Spinning the Globe by Ben Green Read Free Book Online Page A

prejudice,” Napoleon Oliver recalls. “We all played together, ate together—all the same. We were all buddies.” By high school, however, the racial lines were starkly drawn. In 1922, Wendell Phillips High School was 56 percent black, yet had only one black teacher (the lone black teacher in all of Chicago’s high schools) and all school clubs were exclusively white. Sometimes, segregation turned to confrontation, even on the basketball court. In 1913, all-white Evanston High refused to play Lane Tech, whose top player, Virgil Blueitt, was black. And when another school with three black players showed up for a game at the all-white Tilden High, the white team not only refused to play but attacked the black players. “[They] got just about laid out,” one of the white players said. “The white fellows weren’t hurt any, but the coons got some bricks.”
    Already one of the most ethnically segregated cities in America, Chicago was becoming a cauldron of racial hatred and distrust, with a fault line running across the South Side. In July 1919, the fault split wide open. A stone-throwing clash between black and white youths at a Lake Michigan beach, during which a black boy drowned, escalated into a full-blown riot that swept over the city. Innocent bystanders of both races were pulled off trolley cars and beaten to death; white gangs rampaged through South Side neighborhoods, beating and shooting blacks indiscriminately; armed blacks retaliated against whites in kind; and houses in black and white neighborhoods were burned to the ground.
    “My mother wouldn’t let us go outside for four days,” recalls Napoleon Oliver, who was nine years old at the time. “We could hear ’em shooting downtown. We’d look out the windows and see guyswalking up the street with shotguns—there wasn’t no law anywhere. The whites was killing everything black, and the blacks was killing everything white.”
    After four days of chaos, the riot was finally subdued by the state militia, but not before 38 people were killed (23 blacks and 15 whites) and 537 injured. The rioting ended, but the underlying causes of it—and the resentments toward blacks—did not.
    In the wake of the riot, the African American community turned inward, creating a protective wall, almost a parallel universe, that was separate and, if not equal, at least independent of the hostile white community. The South Side created its own identity, and even its own name: they called it Bronzeville. Sports became one of the primary mechanisms for rallying together all segments of the black community—southern and northern, immigrant and native-born—into one cheering throng. On the playing fields and basketball courts, the differences between country boys from Mississippi and city slickers from Prairie Avenue quickly faded. They were all players, were all of “our group,” as the Defender phrased it, and they were all on the same team.
    In the black community, as in the white, baseball and boxing were, by far, the most popular sports. The most acclaimed black athletes in Chicago were Rube Foster, the father of Negro League baseball, and Jack Johnson, former heavyweight boxing champion, who infuriated whites with his flashy lifestyle and consorting with white women. It was on the basketball court, however, that South Side athletes would achieve their greatest triumphs in Chicago sports,
    In 1922, the Robert L. Giles American Legion Post sponsored a basketball team, made up of World War I veterans from the “Fighting Eighth,” an all-black unit, which compiled a 71–5 record in the Chicago city league. The Wabash YMCA and the South Side Boys’ Club also fielded successful teams. But the torch for the South Side was carried most proudly by Wendell Phillips High School, which by the mid-1920s was nearly all black. Named for the famed abolitionist, Wendell Phillips became the magnet for athletic and educational achievement in black Chicago.
    In 1922, when the Wendell