Published Sunday, March 12, 2000, in the Herald-Leader
Mark Story can be reached by phone at 231-3230 or by e-mail at mstory@herald-leader.com.



University of Kentucky
Basketball History




More than just a game



"Anyone who says that game wasn't all about race is in denial.
The game was about nothing but race."
quote from William Turner, a leader of the Black Student Union
at Kentucky in the mid-1960s and now a newspaper
editorial writer in North Carolina.

To UK's small band of black students in 1966,
the Kentucky-Texas Western title game brought
a celebration that for some has since lost luster...

As game time approached, they gathered in a dorm room on the University of Kentucky campus. It was the night of March 19, 1966, the night when Kentucky would play Texas Western for the championship of the NCAA men's basketball tournament. By tip-off, the group of 8-10 Kentucky students made sure they had locked the door to the dorm room. They took towels and placed them under the door to keep the noise in the room. Then the UK students gathered around a small black-and-white TV to watch the game. And they rooted like hell for Texas Western. It might help you to know that every UK student in that dorm room that night was black.

Ask Kentucky fans old enough to remember, and almost to a person they will tell you that, at the time, they don't remember talk of race being the dominant theme of the now-famous 1966 Kentucky-Texas Western NCAA title game. That game, in which Texas Western's all-black starting lineup vanquished Kentucky's all-white team, was later dubbed the Brown vs. Board of Education of college basketball. Of course, almost all Kentucky fans of that era were white. In 1966, Kentucky had never had a black basketball player. Among the small number of black students on the UK campus in the spring of 1966, their memories of the UK-Texas Western matchup are as different, well, as black from white. "Anyone who says that game wasn't all about race is in denial," says William Turner, an early leader of the Black Student Union at UK in the mid-1960s. "The game was about nothing but race. And everybody knew that then, too."

The University of Kentucky was an all-white institution until 1949, when Lyman Johnson, a black student from Kentucky State in Frankfort, successfully sued in federal court to get into graduate school at UK. Kentucky began to accept black undergraduates in 1954. By the spring semester of 1966, "there were fewer than 50 of us on the whole campus," says Chester Grundy, then a UK student, now the university's director of African-American Affairs. A Louisville native, Grundy chose UK for reasons that were all but impervious to the racial climate on the campus. He wanted to go to a big school, he wanted to get away from home but not too far away and he wanted a school with an ROTC program.

The son of a coal miner from Lynch in Harlan County, Turner chose UK at the insistence of his father. He had a scholarship to go to Kentucky State, the commonwealth's predominantly black school, and another to a school in the UK community college system. "Dad felt times were changing," Turner says, "that I might be better prepared in the long run if I exposed myself and was exposed to this changing world." The climate awaiting black students on campus at their state's flagship university "ranged from hostile to indifferent," Grundy recalls. He remembers the UK band playing Dixie at athletic events more often than they played On, On, U of K.

In the nation, it was the era of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. It was the era of the Bloody Sunday civil rights march in Selma, Ala. The national upheaval produced a split among black students at UK. Some wanted to use the same tactics of protest to bring change on campus; others feared that a confrontational approach would retard progress that already was being made. Then, as now, the most visible symbol of the University of Kentucky was its men's basketball team. The "assertive" wing of the black student body at UK decided that for the university to change, the basketball team had to change. When he thinks about it now, William Turner is somewhat amazed at his own audacity.

At the age of 20, he asked for a meeting with legendary UK basketball coach Adolph Rupp to talk about integrating Kentucky basketball. And he got the meeting. Turner met not only with Rupp, but also with athletics director Bernie Shively. "I was so young, so naive, Adolph Rupp's stature, his status as sort of an icon of basketball didn't really dawn on me," Turner says. So what was Rupp's reaction when the young black student appealed to the aging white coach to sign black players? "Mr. Rupp was very gruff," Turner said. "He blurred the word Negro as 'Negrah,' the way they did in Gone With the Wind. "As I recall, it wasn't a pleasant meeting. He tried to intimidate me. He basically said they weren't going to have any black players." Through the mid and late '60s, Turner tried to keep the pressure on by picketing home basketball games. Sometimes, there would be a small group picketing Memorial Coliseum with him. Sometimes, he would be the lone picketer. A young man carrying a sign elegant in its simplicity: "UK needs black players."

In 1966, there weren't many college basketball games on TV. For that reason, Texas Western was not even on Chester Grundy's radar screen. Then the Final Four came along. Top-ranked UK beat No. 2 Duke in a semifinal that many assumed was the de facto national title game. All that stood between Kentucky and what would have been Rupp's fifth NCAA title was Texas Western. The sight of Texas Western and its all-black starting lineup went through UK's black student body like an electrical charge. "People were just buzzing," Grundy said. "It was like 'Did you see who Kentucky is playing?' " For the black students at UK, there was never any question about whom to root for that night. "In those days, I basically picked what team I was for based on who had the most black players," Turner says.

The night of the game is indelibly sketched in Grundy's mind. He was among the small group of black UK students who locked themselves in that dorm room. "We literally were afraid if people heard us, heard who we were rooting for, we would be in physical danger," he said. As the game progressed and Texas Western assumed control, Grundy remembers the students passing around "a laughing towel" that they would hold to their mouths when they got so excited they just had to let it out. The towel was used to muffle the noise. A loss that devastated UK fans everywhere thrilled UK's black student body.

At that time, Turner notes, Kentucky's state song, Stephen Foster's My Old Kentucky Home, was usually sung with the phrase "tis summer, the darkies are gay." "Well, the summer after that game, I was one elated darkie," he says with an ironic laugh. Today, William Turner, a former college professor and now a newspaper editorial writer in North Carolina, wonders if the elation he felt after Texas Western beat UK wasn't misplaced. He now regrets the early emphasis the Civil Rights movement placed on athletics. He feels the rise of the black athlete symbolized in the Texas Western defeat of UK has been a Pyrrhic victory. "Far too many young black men have sacrificed lives that may have been much more rewarding potentially if this society had not impressed on them that the avenue of success was paved on the basketball court not in chemistry classes," he says.

"To me, a lot of that started with that Texas Western game. My feelings toward that game have become mixed, very mixed."


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