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Eddie Rat Meets the Afro-Wearing Bo-Pete
What was happening around the country in the summer and fall of 1968 sent shivers through the minds of athletic administrators who were responsible for black high school athletes in Columbus, Ohio—and elsewhere. It was now—and suddenly—impossible to dismiss the dawning maturation of the black athlete. Reporters, for the first time ever, were seeking out the political opinions of black athletes. It was one of the more potent stories in the news media. Newsweek and Look magazines, two of the most popular national publications, did big stories on the political rise of the black athlete. At the center of attention were black college basketball and track stars in sunny California.
Harry Edwards had earned a graduate degree at Cornell University in 1966, went west, and landed on the faculty as a visiting professor at San Jose State University. (He had been a track star at San Jose State when the civil rights movement was sweeping the nation.) Feeling that black athletes were not being given access to the academic help and guidance they needed, Edwards organized a series of protests. The upheaval, buttressed by the participation of a number of black athletes at San Jose State, forced the school to do the unthinkable: It canceled the opening football game in 1967 between San Jose State and the University of Texas–El Paso, lest there be the kind of negative publicity the school did not want. The school could not have known who it was getting in Harry Edwards, but Edwards—a black goatee-wearing hipster, fearless and erudite—aimed to make his time as visiting professor in the department of sociology count. He became fascinated with the intersection of the black athlete and social protest. “Athletes are on the field maybe four hours a day,” Edwards had said in the summer of 1968. “The rest of the time, they’re in the same garbage heap that most of the black people in this society live in. But they have access at a moment’s notice to the mass media. Black athletes must take a stand.”
With the 1968 Olympics looming in Mexico City, Edwards devised a strategy to bring attention to the plight of black Americans by engaging the black college athlete. He organized the Olympic Project for Human Rights. One of his first supporters was Lew Alcindor, and it was quite a coup getting him on board. Alcindor (later Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) was the best college basketball player in the country, having led UCLA to the NCAA basketball titles in 1967, 1968, and 1969. (His dominating presence was the reason the dunk was outlawed in high school and college basketball, and as a result, the East High Tigers were denied the pleasure of Eddie Ratleff’s and Nick Conner’s’ acrobatic dunks.) Alcindor’s coach, John Wooden, was made nervous by the activist rhetoric bleeding into the consciousness of black athletes. “I feel it’s outside influences trying to use Negro athletes,” he said. Wooden, a man who was both sedate and wily, figured he had gotten out in front of any possible tension by allowing his black players to wear Afros, a “natural” haircut seen as an expression of cultural pride. But then Alcindor announced he would boycott the 1968 Olympics. Some older black athletes, such as Jesse Owens and Willie Mays, thought Alcindor selfish and unpatriotic. They wished they could get the youngster alone in a corner; they’d surely give him a piece of their mind. When asked by members of the media why he had chosen to boycott the games, Alcindor pointed to racism. As other black college athletes headed off to Mexico City, with threats of some kind of protest humming in the air, Olympic officials were nervous. “It seems a little ungrateful to attempt to boycott something [that] has given them such great opportunity,” Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, said about the agitated black athletes. At the Olympic trials before the games, a young black man in the stands held a placard aloft: “Why Run in Mexico and Crawl at Home.” Absent a question mark at the end of the placard, it was, wittingly or not, a profound statement.
But run they did. American sprinters John Carlos, who won a bronze medal, and Tommie Smith, who won a gold medal, whizzed around the track in the sweet October weather. They stepped up on the medal stand afterwards. Then, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was playing—and with their heads rather serenely bowed—each raised a black-gloved fist in support of the civil rights movement in America. The fans knew immediately what they were witnessing: protest. A silent rebellion right in front of their eyes. The gesture elicited immediate outrage from Olympic officials, and from many people around the world. The two runners were quickly booted from the Olympic Village. The powerful moment, however, quickly entered the visual record of the American civil rights movement, like Rosa Parks sitting on that bus, the marchers defiantly walking across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and the photo of Amelia Boynton after she’d been tear-gassed and beaten unconscious by state troopers at the bridge in 1965. History captured by a camera lens, history that could not be erased. An Afro hairstyle, a black glove. These now were some of the ornaments of Black Pride. In time, snapshots of Carlos and Smith would appear on the bedroom walls of high school athletes across urban America.
