Racial integration in college basketball history and at the University of Kansas

I’ve always been fascinated with race relations and race and sports issues. I studied this at KU and am very passionate about the subject. I try to read all I can about the topic. I wrote an 82-page honors thesis at KU my senior year on racial participation and integration in KU basketball: 1952-75. It was the hardest project I’ve ever done, sometimes keeping me up until 4 a.m. in my dorm room. But it was also a labor of love and I’m very proud of how the thesis came out. 

My parents set a great example for me fighting for racial equality and social justice their adult lives. My dad even attended the March on Washington in 1963 and sat next to Jackie Robinson on his plane trip from New York to D.C. I asked him a few years ago why he attended the March when he could have easily stayed home in New York. He looked me in the eye and said: “It was the right thing to do.” He added he was working with civil rights issues at the time as a tireless social worker. I am so passionate about racial equality and social justice, and believe the world would be a much better place if people from different backgrounds could learn to get along.

In this two-part blog, I explore some of the integration in college basketball history and KU’s role in integrating the basketball team with its first African-American player with LaVannes Squires in 1951-52.

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Recruiting black players to KU was never a high priority for legendary coach Phog Allen until he sought the services of Wilt Chamberlain, the most dominating high school player the game had ever seen. Twenty-two years before Chamberlain arrived on campus, John McLendon followed the path of pioneers Lizzie Ann Smith — the first African-American student to enroll at the University of Kansas in 1876 —  and Blanche K. Bruce — the first African American to graduate from KU in 1885 — when he arrived at Mount Oread in 1933 as the first African American to major in physical education.

McLendon was also the first black to attempt to integrate Kansas basketball at that time. He showed up at KU’s tryouts under Allen, but was never invited to join the team. This would have been an enlightened act on Allen’s part to let McLendon become a Jayhawk, but this was too early in the 30’s for strides to actually happen. (The 5-8, 160-pound McLendon also wasn’t a very talented player; he was cut three times in junior high and high school). 

While McLendon could never crack Allen’s roster, there were a few blacks making inroads on integrated college teams in the early 20th century and in the first half of the century, including pioneers as Wilbur Wood at Nebraska (1908-10), Paul Robeson at Rutgers (1918-19), Cumberland Posey at Penn State, William Kindle at Springfield College, Charles Drew at Amherst, and John H. Johnson and George Gregory at Columbia. Gregory was the first black All-America basketball player in 1930-31, and joined on the Walter Camp team by Purdue guard John Wooden, who would become a Hall of Fame coach at UCLA.

Clair Bee was also a pioneer in those early days of signing African-American players with his Long Island squad. However, Bee and other liberal coaches were a minority. Except for an extremely small sample of African-American players on integrated college teams at the time, blacks were essentially barred from participating in intercollegiate sports.

This was certainly the case at Kansas. Milton Katz wrote in his biography on McLendon, “Breaking Through,” that KU’s “athletic administration barred black students from participating in intercollegiate athletics on the grounds that some schools would refuse to play Kansas if it had an integrated team.”

Allen, who also doubled as KU’s athletic director, was still an old-fashioned man and product of his times.

In 1927, Allen reportedly said “that no colored man will ever have a chance as long as (I am) here.”

Allen, who denied that statement, said a year later: “I do not believe that colored and white boys should play together in any games of physical contact or combat.”

KU Chancellor Ernest H. Lindley made a statement in 1928 describing the rough plight of blacks.

“The bald social fact is that the Negro is not getting his full rights in the University, nor in Lawrence, nor in Kansas, nor anywhere else in this country, so far as I know,”  Lindley said.

Allen’s ideas on race were the polar opposite person as the inventor of basketball James Naismith, then a physical education instructor at KU in his 70s when McLendon enrolled at KU.

Naismith kindly took McLendon under his watch and acted with fatherly guidance to this young student. He helped steer him into the proper courses and helped fight to integrate the swimming pool at Robinson Gym so McLendon could complete his swimming requirement needed in the School of Physical Education.

Naismith, who was born and raised in Canada, saw race in different terms than most Americans at the time. He was color blind like many Canadians and also a strong believer in “muscular christianity,” where basketball and other team sports were used as a tool to mold character, self-discipline and ethical values,” Katz wrote.

Katz wrote that “according to McLendon, Naismith deplored any form of discrimination, segregation, or prejudice. The professor treated all of his students equally.”

