The real hoosiers, p.1
The Real Hoosiers, page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Jack McCallum
Cover design by Terri Sirma
Cover photograph © Crispus Attucks Museum
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCallum, Jack, 1949– author.
Title: The real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson, and the hidden history of hoops / Jack McCallum.
Description: New York, NY: Hachette Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023042358 | ISBN 9780306830754 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780306830778 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Crispus Attucks Tigers (Basketball team)—History—20th century. | Robertson, Oscar, 1938– | Crispus Attucks High School (Indianapolis, Ind.)—History—20th century. | Basketball—Indiana—History—20th century. | Racism in sports—United States—History—20th century. | Indiana—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC GV885.42.I4 M33 2024 | DDC 796.323/620977252—dc23/eng/20231023
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023042358
ISBNs: 978-0-306-83075-4 (hardcover), 978-0-306-83077-8 (ebook)
E3-20240123-JV-NF-ORI
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
CHAPTER ONE: The Robertsons Move North… and Find a “Quiet” Racism
CHAPTER TWO: Attucks Has a Zebra Problem
CHAPTER THREE: Threats Mar the Outset of Oscar’s Sophomore Season
CHAPTER FOUR: The Magic of the Dust Bowl
CHAPTER FIVE: Hoops: The Hoosier State’s Most Glorious Import
CHAPTER SIX: Separating Fact from Fiction in Hoosiers
CHAPTER SEVEN: The Secret Spread of Black Basketball
CHAPTER EIGHT: White Robes
CHAPTER NINE: 1927: A School Built by Hate but Also with Hope
CHAPTER TEN: The Lone Blemish and Ray Crowe Is Not Amused
CHAPTER ELEVEN: Basketball and Blood in the Same Town Square
CHAPTER TWELVE: Attucks-Muncie: A Game for the Ages
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A Triumph of Firsts
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: Legit Celebration or Veiled Insult?
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: The Cape-Wearing DuSable Panthers and the Angry Brilliance of Russ
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: Perfection
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: Knocking King Kelly off His Throne
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: Did Attucks Unite a City?
CHAPTER NINETEEN: A Tiger in Winter
PHOTOS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
DISCOVER MORE
ALSO BY JACK MCCALLUM
SOURCES CONSULTED
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A new vision began gradually to replace the dream of political power—a powerful movement, the rise of another ideal to guide the unguided, another pillar of fire by night after a clouded day. It was the ideal of “book learning”; the curiosity, born of compulsory ignorance, to know and test the power of the cabbalistic letters of the white man, the longing to know. Here at last seemed to have been discovered the mountain path to Canaan, longer than the highway of Emancipation and law, steep and rugged, but straight, leading to heights high enough to overlook life.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, 1903
Jordan River, chilly and cold,
it chills the body, but not the soul.
There ain’t but one train that’s on this track,
it runs to heaven and runs right back.
—“Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” traditional Negro spiritual sung at the first Crispus Attucks High School commencement,1928
“Render your body to them,” his father had taught, “but know your soul belongs to God.”
—Edward P. Jones, The Known World, 2003
Prologue
The eyes have you. They follow as you walk the halls of Crispus Attucks High School, a ninety-five-year-old fixture in the northwest section of Indianapolis, built near a confluence of three fetid waterways, built to keep Blacks in their place, built by haters, built to fail. The eyes are in every hallway, for each August an image of the most recent graduating class is affixed to a wall before the school year begins, a march of time from the front offices to the gymnasium, each photograph a message that history matters at Crispus Attucks High School.
Lauren Franklin, the Attucks principal, should walk the halls with a vat of potato salad, for each journey is a family reunion. She did not graduate from Attucks, but thirty-one members of her family stare down at her, and she feels them in her bones every school day. “My mother and father met at Attucks,” she says, lost in reverie. “My grandmother, Marian Perkins, who’s on the wall [Class of 1942], was alive when I got this job, and her message was, ‘Don’t you mess up my school now.’”
Eugene Strader, her maternal grandfather, is in the 1929 graduation photo. Her paternal grandfather, Warren Franklin, was a junior and a top student at Arsenal Technical High School in Indianapolis when he was told, in the summer of 1927, Sorry, all Blacks in Indianapolis must go to Attucks. They probably didn’t say sorry. That order came from the powerful Indianapolis School Board. It would be too strong to say that the board was run by the Ku Klux Klan, but it would not be too strong to say that the Klan had its hand on the wheel of most board decisions back then. Warren Franklin did not graduate because he had to get a job, a familiar story; his was one of many lives disrupted by the segregation order.
