KU’s 1960-61 team that changed the color of college basketball

I've always been fascinated with KU's 1960-61 team, which featured seven, yes, seven African-American players. I first learned about this team while doing research on my 82-page honors thesis at KU about racial participation and integration in Kansas basketball: 1952-75. I have this team picture on my wall at home next to my computer, a daily reminder of how strongly committed head coach Dick Harp was to social justice and racial equality. Harp should be greatly commended for his brave and courageous efforts in recruiting so many black players in an era where segregation ruled and many African Americans, especially in the South, were not allowed to be recruited to play college basketball. 

This 1960-61 team should never be forgotten by historians, basketball fans, and all humanity.

Dick Harp is my forever hero!

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Three years before the 1964 Civil Rights Act was instituted, five years before Texas Western— with five black starters beat all-white Kentucky for the NCAA championship — and nine years before racial and political unrest reached a crescendo in Lawrence, the young and idealist KU coach Dick Harp and the 1960-61 men’s basketball team were opening eyes and making a bold statement about racial justice and equal opportunity while changing the color of college basketball.

 

Led by Harp and first-year assistant coach Ted Owens (he replaced Jerry Waugh, who resigned to enter private business), the 1960-61 team and its seven black players (plus one Native American in Dee Ketchum) was virtually unheard of throughout college basketball at the time, an age in which many qualified black athletes were being shunned by college teams. Bill Mayer of the Lawrence Journal-World wrote that Al Correll (a black player on that team) once mentioned to him that Kansas may have been the only team in the country which had seven blacks represented out of its top 10 players.

In 1960, only 45 percent of college basketball programs had blacks on their rosters and the average number of blacks on integrated squads across America was just two.

Bob Frederick, a white player on that team and future KU athletics director who had a severe knee injury, just played one minute that season. He had no complaints with the black athletes getting the majority of minutes.

“All those fellows were better and deserved to play ahead of me,” he once told Mayer. “I felt privileged to be on the same squad and to get to know them as friends. No resentment about my lack of playing time.”

Butch Ellison, an African-American on that 1960-61 team, was aware of the changing color among his Kansas basketball team and decided to go public with a letter to the editor in Sports Illustrated in the April 4, 1960 issue. Ellison was commenting on a story SI wrote about the Negro (the word associated with blacks in that era) in baseball.

“I enjoyed it, first, because I am a Negro and, secondly, because I am an athlete,” Ellison wrote. “Your article touched on many of the problems of the American Negro in athletics today. On our basketball team here at the University of Kansas this past season, we had four Negro boys on the traveling squad, and next year there will be six and possibly seven. I am sure that everyone who read your article could not fail to be enlightened on the color problem. The one thing which seems most important to me is the quota of Negro athletes in sports, generally speaking. If (somebody) is good, it shouldn’t make any difference what color he is, and if the best nine players happen to be Negro, Chinese, Russian, or Mexican, I think that they they should the ones to play.”

Ellison said the letter got him on “bad personal footing” with Harp, who was proud about the amount of minority athletes on his team but worried about the reactionary and bigoted alumni.

“Dick called me in, he was getting repercussions from alums,” Ellison told me in 2007. “Everyone read that, all the KU alums. (I) never talked to Dick about that. As a 19-year-old kid, I didn’t know that was going to create hat kind of (uproar). ... Dick could not share with us what he was going through. It was risky.”

“It was risky” starting three or four blacks as well, but Harp opened the season with three black players in the starting lineup, including Correll, Wayne Hightower and Bill Bridges up front with Ketchum and Jerry Gardner in the backcourt. 

Expectations were high for the Jayhawks with Hightower and Bridges leading the way. Hightower, who was on some preseason All-American teams, was described by the Journal-World as the “do-everything willow wand.” 

And big things were also expected of Gardner, who could shoot, dribble, and pass with the best, although he needed to control his game to best suit his teammates. He was “touted as potentially the (best) all-around backcourt man in school history.”

“The Gardner, Ellison, Ketchum, (Grover) Marshall crew could be the best backcourt crew in the league, and one of the best in the nation,” the Journal-World added.

And then there was (Ralph) Heyward (another African American player) who got contact lenses in the preseason and was expected to have a “prominent role” on team. Earl Morey of the Journal-World called Heyward the “fastest,” Bridges the “toughest," Hightower the “most outstanding," and Correll “fanciest in around the basket.”

