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

Phillips heavyweight basketball team made it to the city semifinals, the Defender urged the entire SouthSide to turn out to support the “red and black machine.” Dr. Albert Johnson, the Phillips coach, was building a basketball powerhouse with a cadre of talented players—all of them from the South—who would eventually carry the legacy of Wendell Phillips basketball far beyond Chicago: Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, Toots Wright, Kid Oliver, Fat Long, Lester Johnson, Runt Pullins, George Easter, Agis Bray, Roosie Hudson, and many more.
    In 1924, led by the “hot combination” of Brookins, Wright, and Lester Johnson, the Wendell Phillips heavyweights defeated Englewood High, an all-white team, to claim the South Central Division championship and advance to the finals of the city championship against Lane Tech. By the end of the game, Phillips’ rooters were hysterical and the school battle cry—“Fight, Phillips, fight!”—rang out across the gym. On March 8, the night of the championship—which the Defender called “the night of all nights”—the Chicago Elevated ran a special train from the South Side to Loyola University, the site of the game. Unhappily, the Phillips heavyweights suffered an ignominious defeat, losing 18–4. Lane Tech was led by Bill Watson, its lone black player, and despite Phillips’ defeat, the Defender nevertheless took solace in the fact that out of two million people in Chicago, the city championship game was decided by six black boys: “Since we had to battle, we bow out gracefully to Bill Watson.”
    By then, basketball had become more than a mere sporting event on the South Side; it was a major social affair. For years, the Giles Post American Legion team had been hosting dances after their games at the Eighth Regiment Armory. And in 1925, the Defender inaugurated its “Annual Winter Classic,” which matched Wendell Phillips against one of the top black teams in the county for the unofficial “national cage title.” Described as the “greatest spectacle in the history of our Race in Chicago,” 4,500 people showed up for the gala, and another 2,000 were turned away. The Winter Classic drew as much coverage on the Defender ’s society page as on the sports page, as women arrived in silk gowns and men in tuxedos, and fifty-five box seats were reserved for Bronzeville’s elite (“businessmen, doctors, lawyers, society matrons, Debs and near debs”). The Wendell Phillips band entertained before the game, the Booster Orchestra played during halftime, and Joe Jordan’s Orchestra played afterward until the wee hours, turning the dance floor into a “surging mass of humanity.”
    By 1926, basketball on the South Side was at its peak. Tommy Brookins, Randolph Ramsey, and Lester Johnson had already left Wendell Phillips but were still playing for the Wabash Y Squirrels, St. Monica’s Catholic Church, and the Giles Post American Legion. The Phillips heavyweights had reloaded with Toots Wright, Fat Long, and Kid Oliver, and sixteen-year-old Runt Pullins was coming up through the ranks, already making his mark for the lightweights.
    These young men were battle-tested veterans who had played together for years, had won tough games in hostile arenas, facing the taunts and jeers of white crowds, the blind eye of the referee, even the bricks thrown at the “coons.” Once they left the sheltering hallways of Wendell Phillips, they would be entering a world that was foreboding and openly hostile to black men. It didn’t take a guidance counselor at Phillips to explain to them what their job opportunities were. All they had to do was look around. On every street corner, on every tenement stoop, they saw in the haunted eyes of their fathers, their older brothers, and their friends the limitations of the American dream. Their chances of entering the skilled trades were almost nil, as the craft unions blatantly discriminated against blacks. A civil service job at the post office,