Indiana's Version of Jackie Robinson (Long)

Sid · Mar 22, 2007

I'm posting this in the back room because IMO it's as much a social commentary as a sports story. It's significant that IU was a pioneer both in football and basketball, given the history of the Klan in the state. It's a good story, with a current connection. His son is an assistant to Steve Alford at Iowa. I wonder if he will follow Alford to New Mexico.

Garrett paved way in Indiana

By Phil Richards
phil.richards@indystar.com

It is testimony to Bill Garrett's stature that the man to whom he most frequently is compared didn't play his position (center) or even his sport (basketball). Jackie Robinson was about making history, not baskets.

Garrett did both.

"I really don't know much about him, but I know the guy was a pioneer," said North Central High School boys basketball coach Doug Mitchell, whose Panthers, featuring Indianapolis Star Indiana Mr. Basketball favorite Eric Gordon, will meet East Chicago Central in the Class 4A state championship game Saturday at Conseco Fieldhouse.

Sixty years ago, Garrett led Shelbyville to the 1947 state title and was named Mr. Basketball. Later that year, a few months after Robinson took Ebbets Field in Brooklyn to break Major League Baseball's color barrier, Garrett enrolled at Indiana University, where he became the first black basketball player to play regularly in the Big Ten Conference.

Garrett, who died in 1974, possessed surpassing athletic skills, but in the days of Jim Crow, it took more. Garrett was unflappable, imperturbable. His quiet strength of character ran deep. It sustained him.

"It was the only way you could survive in those days, be resolved and strong in character and shrug things off," said Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame member Oscar Robertson, who knows Garrett's story well. "Otherwise, Jackie Robinson wouldn't have made it. Otherwise, Bill Garrett wouldn't have made it. I wouldn't have made it as the first black to play basketball at Cincinnati."

Garrett died of a heart attack at 45, but he packed in a full life.

He stood only 6-3 but played center and led IU in scoring and rebounding all three of his seasons (freshmen were ineligible), and was named an All-American as a senior. He was drafted by the Boston Celtics, played for the Harlem Globetrotters and was voted Indiana high school Coach of the Year when he won the 1959 state championship with Crispus Attucks, Robertson's alma mater.

Shelbyville celebrated the title with a "Bill Garrett Night" at which Jesse Owens was the principal speaker.

After 10 years as Attucks' coach, Garrett served as the school's athletic director and later as IUPUI's assistant dean of student activities. In 1975, the year after his death, Shelbyville named its gym the William L. Garrett Gymnasium.

Yet outside his community and a shrinking circle of fans and players who followed the path he broke, Garrett is little known.

The son of a factory worker, Garrett was something of a pioneer even before he arrived at IU. He was Shelbyville's best player, its leader and a strong student. He also was one of his team's three black starters, along with Emerson Johnson and Marshall Murray.

Until the Golden Bears, no team had won the state title with three black starters.

"They called us the 'Black Bears,' " said Hank Hemingway, a white starter at forward who lives in retirement south of Shelbyville. "There were a lot of negative remarks about our three black starters made out on the floor. A lot of people would have taken offense and lost their cool, but that's one thing Bill never did. "He was a gentleman."

Garrett enrolled at IU in 1947, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to yield her seat to a white passenger on an Alabama bus, 19 years before Texas Western College became the first basketball team with an all-black starting five to win the NCAA championship.

Other players had the talent to precede the Shelbyville star across the Hoosier color line, but they weren't welcome. The state had been a bastion of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s, and discrimination and segregation remained facts of the day. Certainly it extended beyond Indiana; sports historians say there was a tacit agreement among Big Ten basketball coaches to not recruit black players.

Johnny Wilson led Anderson to the state title and was named Mr. Basketball in 1946. When IU coach Branch McCracken came to Anderson to serve as the featured speaker at a luncheon honoring the state champions, he was asked about the prospect of Wilson, a spectacular black athlete, playing for the Hoosiers.