It would be up to Harp, who entered the season with a career 72-31 mark, to mold these men into winners and ideally fulfill his mission by bringing the two races closer together that season. Owens felt he was up for the task on the court.

“Practices under coach Harp were well-planned, which was a good lesson for me,” Owens wrote in his book, “At the Hang-Up.”

“At OU, coach Bruce Drake was a creative offensive coach, and now I could learn from coach Harp, a master of teaching half-court pressure defense. The varsity practices were intense, and we felt that we were positioned to make a run at the conference championship and an NCAA bid.”

After opening the season with an easy 86-56 home victory over Northwestern, KU traveled to Lubbock, Texas, to face Texas Tech. It was the Jayhawks’ first trip to Texas since the 1957 heated Midwest Regional, and Harp and his players were treated to a “vociferous crowd.” Ellison came off the bench to score a career-high 14 points in the second half as KU won 97-75.

He said the team was called “jungle bunnies.”

“We had never heard that before,” he said. “We ran them off the floor. Up and and down the floor, we jut out ran them.”

Mayer wrote that “KU displayed loads of passion de combat. ... But again, the important aspect of the game was the KU desire. If this is maintained, it could be a great season ---NCAA ban or not.”

Kansas didn’t seemed fazed by the “typical hostile Texas crowd of of 8,000.”

“All things considered, we were well treated at Lubbock,” Harp told the Journal-World. “That 1957 Dallas crowd was still the worst I’ve ever seen and though the one Monday was noisy and naturally for Tech, it wasn’t as bad as it might have sounded on the radio. The problem was that (KU announcer) Tom Hedrick’s radio booth was situated in the middle of a group of Tech rooters and everything was amplified out of proportion. I supposed some things that shouldn’t have, screeched through. They asked me afterward what I thought about the crowd and I told them that basically it wasn’t any better or any worse than the average crowd in our own Big 8. I’m sure there were ... unpleasant things. I did notice that several Texas Tech lettermen were in the group that seemed to cause the most furor, and I know the school wasn’t in favor of that, because it has some fine officials. But back to my original premise, we were well treated and accommodated at Lubbock. The boys didn’t mind the crowd, since we won.”

At 2-0 with a date at St. John's in Madison Square Garden in New York four days later,  observers already thought this team could be pretty special.

“Fact is,” Morey wrote, “many already suspect that with proper improvement, this year’s oufit could turn into one of the year’s finest teams ever for the school.”

A critical newcomer was learning the college game and would be in an instrumental player for KU this season with his play and also change the color of Kansas and college basketball. His name was Nolen Ellison (Butch's brother) and KU had high hopes for him despite his struggles in the first two games.

“Ellison hasn’t found the scoring range yet, but his coaches think he will,” the Journal-World wrote.

After coming off the bench the first five games, Ellison was inserted into the starting lineup after Ketchum sprained his ankle. Ellison never lost his starting spot the rest of the season and career, becoming a 1,000-plus point scorer and one of the most underrated and toughest players in KU history.

Reflecting back toward his career, Ellison told me in 2007 that Ketchum, whom he called an “interesting fella,” “made a mistake” by not trying to earn his starting assignment back.

(“I) thought I was a better player, but he was a senior and he accepted it in the same way, I was grateful as I look back that Jackie Robinson would have accepted Branch Richey (if he) would have said, ‘You’re not playing today.' ... He  might have hit three home runs yesterday.

“He (Ketchum) didn’t have the fight in the Native American today, they turned the other cheek. If you do that enough, a man will hit you hard. I felt bad about that, but he didn’t seem to mind.”

With Nolen Ellison starting now, that marked four blacks in the starting five. It was certainly unconventional in college basketball at the time as Harp experienced growing pressure about playing too many blacks.

George Ireland, the head coach at Loyola of Chicago, which beat Cincinnati two years later in the 1963 NCAA title by starting four blacks, said he was a pioneer in the race movement.

“I built the bridges many of those guys crossed,” Ireland told Street and Smith Magazine in 1978. “People don’t understand that now. The black (high school) kid can go on and play now and it is the accepted thing. In those days, it was not the accepted thing.”

Ireland said “there used to be a joke. You play one at home, two on the road, and if you’re behind play three.”