Dwight “Bo-Pete” Lamar of Columbus, Ohio, was one of those young black athletes who allowed the sway and direction of the sixties to work its way inside of him.
In Columbus, in the middle part of the twentieth century, one could find the lower socioeconomic classes bunched predominantly in the vicinity of the city’s factories. These locales were also where one could find low- and modestly priced housing, as well as public housing that had been built by the federal government. Because there was no public transportation system, city leaders and factory owners knew they needed housing close to the factories, and that is how many black families came to be huddled there. The factories were big and noisy, with flinty names—the Malibu, D. L. Auld, Buckeye Steel Castings, Timken Roller Bearing, the Jeffrey Company. The work could be dangerous; the Malibu and Buckeye Steel were especially feared workplaces; countless workers had fingers, and fingertips, sliced off in accidents. But the work was steady, and it seemed the factories were always hiring.
It was the lure of the Malibu that convinced Lucy Lamar she should leave Sparta, Georgia, and relocate to Columbus. She had several relatives who had already left Georgia, landed in Columbus, and were drawing paychecks from the Malibu, a plant that made steel parts. The plants had really prospered during World War II, when there was a great need for their products such as ammunition and bomb-making equipment. There was something else that haunted Lucy Lamar: Her husband, James, whom she had met and married in Sparta, had been murdered. She was a single mother with four sons. Her second eldest was Dwight, whom everyone called Bo-Pete.
When she reached Columbus, Lucy Lamar settled on the North Side of town. The closest factory to her was not the Malibu, but Timken Roller Bearing. She did not have to step inside a factory to be convinced how harsh the work could be; she had relatives who passed along reports. She quickly determined she did not wish to work in a factory, so she settled on a job as a “day worker,” a kind of lower-level maid for well-to-do white families in Upper Arlington and Bexley, two pricey white Columbus suburbs. “She had three or four houses she’d clean,” recalls her son Bo-Pete. Sometimes the women who lived in those suburban neighborhoods would pick Lucy Lamar up in their cars and drive her back to their homes. The early sixties were roiling, and she wanted sometimes to start a conversation with her employers about the reasons she had left the South with her boys, but she mostly kept silent. “She had that southern mentality,” Bo-Pete recalls, alluding to her constant deference to white people.
On the days when no one would come pick her up and she had to get to Bexley, Lucy would catch the bus from the side of town where she lived, ride downtown, then transfer to the East Broad Street bus, which took her down East Broad Street—past East High School—into the suburb. She suffered from terrible migraines but worked through them because her boys had to be fed. Bo-Pete started to enjoy the game of basketball when he was little. He’d dart out of the house around noontime, and Lucy wouldn’t see him again until the skies darkened. As long as he wasn’t getting in trouble, she didn’t mind the endless hours he spent on the court. He was an extremely skinny boy. “Bo looked like Spiderman,” remembers Jim Cleamons, who played with Bo-Pete in elementary school and would go on to basketball glory in the NBA. At Weinland Park playground, a few blocks from his home, Bo-Pete honed his game, dribbling the ball low so no one would swipe it in pickup games, perfecting the skills it took to shoot a long-range jump shot. “Bo understood the game,” says Cleamons.
