. He was only forty-two when he left the bench, though opposing coaches must have thought he was ninety-two for all the beatings they absorbed from the man. Yes, the athletic director is technically the boss; yes, in that position he would make more money, $300 more than the basketball coach, and Crowe told the Recorder, “Salary is one of the best ways to measure advancement.” That is quite often a mantra among a class of people who grew up with very little (and also quite often among a class of people who grow up with millions).
But a powerful coach usually has more power within an institution than the athletic director. The Indianapolis Recorder announced the change with the headline “Promotion of Crowe Floors Attucks Fans” and suggested in the story that he had been “kicked upstairs.” Collins wrote in a column after the change was announced that it was a “shock to many,” and it’s a solid guess that Collins knew the whole story—and the whole story was not merely that Crowe wanted a promotion and the salary bump. Attucks was in a state of flux at the time. Russell Lane, who had been at the helm since 1930, retired in 1957, and a new man, Alexander Moore, took over. Newspapers described what was going on at Attucks as a “general reorganization of the faculty.” In all probability, Ray Crowe, for all his success, got reorganized.
His successor, Bill Garrett, was already in the public school system as a teacher, and some thought that he had been groomed for the Attucks job even when Crowe was so successful in it. At any rate, after a few years of calling the shots from an office, Crowe said publicly that he wanted back on the bench. Or maybe he had never wanted to leave in the first place. Or maybe he was furious that Garrett was named the Indiana High School Athletic Association’s coach of the year after his state championship when he, Crowe, had been snubbed for all those seasons. The Ohio Touchdown Club, hardly a civil rights organization, was so appalled that Crowe had been ignored so often that it gave him its 1959 High School Coach of the Year Award—even though he wasn’t coaching or from Ohio.
Crowe said in Kerry Marshall’s The Ray Crowe Story that he had had offers over the years from Prairie View in Texas and “from teams in Florida and Tennessee” but was not specific about what kinds of schools or what kinds of offers. He had been told that he had a chance at getting the Shortridge job when their coach retired. But Crowe never got that call. Muncie Central, the team Crowe had beaten in that memorable 1955 game, was also in need of a coach after Jay McCreary left, but Crowe never applied, believing they had no interest in him. Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody report in Getting Open that Shelbyville’s Frank Barnes, a white man, had nine high schools and two universities contact him about coaching jobs after his Garrett-led team won the 1947 state championship. Barnes stayed and parlayed the win into a new three-year contract with a salary bump. Ray Crowe, he of the 193–20 record, seemed to have no such leverage.
Bob Collins knew that Crowe would have a hard time getting a job at any white school and, to prove it, started a rumor that the school board of Lebanon, a high school about thirty miles northwest of Indianapolis, had made Crowe its first choice for the open head basketball job. Crowe went along with it and might possibly have taken the job. Said Collins in the Crowe biography, “Well, not more than two or three days passed before every racist in Lebanon was up in arms ready to lynch the school board. They had cross burnings, white hoods, the whole business. Even in the late fifties and early sixties, predominantly white schools were not going to turn their basketball programs over to a black coach—even one as successful as Ray Crowe.”
Which brings us back to Ted Green’s documentary, Attucks: The School That Opened a City. Just how widely did it open?
Collins always maintained that Attucks’s success helped integrate Indianapolis high schools. “They became so dominant that the other schools had to get black basketball players or forget about it,” he said in an interview with writer Phil Hoose. Is that the best road to integration? No. But it’s a road.
Even Robertson, anyone’s least likely candidate to express a positive opinion, says that the Attucks team “opened up” Indianapolis a little, if only for the Black population. “It gave them [African Americans] something to feel good about,” he said to Indy author Mark Montieth. Montieth asked Oscar if he thought that the Attucks run of victories and consecutive state titles were popular. “Probably 50–50,” he said before reconsidering and putting it at “seventy loved us and thirty didn’t.” That’s not bad.
Willie Merriweather, Oscar’s rock-solid teammate on the 1955 championship run, is more positive. “I think we changed the way people thought about us in Indiana,” said Merriweather in a 2022 interview.
Suddenly, the theaters, the stores, some of the restaurants, felt like places that Blacks could now go. They were a little more welcoming. We had a lot to do with changing the racial atmosphere, at least in Indianapolis.
You take the mixed cheering squad that rooted for us in the state championship games. Attucks cheerleaders combined with white kids from other city schools. It sounds small, but it was a big thing. And it happened because of our basketball team.