"I don't think he could make my team," McCracken responded.

"I wasn't bitter about it," Wilson, now basketball coach at Lock Haven (Pa.) University, said last week. "My mother told me to never go where you're not wanted."

Wilson stayed home. He averaged 23.3 points for his three seasons at Anderson University.

According to "Getting Open, The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball," a 2006 biography co-authored by Shelbyville native Tom Graham and his daughter, Rachel Graham Cody, the catalyst for change came in the summer of 1947.

That's when a group of prominent black leaders headed by Faburn DeFrantz, executive director of the Senate Avenue YMCA in Indianapolis, visited IU president Herman B Wells and McCracken. Their message: Now is the time for Indiana to recruit a black player, and Bill Garrett is the one.

IU acceded. Garrett was admitted.

When Garrett arrived in Bloomington, the approximately 100 other black students closed ranks around him in support. One was football star George Taliaferro. The Gary Roosevelt graduate went on to be the first black chosen in the NFL draft, by the Chicago Bears in 1949, and he served as one of Garrett's pallbearers.

Taliaferro remembers the time and its trials. He remembers Garrett, and he knew Robinson.

"I was recruited to IU to play football. I was not recruited as a human being," said Taliaferro, 80, a three-time NFL Pro Bowl player who served as a professor and in several administrative positions at IU before retiring in Bloomington in 1992. "And everything that happened to me outside of receiving a quality education was demeaning.

"Bill Garrett just had a built-in mechanism to handle situations on the spot. There was no way Bill Garrett could not succeed. He happened to be a man whose time had come, just like Jackie Robinson."

And yet Garrett might not have succeeded, said Taliaferro, had it not been for the support of two white teammates, the late Gene Ring and Phil Buck, retired longtime coach of Anderson Madison Heights.

Buck was Garrett's close friend and road roommate. He recalls stopping at a restaurant on the return to Bloomington after an offseason visit to Indianapolis. The restaurant refused Garrett service. Buck and Ring were embarrassed. Garrett was humiliated. They left quietly. They left together.

It was not an isolated incident.

"Rooming with him, I remember the times he was hurt and embarrassed, but he never showed it and nobody ever saw it," Buck said. "He was the best person who could have broken in because he was such a great person."

The stakes were high. The Big Ten was the country's preeminent athletic conference. Garrett was being watched not only around the league, but around the country.

"Just think if Bill Garrett hadn't worked out at IU. Where would the black athlete have been?" asked Robertson.

By Garrett's senior year, Michigan and Michigan State each had a black player on its freshman team. A year after Garrett's graduation, according to "Getting Open," there was a total of six black players on five Big Ten teams.

Wally Choice, Montclair, N.J., the second black to play at IU, enrolled in 1952. He would be followed the next fall by Hallie Bryant, the 1953 Mr. Basketball from Attucks with whom Choice shared a room.

Choice was an All-Big Ten player as a senior. He met his wife, received his education and acquired the skills at IU that would help him establish and operate a successful business. Choice never met Garrett and he deeply regrets it; he would have liked to have thanked his predecessor.
"He changed my life," said Choice, who resides in Montclair in semi-retirement. "It's a tribute to have followed in his footsteps. He paved the way by just being himself, by being Bill Garrett."

Garrett is survived by his wife, Betty Garrett Inskeep, Indianapolis; their daughters Tina, an attorney in Chicago; Judith Shelton, a pharmacist in Houston; and Laurie Cobbini, a Presbyterian minister in North Carolina; and son Billy, an assistant basketball coach under Steve Alford at Iowa. Billy's son, Billy III, is a promising 11-year-old point guard.
The Garrett name lives on, as does the legacy.

North Central's Gordon will attend IU this fall on a basketball scholarship. He will be received as a hero, not a pariah.
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Indiana's Version of Jackie Robinson (Long)

Sid Well-Known Member

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Indiana's Version of Jackie Robinson (Long)

Sid Well-Known Member

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