But other lives were saved. Look, there in the 1932 class photo is the face of Willard B. Ransom. After his graduation from Attucks, he experienced years of racial prejudice in the US Army and in his law practice, so he organized the Indiana branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and spent the rest of his life in the civil rights movement, organizing protests and sit-ins in and around Indianapolis, everywhere from White Castle hamburger stands to downtown department stores.
Nearby is the Class of 1930 photo, which includes the remarkable Flonoi Adams, who went on to Purdue University and then into the army, where he received the Bronze Star for “meritorious achievement,” as well as a dozen other military honors. He was the first of a parade of Attucks graduates to make their mark in the military. There, in the 1936 photo of Attucks’s ninth graduating class is Charles Henry DeBow, a Tuskegee Airman who flew fifty-two World War II missions in the European theater. There in the 1937 photo is DeBow’s classmate Graham Martin, who began what seemed destined to be a dismal life at the Dickensian-sounding Home for Friendless Colored Children before entering Attucks with an overpowering will to succeed. He became one of the “Golden Thirteen,” the US Navy’s first group of commissioned Black officers. He returned to teach and coach at Attucks for almost forty years; the school’s football field bears his name.
Another wall, another photo, this one from 1941, shows John Wesley Lee, who became the first African American commissioned, as an ensign, in the navy in 1947. Five years after Lee—look, there in the Class of 1946 photo—is Brigadier General Norris Overton, who once said, “Everything I achieved is because of Attucks.” One year after Overton graduated—there, in the Class of 1947 photo—along came Harry Brooks Jr., who advanced to major general in the army, where his subordinate officers included Colin Powell, who later called Brooks “the conscience of the Army.”
It wasn’t just the Attucks males who were drawn to Uncle Sam. Alberta Stanley White, another graduate from that Class of 1937, joined the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. While keeping up her grades, she, like many others at Attucks, also earned fifty cents a week as a domestic worker to help with the family expenses.
This inclination of early Attucks graduates to serve—a trend that continued; witness the ascension of Fred Davidson III (Class of 1959) to deputy assistant secretary of the navy in 198
The return of so many Attucks products from World War II inspired a push against the institutional racism that prevailed in Indianapolis, which practiced a paternalistic not-now-but-soon philosophy of race relations. The veterans had served their country yet still could not get served at many lunch counters in the capital city, and their children were still being directed to a segregated school. A headline from the January 11, 1947, Indianapolis Recorder, the African American newspaper of record that still publishes today, tells of the fight, one that, as we shall see, lasted decades: “Vets Plan New Campaign Against Jimcrowism in Schools of City.”
The soundtrack to Crispus Attucks High School, though, was more complex than “The Army Goes Rolling Along” or “Anchors Aweigh.” Dozens of future jazz musicians1 learned their craft at Attucks, which hired outstanding music teachers. It was a short walk from the high school to Indiana Avenue—the Ave-noo, as it came to be called—where nationally known acts like Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong jammed with Attucks grads. Then along came David Baker—there he is, in the Class of 1949 photo—who as a teenager riding the streetcar to and from school would pull out his tuba and blow a few bass notes, much to the irritation of fellow passengers. Baker, who would be nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, kept on playing and would later direct an influential jazz department for the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University (IU), an institution to which he may not have been admitted a decade or two earlier because of his skin color.
Something less improvisational? There’s Rodney Stepp on the wall with the Class of 1969. He composed, keyboarded, and gamboled with the Spinners, a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group with tight harmonies and tighter choreography, and can be seen in the background of When We Were Kings, the documentary about the 1974 Muhammad Ali–George Foreman Rumble in the Jungle in Zaire, where the Spinners were invited to play.
Something more buttoned-down? Move to the Class of 1982 for the photo of Angela Brown, who played Adelaide in the Attucks production of Guys and Dolls and went on to become a celebrated dramatic soprano who specialized in portraying Verdi heroines.
You can stop anywhere, really, on your journey through the hallways and find some Attucks grad who made a difference, someone who overcame overwhelming odds and achieved amazing things after leaving a school that by its very existence demonstrated Indianapolis’s corrosive hypocrisy. As historian Aram Goudsouzian put it in a piece for the Indiana Magazine of History, “Crispus Attucks High School established itself as the central institution in black Indianapolis, a source of pride, a base for community organization, and a training ground for future success.”