Herman Shibler, the school superintendent during Attucks’s run, is even more positive that the title of Green’s documentary is accurate. “That basketball team accomplished more for race relations in one season than you could accomplish in ten years of forums and discussions,” he said after the 1955 title. “The white people here have a completely new impression of the colored race. It’s marvelous.” (It would have been even more marvelous had he found a word other than colored, but those were the times.)
Chances are, the whiter your face in Indianapolis, the more you believed—the more you wanted to believe—that things had changed, that the Attucks basketball team had pushed an equality button and suddenly the city was more egalitarian than it had ever been. Now, there can be little doubt about how much pride (for African Americans) and how much pure joy (for all audiences) those magic years of 1955 and 1956—and to an extent the whole Crowe era from 1950 to 1957—brought to the city.
But then some fans began to tire of Attucks’s dominance. The team wasn’t so novel, so fresh, so beautiful in its precision as it had been during the Oscar years. The idea that Attucks should deliberately lose to restore competitive balance started to seep into the mainstream newspapers. Now, that was never the suggestion in the small towns of Hoosier hoopdom, where the citizenry wanted to keep winning forever. Black Attucks was never gathered as deeply into the civic bosom as were other teams in other places for the simple reason that African Americans, even athletes, were not accepted as equals off the court. “Whites saw no hypocrisy in cheering Attucks on as an Indianapolis team while at the same time denying African Americans full participation in civic affairs,” wrote Richard Pierce in Polite Protest.
In the 1958 sectional, with Oscar two seasons gone and the Tigers coasting to another title win over the nearby teams, unhappy white fans tossed ice cream carton tops onto the floor during the closing moments of Attucks victory over Ben Davis, a city rival. And Andrew Ramsey, the Indianapolis Recorder columnist and Attucks teacher, had seen enough. In two consecutive weekly columns, he unpackaged all the anger he had been carrying around for decades. He wrote about the “restrictive covenants” and real estate “collusion” that kept Blacks from these “glorious communities of suburban living” and castigated the Indianapolis Redevelopment Commission for its seeming commitment “to a policy of more and more racial segregation.” The expansion of Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and the construction of Interstate 65 continued to push minority residents out of the areas around Attucks and Indiana Avenue, and often they quite literally had nowhere to go.
Most everyone in Butler Fieldhouse saw ten players and two referees take the floor for the sectional final. Ramsey saw this: “As the players started peeling off their street sweat clothes to do battle with each other, America 1958 was again in evidence. Five Negro boys coached by a Negro and cheered by Negro fans formed a team that represented segregation. The failure pattern of America passed, while four white boys and one Negro composed the team representing integration, the pattern of America to come.”
He wrote about the opposing crowd cheering when an Attucks player went down. He decried the top-tossing as “an almost unheard of display of poor sportsmanship.” He gazed at the cheering sections at the Attucks–Ben Davis game and saw nothing but separation, white fans over here, Black fans over there, the seating reflecting an economic divide that prevailed in the real world because “that’s the way America lives.” In fact, the headline over his March 8, 1958, column read, “Net Tourney Represents America in Microcosm.”
Ramsey noticed, too, that the comments about the athletes only related to the game, one fan ruing that a certain player was a senior, “as if graduation was something to be deplored.” (That was the educator in him talking, and, Mr. Ramsey, that battle is still being fought.) And this paragraph lets us remember how much the Indianapolis of the 1940s and 1950s needed an Andrew Ramsey, someone to see through the public relations pablum, someone whose eye bored straight to the truth—this final cri de coeur: “Here in Butler Fieldhouse was a fair sampling of America in 1958. Here was the new beside the old, the strength alongside the weakness, the hopes elbow to elbow with the fears.”
On another page of the Recorder, but as if in symphony with Ramsey’s sentiments, was a story about a fan witnessing “hideous and repulsive remarks” hurled at a college basketball player during a game at Duquesne and seeing another fan walk onto the floor after the game and “berate” the athlete, who took it all in expressionlessly. The player was Cincinnati sophomore Oscar Robertson, who scored twenty-seven points in the Bearcats’ 72–61 victory. It was a perfect snapshot of a moment in time, incidentally, and a forecast of things to come: Oscar stood in first place in the national collegiate scoring race with 34.3 points per game, just ahead of Elgin Baylor at Seattle University, with a “third Negro cager,” as the story identified Wilt Chamberlain of Kansas, right behind Baylor. In just a few years, those three, along with Bill Russell, already a Boston Celtic, would dominate the NBA, elevating the game.