“Dr. Naismith didn’t know anything about color or nationality,” McLendon told Katz. “He was so unconscious about your economic or religious background. He just saw everyone as potential. There wasn’t anything in his body that responded to anything racist.”

With Naismith acting as the guiding foundation for the young McLendon, the latter would make his mark as the first African-American student at KU to graduate with a physical education degree and later become a trailblazing coach and one who basketball legend and Hall of Famer Julius Erving nicknamed "The Father of Black Basketball.”

McLendon was the first coach to win three straight national championships (at Tennessee State from 1957-59), the first black coach of an integrated professional team (the ABL’s Cleveland Pipers), the first black coach in the ABA, the first black coach to publish a basketball book, the first black coach on the Olympic staff, and the first black coach inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame.

As stated in “Breaking Through,”

“McLendon’s amazing career culminated in his efforts as a basketball ambassador; he traveled to fifty-eight countries teaching the fundamentals of the game and the value of sportsmanship, and many believe he contributed more to the proliferation of basketball worldwide than any other individual.”

Despite not earning a spot on the KU roster, McLendon never felt any ill well toward Allen.

“It was Dr. Allen’s job to resist integration. He was the AD,” McLendon told Blair Kerkhoff in his book on Phog Allen. “The whole school knew it was an area where he’d be challenged. He practically apologized to me. But as quickly as he could he got black players on his team.”

“Phog’s ideas about integration in athletics were ambiguous. In the 1930s, he was a fan of Jesse Owens and one year voted for him to win the Sullivan Award,” Kerkhoff wrote.

Twelve years after McLendon graduated from KU, Jerry Waugh, who played for Allen from 1947-51, said Phog called a team meeting in ‘48 “to decide whether we would accept a black player.”

As Allen told Waugh and the team:

“’This changes the travel arrangements, changes eating accommodations and it presents so many problems,’” Waugh recalled Allen saying in a 2015 interview.

“Most of us, I didn’t give any thought to that,” Waugh said about Allen’s sentiments. “I thought we’d go with Doc. Later on, I thought about it, why what was the problem then, and I didn’t see a problem, when maybe I should have seen the problem.” 

Waugh said that Allen “had his biases. It was the times. It wasn’t that he was different from anybody else at that time.”

Charles H. Martin wrote in the Indiana Magazine of History: “The Color Line in Midwestern College Sports, 1890-1960,” Volume 98, Issue 2 about more of Allen’s biases.

“At the University of Kansas, many students supported the recruitment of African Americans, but university coaches were slower to act than their counterparts at Kansas State. After World War II, black and liberal white students at the university established a local civil rights movement, which challenged discrimination in housing, movie theaters, restaurants, and eventually athletics. Perhaps influenced by this campus activism, Kansas Chancellor Deane W. Malott decided in May 1947 to drop the school’s Jim Crow policy for sports. Malott announced that ‘any regularly enrolled student at KU may try out for intercollegiate athletics,’ provided he met conference eligibility requirements. But Phog Allen, the highly successful basketball coach of the Jayhawks, publicly denied that there had been any change in policy for his teams and instead recommended that African Americans participate in track and field, because that sport ‘didn’t require as much body contact as basketball.’

The New York Times reported on March 20, 1947 that one of Allen’s critics sarcastically stated that the coach “would rather lose ever every game on the schedule than allow a Negro to play on his team.”

Blacks were denied access to the basketball team and to various restaurants in Lawrence outside campus in the late 1940s. On campus, blacks were integrated into white culture, history professor Douglas Harvey wrote in KUhistory.com:

“African-American students at the University of Kansas found themselves in something of a Twilight Zone. On campus, they existed in an environment that – officially, at least – was completely colorblind. They mingled with white students in integrated classrooms, could live in integrated dormitories, and were served in the Kansas Union’s cafeteria without a second thought.

“But just a few steps off campus, African Americans entered a world where prejudice reigned and service was denied. ... Blacks were denied the right to eat in Lawrence restaurants or attend nightclubs. In a 1947 survey by CORE (the Lawrence chapter of the Committee on Racial Equality, which was renamed the Congress on Racial Equality in 1950), the activist group found that 15 area cafes and nightclubs “did not serve ‘Negroes’, the word used for blacks at the time.”

References:"Beyond Jim Brown: The Story of Race Relations in Lawrence" by Dr. Bill Tuttle Feb. 12, 2009 in larryville.com