After a promising ninth-grade year at Indianola Junior High, Bo-Pete enrolled at North High School in the fall of 1966. There was no other option; those who lived in his neighborhood were assigned to North High. It was an overwhelmingly white school. Because of their visibility, the black athletes at the school assumed the role of black student leaders. The school had never had a black cheerleader, and the black athletes thought it was high time they did. “No one just ever thought to try out,” says Roseanne Bell, who became the school’s first black cheerleader in 1966. She could sense that other blacks at the school felt pride for her accomplishment. Also, she quietly accepted the intense stares she’d sometimes get from whites while she was attending away games. By his eleventh-grade year, Bo-Pete Lamar—still skinny, with long arms and a huge Afro that bobbed as he floated up and down the court—was leading the City League in scoring at 24 points per game. He shot from a variety of spots on the court, a lovely high arching shot that was lethal. “Bo had a free hand to shoot,” says North teammate Curt Moody. “He had such range.”
Simmering racial problems at the high school began to crest during the 1967 school year. Some white parents were aghast that their daughters were cavorting a little too closely with black male students, namely the athletes. As well, a good many black students began to voice displeasure about what they perceived as a lack of respect from faculty, especially concerning hair styles, specifically the Afro, which had become popular among black entertainers, activists, and high school students across the country. The Afro fad played out in national magazines. In an issue devoted to black culture, Look magazine highlighted a couple at the time: “American couple Win and Joyce Wilford are New York–propelled and Afro-oriented. Joyce, who wears a natural haircut and African jewelry, graduated in philosophy from Long Island University. She and Win are studying now with the Negro Ensemble Company and work as models through the Ford agency.” One of the accessories the black high school student sporting an Afro had to have was the Afro pik, a plastic comb shaped like a pitch fork that pouffed the Afro. Bo-Pete was mighty proud of his Afro and the pik he sometimes twirled in his hand while in the hallways.
When North High reached the high school state basketball tournament, Head Coach Jim Kloman decided he had to have a talk with Bo-Pete Lamar, his star guard who had had a dazzling junior year. Since the team was in the tournament, and he was the team’s heralded star, Lamar thought the coach wanted simply to talk to him about upcoming game strategy. But he did not. Kloman told his star player that he did not like his Afro, that some school boosters and fans—white boosters and fans—viewed it as an expression of militancy. Bo-Pete was taken aback. “I played the whole season with my Afro,” he recalls. Lamar wanted to know which school administrators had complained, because he wanted to go talk to them. Perhaps he could reason with them about what the Afro hairstyle meant to black students. After all, they were in the state tournament. Their chances to advance would surely depend on having their best scorer on the court. The coach—young, white—grew more persistent, telling Lamar there was no option, that he had to get his Afro cut or he would be tossed off the team. Lamar, one of five blacks on the twelve-member team, was stunned. “We didn’t know what Bo was going to do,” recalls Curt Moody, Lamar’s black teammate. “We’re in the tournament. For him to be asked then to cut his Afro didn’t make any sense.” Donnie Penn, another black player on the team, who lived on the same street as Lamar, was livid. “Kloman didn’t know how to deal with blacks,” he says about the coach.
When he got home after his talk with his coach, Bo-Pete sat down and explained to his mother what had happened. Lucy Lamar reminded her son why she had left the South—for freedom, and not just freedom of expression. She had left the South in hopes that her children would be able to stand up to white authority when they felt they were being disrespected or misunderstood. Bo-Pete then immediately knew his mother would stand by him whatever decision he made about his Afro. The next day, Bo-Pete made his political statement: He quit the North High basketball team. His close friends on the team were stunned. They wondered if the coach would yield; Bo-Pete was their most gifted player. But the coach would not. Word about Bo-Pete quitting raced through the school and then the black community, through the homes of his classmates, in and out of Mr. Wallace’s bootleg barbershop, which was just down the street from the Lamar home. “It was disappointing to the neighborhood,” remembers teammate Donnie Penn. “All the blacks said, ‘Why?’ ”
