Recalling when pioneer LaVannes Squires broke KU basketball's color line

Part II in racial integration in KU basketball history:

Just in 1947, Kansas basketball coach Phog Allen said that African Americans shouldn’t play basketball at KU, but instead compete in track and field, because that sport “didn’t require as much body contact as basketball.” And a year later when Allen called a team meeting explaining all the problems it would cause for an African American to play basketball at KU, the legendary coach had a change of heart in 1950 when he finally signed his first black player — LaVannes Squires from Wichita (Kan.) East High School, a 6-1 slender guard who played for KU graduate and former star player Ralph Miller under Allen. One year later, he and Gene Wilson from Kansas State became eligible and were the first black players in the Big Seven.

Squires was an exceptional gentleman and outstanding citizen and student, but played sparingly at KU. According to Butch Ellison, a black player at KU in the late 1950s and early 1960s and a KU sports historian, Kansas and Allen actually were more interested in Cleo Littleton, who was Squires’ teammate at Wichita East and also a black player.

 “They wanted Cleo Littleton," Ellison told me in 2007. "They wanted a package deal.”

It didn’t work out. While Squires signed with Kansas, Littleton opted to play for Wichita State the next year in 1951 when Miller was hired by WSU. He became an All-American and one of the best players in WSU history. Littleton was the forerunner who helped Wichita State break into national prominence in college basketball. He was the first college player west of the Mississippi River to score more than 2,000 points in a career and finished with 2,164, which still ranks No. 1 all time at WSU.

Littleton’s jersey (No. 13) is one of only four retired in the Shocker basketball program. He remains the only men’s basketball player in Missouri Valley Conference history to be named first-team all-conference four times. In 1953-54, Littleton led WSU to a 27-4 record and the team’s first-ever berth in the NIT.

As for Squires? 

He earned a Freshman Basketball Award in 1950-51 before scoring 32 points in his three-year career in 33 games for 1.0 points per game. The Wichita native also battled lung ailments. According to the KU Media Guide, he was actually supposed to contend for a starting guard position his junior year in 1952-53 before being sidelined by his lung problem. KU marched to the national finals that season before losing to Indiana while winning the national title the previous year.

The Jayhawks had another reason, and arguably an even more important one, for signing Squires in 1950. With KSU’s signing of Wilson, Allen wasn’t about to let the Wildcats and head coach Jack Gardner have the upper hand.

In Jesse Newman's 2009 book, "Local Sports Hero: The Untold Story of the University of Kansas Sports and Wesley B. Walker," longtime KU radio announcer Max Falkenstein said:

“Doc Allen used to joke, You’ve got to fight fire with fire. If the other team has a Jewish player, you’ve got to get a Jewish player. ... if they’ve got a Polish player, we’ve got to get a Polish player...if Kansas State has a black player, we've got to get a black player.”

While KU matched Squires for Wilson, Wilson was a player who Falkenstein said “did so well, no one could touch him, he ran circles around everybody.”

Wilson’s career was interrupted by military service and averaged 4.2 points and 3.8 rebounds in just six games during the 1954-55 season.

Falkenstien talked previously to the Chicago Tribune on March 28, 1986 about Allen’s signing of Squires. Mike Kiley of the Tribune wrote that “Kansas` team in the early 1950s was integrated, in part, because of the idiosyncratic nature of legendary coach Phog Allen.”

Falksenstien said: ''Doc (Allen) said you matched an Italian against an Italian, a Jew against a Jew. So, when Kansas State signed a black player (Gene Wilson), he courted LaVannes Squires from Wichita.''

Squires, who didn’t make the traveling team until his junior season, came from humble beginnings. According to his Wikipedia page, he was born in Hartsdale, Mo., as the eighth of 12 children to parents Arthur and Charlotte Squires. Squires’ dad died when he was age 3, and his mother just had a fifth-grade education. Still, she inspired LaVannes and her children with her unwavering and courageous work ethic. Squires grew up filling coal bins, working in wheat fields, doing construction work, and digging graves in a cemetery.

He served as a captain for Miller at Wichita East, earning All-City and All-State honors his senior year. Nicknamed “Felix the Cat” for his quickness and slender build, Squires graduated in the top-10 percent of his class and became the first in his family to attend college.

In his first game as a Jayhawk at Hoch Auditorium in KU’s 57-46 victory over Baylor on Dec. 3, 1951, Squires scored four points on 2-of-3 shooting. He was listed as the 10th man on KU’s box score in the Lawrence Journal-World.

Here’s Bill Mayer comments after the game:

“Coach Allen used 10 boys last night in an obvious attempt to develop a second platoon to spell his regulars. Johnson, Dyer, Squires, Heithholt and Born show promise of becoming a capable set of shock troops and may give the Jays the depth they didn’t have last year.”

