While the 1960-61 KU team was having success on the court with its seven African-American players and four black starters, it was head coach Dick Harp’s unwavering mission to promote racial equality off the court. This was in many ways his divine purpose for coaching, to use basketball as a vehicle for racial integration and harmony.
There has long been a dividing bridge between the white and black worlds, and this case was no different than with the KU basketball team in the early 1960s. While they were united on the same team with the sole purpose of winning basketball games, the white and black players were extremely isolated off the court.
“Dick wanted us to somehow integrate and feel like we were part of this family,” Nolen Ellison, an African-American player on the ‘61 team, told me in 2007. “(But) the only time we saw a white teammate was at practice.”
While the idealistic Harp would invite his players to his home for dinner a few times a year in his fervent efforts to unite the two races, they would always leave separately. The white players would go back to their fraternities, while the black players would, too, return to their fraternities or apartments.
Even on the road, the white and black players would go their separate ways. When the team traveled to New York, Harp gave the team tickets to a broadway musical. The white players would take the tickets and see the musical or opera, Ellison said, while the blacks would go visit the watering holes in Fillmore.
“(We did) not (have) much socially in common,” Ellison said. “We lived in two different worlds, and today we live in two different worlds.”
While Plessy and Ferguson’s separate but equal doctrine in 1886 was finally overturned in 1954 with the landmark Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka case, no legal action could change the ways black and white Americans — and most specifically KU’s black and white players — viewed each other. The white and black athletes came from different backgrounds and most did not feel comfortable in each other’s worlds at that time.
This troubled Harp deeply.
“Of all my Negro players, only one, Maurice King, ever became completely integrated,” Harp told Jack Olsen of Sports Illustrated in 1968. “When we would go to Kansas City to play in the Big 8 Christmas Tournament, King would hang around with white players all the time. There must have been something exceptional about him, because he got along so well with the others. Once the team was in Houston, and somebody told King that he couldn’t eat with the white players in the airport restaurant. He was near tears, so we all wound up eating with him in the area partitioned off for Negroes.
“But this was only a gesture. The rest of our Negro players spent their time off-court with other Negroes. I tried everything I could to bring our white and Negro players closer. I remember how discouraged I used to feel when my wife and I would have all the players over for dinner. Invariably, when it came time for the boys to go home, the white players would go off together in one direction and the Negroes in another.
“Sure, we broke down some of the physical segregation. We mixed white players and Negro players in rooms on the road. We did all the formal things, but the times called for more than that. What I wanted to do was reach the minds and hearts of my white players so that they would become determined not to permit the Negro to be anything less than a human being. What I had hoped was to use basketball to turn out a bunch of white college graduates who would be willing to walk that extra mile for some Negro because of the experiences they had as members of an integrated basketball team. I don’t think I produced even one such white man.”
Olsen praised Harp for his strong convictions.
“Few coaches are willing to examine themselves and their records with the brutal honesty of a Dick Harp,” Olsen wrote in 1968. “Most go about in a dream world of race, imagining that they are assisting in the slow evolutionary process of integration (to be achieved in some century of the future, perhaps the 25th), telling the Kiwanis Club and the Rotary how much sports is doing for the Negro and failing to come to grips with the situation. Ironically, they are often good men ... And most of them have not the slightest idea what they are doing--or not doing.”
Ellison commends Harp for his idealism, but said he was in a lost battle with his social dilemma.
“Dick (was) trying so hard to make us homogenous as part of appreciation of each other’s culture,” Ellison said. “These guys live in different places, different churches, different houses. How do you turn around guys through basketball?
“Dick Harp, and his proclivity to want to reshape the lives of these kids, that’s probably more of a greater experiment than just having that many black kids (on a team). He tried his very best to force conformity.”
Unfortunately, because of the times, it was without much success.
But Dick Harp should be courageously commended for trying to unite his white and black players. I've never heard a coach at any level talk about using sports as a vehicle for bringing the two races closer together. Dick was a progressive person way ahead of the times and a wonderful and amazing human being!
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