Ireland, who most historians give credit for bringing in a new era of integrated basketball, played four blacks on the court at the same time during the 1961-62 season while breaking the longstanding gentlemen’s agreement about not playing more than three blacks at any given time. He also was credited with fielding the first all-black lineup in a game against Wyoming in December 1962.

But historians have to look long, hard and clear at what Harp was doing in 1961 before Ireland in playing and starting the best players, and they happened to be four blacks. Also, the two coaches had contrasting personalities. They were both recruiting blacks to win games, but Harp seemed to being do so also to give blacks their shot at the American dream and an equal opportunity to success. He loved his players, and was color blind.

Ireland, meanwhile, was also color blind but didn’t have a true affinity for his players. He certainly wasn’t making a stand on principle for recruiting and playing so many blacks.

The Chicago Reader wrote in April 2012 that “Ireland wasn’t a civil rights activist; he cared about the civil rights of players who could help his teams win." He also wasn't beloved by his players. "George didn't see color," Jack Egan, the team's lone white starter, said at Ireland's funeral in 2001. "He hated all of us the same.”

Harp died a year earlier than Ireland in 2000, and hate was one word never used to describe the former KU head coach. Each of the mourners and his former players expressed extreme gratitude over the man who made such an indelible impact on their lives.

With Harp starting four blacks in 1961, this didn’t set well with alumni and boosters, who protested adamantly.

Harp sadly received threatening notes and criticisms for playing too many blacks.

“Sometimes an alumnus would come up to Harp and refer to the team’s black athletes as niggers, ‘and I’d get so mad I wanted to kill them,'” Harp told Sports Illustrated in 1968.

While Harp was confronted with racist boosters, he also became conscious of the racial slurs he heard in Allen Fieldhouse. During home games, Harp “heard certain sounds from the cheering sections whenever he started a few Negroes.

“They’d play Sweet Georgia Brown, the Harlem Globetrotters’ theme song, when our boys came on the court, or they’d take the Kansas yell — ‘Rock Chalk, Jayhawk, KU,’ and change it to ‘Rock Chalk, Blackhawk, KU.’”

For Harp, he knew he was doing the right thing by starting four blacks, but he also felt an internal struggle about offending the alumni.

Jack Olsen wrote in 1968 in SI that “Harp first began to think of quitting his job as Kansas coach on the day he found himself wondering whether it would offend the Kansas spectators if he started four Negroes.

“All four of them deserved to start, but the mere fact that I had to think about whether I should start that many brought me up short,” Harp said.

Olsen wrote that “Harp played the four and kept on playing them, but the insult of the fans and digs from the alumni wore him down. ... He could feel the pressure of a quota system and he did not want to be a part of it.”

While Harp encountered difficulty at home with boosters, he and his black players faced even more prejudice and discrimination when his team ventured to such southern schools as Texas Tech.

“I never even calculated (what blacks) were on those other (Big Eight) teams, but I know when we got to Texas Tech, we were slipping in the back doors to restaurants because we couldn’t go in the front door,” Nolen Ellison said.

That was the plight of the black person in America in the early 1960s. He was still viewed as inferior to whites, particularly in the Jim Crow South. And even in 1960, historian William Tuttle said “Lawrence was still a segregated town.”

He wrote in “Beyond John Brown: The Story of Race Relations in Lawrence," that Joanne Hurst, who grew up in Lawrence during the 1940s and 50s, was sickened by the treatment of blacks. She “remembered ‘sitting in the balcony of the three theaters we were allowed to attend, balcony only; and I remember that the Granada Theatre was off limits completely, and when it was finally opened to us, white lines were painted on the back of the seats to identify our section. I would go without seeing a movie for the rest of my life before I would subject myself to the humiliation of  sitting in a seat with a white stripe on it.’”

And that wasn’t the worst for Hurst and many other blacks in Lawrence in 1960.

When Hurst was pregnant “about to deliver, she was placed in a bed in the hallway of Lawrence Memorial Hospital. It wasn’t that rooms were unavailable. But she was told that ‘the black rooms on the obstetric floor were all filled up and so it’s the hall for you, young lady.’”

A transformation in race relations eventually came to Lawrence to lift the city and university out of dark and troubled times.

“Much change, including progress in race relations, would come in the 1960s both to Lawrence and the University of Kansas. And in the decades since, the people of the community have tried to build on these victories to ensure that racial equality, once achieved, would endure,” Tuttle wrote.