One more story from 1958. Although Attucks remained all Black, school officials trumpeted the fact that more and more African Americans were going to Shortridge and Tech, and more and more teachers were working in mixed schools. One of the teachers who demanded a transfer out of Attucks was Ramsey, who believed that Black teachers would help white students “understand that America was a multi-racial society.” (He finished his forty-two-year teaching career with twelve years at Howe and Shortridge after thirty at years Attucks.) The cross-integration numbers were actually quite small, and in a few years’ time the federal government would rule that, of 350 school boundary changes since 1954, more than 90 percent promoted—one might say protected—segregation. Again, in Indianapolis, custom, not law, prevailed. Who helped generate that investigation? Ramsey, through his position in the local NAACP.
Later in 1958 there was the story of Betty Jean League, a white teacher at School 60, a mixed elementary institution near Shortridge High. In what the Indianapolis Recorder was calling the “Indianapolis Little Rock Case,” a coalition of white parents demanded League’s removal because she was married to a Black man. He happened to be Bailey D. League Jr., who had played basketball at Attucks in the late 1940s and continued at Indiana Central. League had served in the US Army and had a good job at Kingan and Company, an Indianapolis meatpacking plant.
The issue came before the school board, and it was a hot one. The best way out, according to the board and Dr. Shibler, the “progressive” school superintendent, was to transfer Betty Jean to another school despite her having received a review of “excellent” for her teaching performance.
Only one voice on the board, that of Grant Hawkins, who in 1955 had been elected Indy’s first Black school board member, spoke against the transfer. “Don’t let this happen in this country,” he pleaded. Norman B. Gesner, a white parent who said that he and his wife “were looking forward” to their seven-year-old son being taught by League, said, “I think it is outrageous that a teacher should be transferred because of a matter that is of no proper concern to the board.”
Outrageous? Not in Indianapolis. Shibler ruled that the transfer should take place not because League was a bad teacher but because “she could no longer do an effective job at School 60.” Remember what Shibler had said about the effect of Attucks basketball? That white people have a completely new impression of the colored race. That it was marvelous. If there had been an over-under bet on leaders doing the right thing back in 1950s Indianapolis, you should have always taken the under. A delegation from another elementary school showed up with a message: Don’t send her here. “It’s against the law for them to be married,” said one man from that delegation. Sadly, he was literally correct. As the meeting broke up, a white parent loudly berated Gesner. “There aren’t ten thousand people in the world who think like you do!” she shouted. Shibler told reporters that morale was low at School 60 because other teachers “resented her being married to a Black man.” League reported that she had received several abusive phone calls.
The story never did get much attention in the three major Indy newspapers, and even the Recorder couldn’t follow it forever. Alas, there is no denouement to the Leagues’ saga from this chronicler. It is a revolting tale, but one that, for sure, was simmered in an all-too-familiar Indiana broth.
Footnote
1 You never have to look far for other egregious examples of racism in sports in those days. In 1956 Jim Brown of Syracuse, an African American who was so far and away the best college football player in the country it wasn’t even funny, finished fifth in the Heisman Trophy voting. The winner was Notre Dame golden boy Paul Hornung, who had quarterbacked the Irish to a 2–8 record, throwing thirteen interceptions against three touchdowns. Not that Hornung didn’t become a great pro; he just wasn’t Jim Brown. Nobody was.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A Tiger in Winter
“Oscar could have all the money he wanted just by having a different kind of personality, but that wasn’t him.”
On a Tuesday night in January 1964, Oscar Robertson, in his fourth year in the NBA and already one of its established stars, sat in a dreary Boston Garden locker room with nineteen other NBA All-Stars as a blizzard raged outside. There was one inside too. Robertson, the Cincinnati Royals representative to the National Basketball Players Association, was one of the leaders of a coalition that had demanded change in an NBA that played in rundown arenas and compensated its players with average salaries and second-class travel accommodations, while sapping their energy with a killer schedule at a time when trains and buses were frequently used to get from city to city. Robertson was anticipating the birth of his second child around that time, but he wouldn’t be there for it. Male maternity leave in the 1960s? What the hell was that?
Tip-off for the nationally televised NBA All-Star Game—TV exposure for the pro game was a rarity back then, and it was a big, big night for the league—was just minutes away, and the players were adamant that they weren’t taking the court unless they received concessions from the league. “I was scared to death,” Jerry West would say years later. “Our owner [Bob Short] had told Elgin [Baylor] and I that, if we struck, we’d never play for the Lakers again.” Boston’s Red Auerbach had roughly the same message for his players. Baylor had a message too. “Tell Bob Short to go fuck himself.”
