Secret Game

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The Secret Game was the first basketball game in the southern United States to be played between a white and a black team. The game took place on 12 March 1944 on a Sunday morning, between the white team of Duke University and the black team of North Carolina Central University (NCCU), then still North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC) , in Durham , North Carolina held . It was not until March 31, 1996 that this game, which "has become symbolic of how resistance to Jim Crow occurred outside the traditional civil rights movement", became known to a broad public. Scott Ellsworth, a historian and Duke graduate, wrote an article about it in the New York Times at the time . In 2015 he published the story of this game under the title The Secret Game. A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph as a book.

The world of Jim Crow

To understand the meaning of this game, it is necessary to keep in mind the social and political realities of the 1940s in the southern United States. It's the world of Jim Crow : Extreme racial segregation shaped everyday life. Contacts between whites and blacks were frowned upon. If it did happen anyway, and white citizens became aware of it, there were protests, slurs or even threats. Ernst Moritz Manasse , a scientist who emigrated from Germany because of his Jewish origins and who was the only white person to teach at the NCCU since September 1939, describes the situation as follows:

"For me it was a great difficulty that I couldn't invite my colleagues and my students to the house. A colleague of mine brought me home in a car - we had no car for the first 14 years - and I asked him in for a cup of coffee. I was called to come to the renatal office; the neighbors had complained that I had a Negro visitor who was not working in my house. And six weeks later the same thing happened again, and I was called again and told the neighbors won't stand for this and, if it happens again, he would shoot. Not at me, but at my colleague. "

At that time it was only a short step from threatening violence to violence, as Scott Ellsworth reports in an interview with the Chicago Tribune about an incident at the time of the Secret Game :

"That same year in Durham, an African-American GI, an Army soldier in uniform, refused to move to the rear of a Durham city bus and got into an argument with the white bus driver, who then murdered the soldier. An all-white jury exonerated the bus driver after deliberating for 20 minutes. "

Marianne Manasse , the wife of Ernst Moritz Manasse, had to experience first hand what it means to want to defy racial barriers. Her son Gabriel reports about this:

"I remember very vividly an incident when I was with my mother on the bus. A pregnant black lady got on the bus and in those days blacks sat from the back forward and the whites from front backward. And we were close to the place where those came together and there really were no other seats. And my mother - we had been in separate seats - picked me up and put me in her lap so that the black pregnant lady could sit down, which she did, at which point the bus driver stopped the bus and threw us off. "

This segregation, ubiquitous in the southern states, did not stop at educational institutions either. There was the North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC) , one of eleven all-black educational institutions in North Carolina, and there was the "Duke," Duke University :

"Duke, of course, was rigidly segregated in those days. The faculty, student body, and administration were all white, while the only African Americans to be seen on campus were maids, cafeteria staff, and service workers. Indeed, when the Harvard Glee Club was scheduled to sing in the chapel just before Easter in 1941, officials at Duke told the Cambridge group to either leave their one African-American member at home - or not come at all. Blacks in Durham regularly avoided going anywhere near campus. "

Taking all of this into account, Scott Ellsworth sums up the historical situation in which the basketball game took place in 1944:

“It was a huge deal. For one thing, you had white people who were agreeing to play on the same social level as African-Americans. These were people who'd been taught all their lives that you never call a black person "Mr." or "Mrs.", and so on. You just lived in two separate worlds. On the other hand, it was really dangerous, what they were doing. [..] The young men, black and white, who played the Secret Game, took a real chance. They could have ended up in jail. "

The top secret game

In the 1940s, social segregation did not even stop at sport. Teams from the black colleges were locked out of the "National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)" and from the "National Invitational Tournament (NIT)". Few people at that time dared to defy the common southern norms. These included Duke professors, some of whom had begun to meet secretly with colleagues from the North Carolina College for Negroes (NCC) - at least until the Ku Klux Klan found out about it and threatened to leave the house in which the meetings were held to burn down. No less daring were the activities of some of the Duke students organized in the YMCA . They drove over to the NCC and held multiracial prayer meetings there. Scott Ellsworth suspects that these daring violations of racial barriers gave rise to the idea for the secret basketball game.