On we go. There, in the Class of 1937 photo, is Harriette Bailey Conn, who became Indiana’s deputy attorney general and a state representative, and who, like Ransom, never wavered in her fight for civil rights before her death in 1981. Conn graduated from Attucks when she was fourteen. David Leander Williams, a 1964 Attucks grad who wrote the comprehensive African Americans in Indianapolis, called her “a warrior.” Three years after Conn, along came A’Leila Josephine Kirk, one of the first Black women accepted into Indiana University’s School of Medicine. She went on to become chief of psychology at Danvers State Insane Asylum, at the time a groundbreaking institution.
S. Henry Bundles, there in the Class of 1943 photo, was the first African American to graduate from the Indiana University School of Journalism but found it impossible to land an editorial position because of his skin color. So he switched to the business side and became the circulation manager of the Indianapolis News. Bundles branched out and eventually became chairman of the Indianapolis Business Development Foundation and, as an Indy 500 Festival director, a sometime driver of a pace car, never forgetting that in the early days of the Brickyard, he would not have been allowed to enter.
Firsts are all over the walls. There’s Joseph D. Kimbrew (’46), Indianapolis’s first Black fire chief. There’s Taylor L. Baker Jr. (’53), the city’s first Black prosecutor. There’s Julia Carson (’55), the first African American woman to represent Indianapolis in the US Congress, who on a June day in 1999 presented Rosa Parks with the Congressional Gold Medal, the result of a bill that she had cosponsored. There’s James Toler (’58), the city’s first Black police chief. There’s Janet Langhart (’59), who became Chicago’s first Black “weathergirl” and later, among many other things (model, TV host, author), the “First Lady of the Pentagon” after marrying William Cohen, the secretary of defense under Bill Clinton.
While much of the white citizenry of Indianapolis regarded the school as one homogenous Black sea, all kinds moved through the halls of Attucks. Study the Class of 1965 photo and find the face of Bernard Parham, who early in life discovered that he had a head for chess. Parham helped organize a club at Attucks that played as a team in a kind of underground circuit that met at Douglass Park in the Black section of Indianapolis. “We couldn’t go to places like Broad Ripple Park,” said Parham in a 2022 interview, “or they’d kick us out. So, I’d get together with the white captains of the other Indianapolis schools, and we’d play informal matches.” He became a grandmaster, has a move named after him (the Parham Attack), and, oh, yes, in 1964, the year before he graduated from Attucks, beat someone named Bobby Fischer in an exhibition. It’s not folklore; you can look it up on chessgames.com.
There were, of course, more prominent sportsmen at Attucks than chessman Parham, who continues to play games at his home in Lafayette, Indiana. Go back to the hallway where the 1950s photos hang, back to 1953, and find Willie Gardner, one of the star-crossed souls of Attucks. Gardner, who was often referred to by his unusual middle name of Dill or his ironically bestowed nickname of “Wee Willie” (he stood 6′7″), was a brilliantly gifted basketball player valued by both the Harlem Globetrotters and the New York Knicks. But a heart condition ended his basketball career in 1957 and, combined with the effects of diabetes that took the lower part of both legs, ended his life in 2000.
Near Willie’s photo is his onetime teammate and friend Hallie Bryant, the first African American to make a big splash in Indianapolis scholastic basketball. The photo was taken right after he was named the state’s Mr. Basketball and months before he left for Indiana University, where he played three years and found that the Bloomington campus was not the best place to find success as a Black player in the 1950s. But Bryant moved on and carved out a career as both a Harlem Globetrotter and a one-man ’Trotter offshoot.
Move up to the Class of 1957. There is Albert Maxey, another basketball star who went west to play at the University of Nebraska. While he found the Cornhusker State not always accommodating to Blacks, he nevertheless stayed and became a policeman and husband to the late JoAnn Maxey, the first African American woman to serve as a state senator in Nebraska. When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. passed through Lincoln one day in 1964, Maxey was on his detail.
Take a few steps back. Near Bryant and Gardner is their close friend, a kid by the name of Robertson. The photo identifies him as Bailey Robertson, but he usually went by “Flap,” the prevailing theory on the derivation of his nickname being the way he flapped his wrist after he shot his deadly jumper. Yet there are those who subscribe to the theory that Flap earned the sobriquet by flapping his gums, and his coach, Ray Province Crowe, had more than one word with Flap about his chattiness. Crowe and Flap are immortalized together in the movie Hoosiers, portraying the coaches who watch in frustration as their team loses to Hickory High in the state championship game. Much more to come about Hoosiers, and much more to come about Flap, who died in 1994 at age fifty-eight.
Take a few more steps down the hall, and there he is, in the Class of 1956 photo, Oscar Palmer Robertson. Three years younger than his brother, Oscar resembles Flap but there’s something more guarded about him. He’s smiling, but tentatively. He is holding something back. In the years that follow, Oscar will hold many things back.
