When basketball helped to change history

INDIANAPOLIS – For almost three decades, Crispus Attucks High School quietly served as Indianapolis’ segregated black high school.

Opened in 1927, Attucks produced mechanics, tailors and stenographers, doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, musicians, military officers and politicians. It was a source of pride for the black community.

Most of Indianapolis hardly noticed.

That is, until March 19, 1955, when the Attucks Tigers won the Indiana state basketball championship – the first time an all-black school won an open state tournament anywhere in the nation.

To millions watching on TV or listening to the radio, the school built to rid Indianapolis schools of black students was proudly called: “Indianapolis Crispus Attucks.”

After the game, in accordance with tradition, the winning team piled onto a firetruck for the triumphant ride to Monument Circle in the center of town.

But unlike the celebration the year before, when dark-horse winner Milan had time to bask in the glory and pose for photos, the Attucks team made one quick lap around the Circle and then a beeline back to the black section of town.

The route had been decreed days earlier in a meeting at the Indianapolis Public Schools superintendent’s office, attended by representatives of the mayor’s office, the Fire Department and the police, who feared riots and wanted the Attucks contingent back in its part of town as quickly as possible.

“I was part of Indiana basketball history,” said basketball legend Oscar Robertson, the team’s best player. “I wasn’t an asterisk on the side, and neither were the other guys on the Crispus Attucks team. We were a part of the Indiana High School Athletic Association, and we shouldn’t have been treated that way.”

Now that the school is back in the spotlight for a celebration of the 50th anniversary of that championship, memories and attitudes are as different as the people who experienced the racial discrimination of the time.

Yet all agree that the legacy of the basketball glory is much bigger than sports. Basketball introduced the team and the school as a collection of people, with names and faces and talents. Friendships that formed on the court and in the stands helped to mend a racially frayed city. It was a start.

“Should this stuff be brought up again?” mused team member Willie Merriweather. “In my mind, it should. Because it has a history to it. It has a good ending to it.”

Crispus Attucks High School was planned by city leaders for the purpose of segregating the 800 black students who were attending high schools alongside white students. The black population was growing along with the region’s industry, and 1,350 students reported to the school built for 1,000.

From the beginning, the focus was on academics. With black educators no more welcome than black students in white schools, Attucks was able to attract an impressive faculty. Almost every teacher had a master’s degree, and many had doctorates.

The school was built without a real gym – not that it mattered much early on, when Attucks was denied membership in the Indiana High School Athletic Association. Even after the IHSAA agreed to let its members schedule games with Attucks, local teams weren’t interested. The Tigers traveled by bus all across the state, playing games in small towns where they were barred by the Jim Crow practices of the time from “white” hotels, restaurants and bathrooms.

Principal Russell Lane, who had been among the most active in the campaign to have Attucks admitted to the IHSAA, instructed his coaches to put sportsmanship first. That was the way, he believed, to break down the barriers between races. That changed in 1950, when Ray Crowe became coach. Crowe believed in student-athletes and fair play. He benched great players for slacking in schoolwork and for, in today’s parlance, talking trash.

He also played to win.

In Crowe’s seven years as coach, Attucks won 179 games and lost 20.

Former Milan player Bobby Plump, who fired the game-winning basket in the 1954 state title game that inspired the movie “Hoosiers,” still marvels at Attucks basketball.

The streaks. The number of victories. Close wins over great teams. More often, huge margins of victory.

“They dominated,” Plump said. “When you take that dominance and then add the prejudice of the time, you have a very volatile situation.”

Aware of the volatile situation, Crowe insisted that his players not react openly to the many obstacles they faced, including biased officiating. Al Spurlock, Crowe’s assistant coach during those years, said: “Ray would always say, ‘We have to beat seven men.’ “

Betty Crowe, Crowe’s wife during the basketball glory days and a 1948 Attucks graduate, said: “The kids would get mad. I’d get mad, too. But Ray would sit there calmly. (In the stands) we’d all be yelling and screaming and fussing, and he’d just sit there. It kept the boys calm.”

Plump remembers the prejudice he and his teammates witnessed.

“People driving by would see our jackets and yell at us, ‘You guys better beat those niggers.’ We were shocked,” Plump said. “I can tell you, as players we sure didn’t think that way. … We thought of Attucks as a bunch of guys we intended to beat.”

They weren’t alone. The more Attucks won, the more tournament games the Tigers played in front of large, mixed crowds, the more accepted they became – not by everyone, and not all at once. But it was happening.

Said Robertson: “The way we played and won, we did it with a lot of class.”

In 1955, it all came together. Attucks rolled through the regular season with an average winning margin of 22 points and a record of 20-1.

At the Final Four, after Attucks’ easy victory over New Albany, that school’s cheerleaders followed tradition and joined the cheerleaders of the finalists. White cheerleaders, alongside black.

“Even now,” Robertson wrote nearly 50 years later in his autobiography, “it’s one of the little details in my life that helps me, when I look back.”

A standing-room only crowd of nearly 15,000 packed Butler Fieldhouse on March 19, 1955, for the final.

No need to worry about racism from officials: The opponent was another segregated school. Gary (Ind.) Roosevelt, built shortly after Attucks and for the same reason, also had made a quick rise once it was allowed to play in the tournament. True to form, Attucks jumped to a big lead and won going away, 97-74.

The champions dominated the front pages of the Indianapolis newspapers and were splashed on sports pages throughout the state. The Chicago Tribune headline read: “Indianapolis routs Gary.”

The night of the victory, as the firetruck left the fieldhouse, white kids joined black kids in cheering the champions. Along the route, white fans turned out to wave and cheer. But, as planned, the parade was quickly diverted to the black part of town.

Change would not be immediate.

The state’s desegregation law of 1949 had made it possible, but not mandatory, for black students to attend the high school in their own part of town. Given a choice, many black students followed tradition and attended Attucks, but others went elsewhere.

Once Attucks started winning – the Tigers went undefeated in winning the state title in 1956 and won it for the last time in 1959 – many schools began to recruit black players, although there would be no white students at Attucks until the late 1960s.

But integration was, at last, back on the track it had been on before Attucks was built.

Said Robertson: “By us winning, it sped up the integration. I truly believe that us winning the state championship brought Indianapolis together.”