The NCC team, the Eagles, were a very successful basketball team. At the time of the Secret Game , they had only lost one game of the season, and they had a legendary coach: John B. McLendon . He was a student of the inventor of basketball, Dr. James Naismith , and at the NCC “from 1937 to 1952 and as head coach from 1941 to 1952, he pioneered basketball's full court game”. His assessment of his team at the time: “ We could have beaten anyone. “Only, the Eagles couldn't prove it because they couldn't play against white teams.

On March 12, 1944, the Eagles were not faced with the "Blue Devils", the actual Duke basketball team, but a team from the Duke Medical School. It was an Army team in the broadest sense, made up of military personnel from a special program assigned to the Duke for medical training. Despite its ragged line-up, the Duke Medical School team was considered one of the best teams of its time, made up of well-known basketball players in the USA.

The fact that the game actually did take place is largely thanks to John B. McLendon and Jack Burgess, a player on the Duke team and a staunch opponent of racial segregation. Above all, he had to persuade his teammates before they had the ambition to beat the NCC team.

The game itself was deliberately put on a Sunday morning. Durham's population at the time was largely in the Church, including the police. Playing on the Duke grounds seemed too dangerous, so the game was held on the NCC grounds. Secrecy was paramount. Which still didn't work out completely, as Scott Ellsworth noted with reference to his book: “ So they held the game where it wouldn't be discovered - although, as we learn in the book, there was some discovery. “The Duke players came to the NCC campus in borrowed cars and immediately rushed to the gym. Their doors were immediately locked by coach John B. McLendon, only the players, the coach and a referee were in the hall. But some students had found a way from outside to take a look through the hall window and watch the game.

The game ended 88-44 for the Eagles. After a short break there was a second game, this time with mixed teams. Afterward, the two teams retired to the NCC's men's dormitory and, after refreshing themselves, spent a few hours together before the Duke players drove back in their cars. Durham Police never heard of this game, nor did the local newspapers. A reporter for the Carolina Times , the weekly newspaper for Durham's black population, had gotten wind of the matter, but had refrained from publishing anything, mainly to protect McLendon. The two teams had played the southerners' first interracial basketball game, but no one would ever find out about it. The game has never been mentioned in any of the official sports annals. It never happened.

The rediscovery of the "Secret Game"

On March 31, 1996, the New York Times published the article Jim Crow Losses - The Secret Game by Scott Ellsworth. With this article, the Secret Game was brought out of oblivion for the first time . How this came about, Scott Ellsworth has described - in addition to his 2015 book - in several interviews, the most comprehensive in Duke University Alumni Magazine on March 26, 2010. It was John B. McLendon himself, after having spent decades on it had made sure that the public did not learn about this game, which in the mid-1990s Ellsworth drew attention to the Secret Game in an interview and told him the story. In the "Duke University Alumni Magazine" Ellsworth describes his extensive research in order to get the facts for his story absolutely solid.

After the New York Times article was published, Ellsworth became the center of media attention. Since then he has associated many unforgettable moments with the previously forgotten game of March 12, 1944. But:

"One moment, perhaps, stands out more than the others. To accompany my original story, I had for a reunion of some arranged of the surviving players in Durham, where we would take a group photograph in the gymnasium where they had made history. It was the first time that the two teams - and Coach McLendon - had seen each other in fifty-two years. As they walked out onto the gymnasium floor, I got shivers up my spine. [..] As the photo session ran on - first one hour, then another - they were off in their own universe, telling stories and swapping tales from a lost morning a half-century earlier. They were no longer two teams, but one. And as I looked out across that ragged old gym floor, I knew just what to call them. Champions. "

