Way Black History Fact - The First Interracial Basketball Game

Our Way Black History Fact covers a secret basketball game in the 1940s in the Jim Crow South that broke racial barriers and led to the style of play that we recognize today.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Right now, it is time for the way black History fact.
In today's way Black History fact comes from Campus Echo
dot Com. Eighty years ago, in the depths of the
Jim Crow era, basketball teams from what is now North
Carolina Central University and Duke University broke barriers in the
South's first racially integrated college basketball game, known as the

(00:21):
Secret Game. It brought together the Eagles varsity men's team
and a squad from Duke's School of Medicine. Students in
the YW SORRY the YMCA chapters at Duke in North
Carolina College for Negroes as NCCU was known at the time,
had been holding clandestine prayer meetings. A conversation at one
of those meetings started it all. One of the ncc

(00:42):
students overheard some nineteen forties trash talk about Duke's medical
school team and issued a challenge to see who had
the best team in Durham. According to the author Milton
Katz on the documentary film Black Magic about the Secret Game, quote,
one of the gentlemen from Duke boasted about their medical team.
They said they were in the best shape and the

(01:04):
best in the state, if not even beyond the state
of North Carolina, said Katz, who wrote Breaking Through, a
biography of NCC's coach at the time, John mcclindon, quote,
another member of North Carolina College for a Negro, says, well,
you may be great, but you haven't played the greatest.
McLendon signed off on the idea and declared that the

(01:25):
game would be held at NCC's gym, with referees and
a legitimate game clock. The two squad scheduled the game
for eleven am on a Sunday because they knew most
Durham citizens, including the police, would be in church. The
teams didn't tell any staff, and when a reporter for
The Carolina Times found out, he agreed not to say anything.
That morning, March twelfth, nineteen forty four, Duke's team jumped

(01:45):
into borrowed cars, rode to NCC's gym, and put their
jackets over their heads to keep them from being identified.
There were no spectators. Cats said in the documentary the
first moments of the game were misshots turnovers. I think
they just had to get the bugs out, and they
obviously did. Duke began to get going midway through the game,

(02:07):
but in the second half the Eagles scored on nearly
all of their possessions, pulling away to triumph eighty eight
to forty four. Quote. Literally, they ran Duke's team out
of the gym. Black College Sports Encyclopedia author Fred Whitteld
said in the documentary the whole event was kept completely
quiet because of a Jim Crow law prohibited competitions between

(02:27):
HBCU's and p wis. Even the Durham Police Department never
found out. This game helped pave the way for how
modern basketball is played from high school to the NBA.
Athletes from different backgrounds can compete against each other at
the highest level without the fear of violence. Quote. History
will never tell what they really did. It was just
a ripple in the pond, with Bild said in the film.

(02:48):
But the fact is that the ripple came and then
pretty soon it became a title weight. All right, A
couple of things I want to share here. This game
came after Duke had won a national championship. So Duke
was indeed you know that team until they played the

(03:08):
Black team, and then they found out that they they
barely got half as many points. Okay, this was back
when there was no shot clock, and back when games
were very low scoring. And so when we talk about
how this this game fundamentally changed how basketball's played, that's
one of the things to know. Nowadays there's sort of
a razzle dazzle style of play. John mcclinnon from the

(03:30):
North Carolina College for Negroes. He's known as the author
of the fast Break. As I mentioned, games used to
be very low scoring, but Duke ultimately borrowed the style
of play from the North Carolina College for Negroes. And
then you know, because they regularly used to score one
hundred point games, once even having one hundred and fifty
point game, they ultimately again changed the course of basketball.

(03:52):
So if you're a basketball fan, this game has ties
to perhaps why you love the game in the first place. Yes,