Mayer also wrote specifically about Squires:

“LaVannes Squires, the Wichita sophomore who last night became the first Negro to perform on a KU varsity cage team, may be one of the boys who will help Kansas this year if his initial effort is any criterion.”

“LaVannes played high school ball under Ralph Miller when he was at Wichita East,” Coach Allen said. “He shows fine early coaching and has a lot of fire, enthusiasm and ability. If he continues to improve as he has in the past few weeks, he’ll play a lot for us.”

Mayer wrote that, “Squires, according to the Kansas coach, is well-liked by his teammates, so it appears there will be absolutely no antagonism there. The crowd in Hoch Auditorium last night also went for the hustling 6-2, 165-pounder.”

Squires did not play much that season or his entire career. He played in just 13 more games (14 total for what would be a career high in games) during that 28-3 NCAA championship season and scored 11 points all year. Squires scored a career-high 12 points his junior season, and then just nine points his senior year. He made 11 career field goals and 10 career free throws.

He was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and the Owl Society, an honorary organization for junior men.

In Squires' Wikipedia page, "Coach Allen came under fire in 1953 from sports editor Jim Hall when he left Squires at home in Lawrence when the Jayhawks were set to play Tulane and LSU. The prestigious Jayhawks lost both games and their prestige by bending over to Southern Jim Crow laws."

While Squires was mainly a practice and role player who pushed his teammates tirelessly in practice, he was a groundbreaking player and set the foundation for future black athletes like Maurice King, Bob Lockley (the third black player at KU who played in eight games during the 1955-56 season and scored nine points) and Wilt Chamberlain to be recruited, in addition to countless other African-Americans who followed Squires' lead.

If not for Squires breaking the KU color line, it is doubtful Chamberlain would have ever attended KU.

The progressive student newspaper, The University Daily Kansan, hoped that change was on its way in the early 1950s to overturn the Jim Crow practices that had pervaded Lawrence for the first half of the 20th century.

“It is time that racial discrimination was ended,” an editorial writer for the University Daily Kansan wrote in 1952. 

“It is time we ended it here at the University of Kansas.”

Many KU basketball fans, though, weren’t ready for a black player on the team in 1951. While Mayer wrote favorably at the time over the crowd reaction to Squires during his first game at KU, he painted a different story in an Aug. 14, 2009 article in the Journal-World. 

Mayer first wrote about the discrimination and racism KU’s first modern-day football black players (the first African-American football player at KU was Ed Harvey in, yes, 1893) endured in halfbacks John Francisco and John Traylor, who came to KU with head coach Chuck Mather in 1954 from Massillon, Ohio. 

“Since this was the 1950s, they ... were stung by the same kinds of racial barbs as was Ed Harvey more than 60 years earlier. It happened on the road and at home. Vicious and demeaning, both places. Bear in mind that Lawrence, the state of Kansas and the Big Seven-Big Eight Conference were not exactly hotbeds of liberalism in those days. Some of KU’s Kansas City alumni actually got up and left the stadium the first few times coach Mather sent Francisco and Traylor into action.”

Then, Mayer addressed Squires’ first home game at KU:

“Matter of fact, several of the KU ‘faithful’ who walked out on the Massillonians were the same ones who took a huffy hike from Hoch Auditorium the night Phog Allen broke the basketball color line with LaVannes Squires in the early 1950s.”

Squires wound up graduating with a business degree in the top-10 percent of his class and worked for the “Look” Magazine Subscription Office in Des Moines as a junior accountant. He eventually became manager of the accounting department of the magazine office before becoming a successful businessman in the banking profession. 

He is now age 88. It is never easy to be a pioneer and the first to break a racial barrier, as the great and legendary Jackie Robinson would attest, so I can only imagine the great adversity LaVannes endured being the first black basketball player at Kansas and living in segregated Lawrence in the early 1950s. I hope LaVannes, who has never come back to any of KU basketball reunions and lives in Pasadena, Calif., is at peace with his KU experience and fervently hopes he returns to Lawrence and is rightfully honored in a resounding celebration at Allen Fieldhouse. That is what he deserves. KU owes that to him. While LaVannes didn’t stand out as a player, he stood out immensely as a pioneer who should be recognized for his outstanding, brave and courageous efforts.

I’m thinking of you LaVannes Squires, ever since I first found out about you and did my research during my 82-page senior honors thesis at KU on racial participation and integration in KU basketball: 1952-1975. I have SO much respect, admiration and love for you.

LaVannes MUST NEVER BE FORGOTTEN by KU sports fans and all humanity.