Interviewed players from back then confirmed to Ellsworth how much the Secret Game changed their lives. Duke players admitted that afterwards they became more sensitive to the issue of racial segregation and almost all NCC players left the south as a result. And so the balance sheet for Scott Ellsworth is:

"But the greatest impact of the Secret Game, perhaps, would be in helping to seed the idea of ​​a different kind of South. For even though the game had been deliberately kept secret, word of it leaked out here and there - and nowhere more powerfully than among those who looked one day to the end of segregation. 'Before we could have a civil rights movement in the streets,' one elderly Durham activist once told me, 'we had to have one in our minds.' Knowledge of the Secret Game was a part of that: It was a narrative that said that Jim Crow did not have to exist, and that whites and blacks could face each other on equal terms. It was a powerful - and persistent - idea. [..] The Secret Game was both a civil-rights and an athletic milestone. But more important, it was a courageous act that was ahead of its time, a thread in the tapestry of racial change at Duke whose powerful message of equality, seven decades later, still speaks to our time. "

literature

  • Scott Ellsworth: The Secret Game. A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball's Lost Triumph , Little, Brown and Company, 2015, ISBN 978-0-316-24461-9 .
  • Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb: From Swastika to Jim Crow. Refugee Scholars at Black Colleges . Krieger Publishing Company, Malarbar (Florida), 1993, ISBN 0-89464-775-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Short biography Scott Ellsworth ( Memento of the original from January 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.lsa.umich.edu
  2. ^ Secret Basketball Game of 1944 .
  3. ↑ JIM CROW LOSES; The Secret Game
  4. ↑ translated by Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb: From Swastika to Jim Crow , pp 66-67
  5. ↑ Chicago Tribune: Scott Ellsworth on 'The Secret Game' Ernst Moritz Manasse also remembers this incident: Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb: From Swastika to Jim Crow , p. 67
  6. ↑ Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb: From Swastika to Jim Crow , p. 70
  7. ↑ Gabrielle Simon Edgcomb: From Swastika to Jim Crow , pp. 33-34
  8. ^ A Courageous Act, Ahead of its Time. A secret basketball game offered a glimpse of what the Jim Crow South could be.
  9. ↑ Chicago Tribune: Scott Ellsworth on 'The Secret Game'
  10. ^ Secret Basketball Game of 1944
  11. ↑ It is not certain whether the Manasseh couple were among the NCC professors who attended the secret meetings or were otherwise related to the SecretGame . But the fact is that Scott Ellsworth dedicated several sections in his book to them.
  12. ^ A Courageous Act, Ahead of its Time. A secret basketball game offered a glimpse of what the Jim Crow South could be.
  13. ↑ James Naismith: The Inventor of Basketball
  14. ^ Short biography John B. McLendon ; there is a detailed article about him in the English language Wikipedia.
  15. ^ NCCU: The Secret Game - March 12, 1944
  16. ^ NCCU: The Secret Game - March 12, 1944
  17. ↑ The real reasons for this are still in the dark today: “ Precisely how this came about is still, to this day, cloaked in mystery. " The New York Times: Jim Crow Losses - The Secret Game By Scott Ellsworth
  18. ↑ NCCU: The Secret Game - March 12, 1944 Jack Burgess and some of his teammates came from the north of the USA: Chicago Tribune: Scott Ellsworth on 'The Secret Game'
  19. ↑ Chicago Tribune: Scott Ellsworth on 'The Secret Game'
  20. ^ Secret Basketball Game of 1944
  21. ↑ Duke University Alumni Magazine: The Secret Game Defying the Color Line by Scott Ellsworth In this article, Scott Ellsworth also describes in great detail the story of his rediscovery of this game.
  22. ^ The New York Times: Jim Crow Losses - The Secret Game By Scott Ellsworth
  23. ^ NCCU: The Secret Game - March 12, 1944
  24. ^ NCCU: The Secret Game - March 12, 1944
  25. ^ A Courageous Act, Ahead of its Time. A secret basketball game offered a glimpse of what the Jim Crow South could be.