Without Bo-Pete, North was quickly eliminated from the state tournament, 81–70, at the hands of Gahanna High School. And as the school year neared a close, Bo-Pete was in limbo. Many black players in their junior year of high school had clashed with white coaches—the reason often cited as cultural misunderstanding—and would go on to forfeit their senior year of play out of pride and anger. But those often were not the marquee players on the team, and they could be dismissed as malcontents. They’d catch on with the local Boys Club and, in their minds, be none the poorer for it because at the Boys Club they could shine. But Bo-Pete was a star. And in 1968 America, his political move had the real potential to alter his life in a very negative way. Where would the family get the money for him to go to college if he did not get a basketball scholarship? The Lamar family did not know luxury. Not a single member of the family had ever flown on an airplane. It wasn’t difficult for Bo-Pete to look around the neighborhood and spot older basketball players who had gone off to college, only to come back without a college degree. This was often the route that led to a job in one of the city’s factories. There had been no black school officials at North High for Bo-Pete to confide in. But word reached Thomas “Doc” Simpson. Simpson knew the streets where all the good basketball players played in the summertime, and he even knew many of the stars from his own gallivanting about the city. He was only a few years older than many of the players. In the fall of 1968, he was going to begin his student teaching at East High. Thinking about Lamar’s plight, he came up with an idea to get Lamar to come to East High. Simpson—having anointed himself a recruiter—planned to go visit Lamar. But he began to wonder if Lamar would seriously listen to him, inasmuch as he was merely a student-teacher-to-be. So Doc Simpson, a nervy sort, went and corralled Jack Gibbs, the East High School principal, and convinced him to come along on the visit to Lamar. Gibbs was sympathetic to stories about talented black kids mired in any kind of crisis situation in the city’s segregated school system. So both men preached to Bo-Pete about their school—the kind of guidance he would get while planning for college—and about the basketball team, especially the basketball team. Bo-Pete listened intently and was moved that the two men would come to see him. He discussed the matter with his mother. In order to attend East, they would have to live in the vicinity of the high school. Lucy Lamar certainly didn’t have to remind her son that they lived on her meager and inconsistent maid’s paycheck. She could not just pick up and move with a snap of her fingers. Her son knew this, yet he also knew his mother was a prideful lady, and the powers that be at North High had mistreated her son, insulting her pride.
Nick Conner, thrilling ally alongside Eddie Rat, was not a rambunctious sort. He was, however, mature, and quite focused. He also had a fiendish affinity for winning. Bo-Pete Lamar was an All-City guard, set loose upon the city landscape, and now suddenly without a team.
It didn’t really impress Eddie Rat that he got more publicity than Nick Conner. He was quick in heaping praise upon Conner. And he also realized that Conner had a genuine sense of what the concept of “team” meant. Conner was well aware that the upcoming basketball team would be without the potent backcourt firepower they had had last year. Little introduction is needed between gifted basketball players. Talent finds talent. That summer Nick Conner began hopping into his old Chevy and driving over to Bo-Pete’s home. Together they’d ride around the city in search of pickup games. And during those rides Nick Conner also began making his pitch about East High and how wonderful it would be to have Lamar at the school if it was at all possible. “Man, we’d really like you to come,” Conner told Lamar.
Lucy Lamar, mindful of her hopes for her children, started making some inquiries about moving to the East Side of town. She had relatives who already lived in Poindexter Village, the public housing complex near East High School. They told her she would like the neighborhood. Lucy, quiet, prim, and proud, went into deep thinking mode before making any moves in life. During the middle of the summer, she told her relatives in Poindexter Village to inquire about rental apartments there. She traveled across town to take a look. When she departed, she had a rental application in hand.
Poindexter Village had been named after Rev. James Poindexter, the father of black political coming-of-age in the city. Born in 1819 in Virginia, Poindexter had arrived in Columbus in 1837 with his wife, Adelia, intent on surviving as a barber—and abolitionist. He found hideaways in the city for escaped slaves trying to make it to Canada. He could be seen in the woods galloping on horseback, leading horses by their reins, bringing them to slaves who were in hiding. Poindexter became a minister and began conducting services at Second Baptist Church. It was a small congregation, and his parishioners grew extremely proud of him. But then something happened that he could not abide: A new parishioner, a black man and his family, arrivals also from Virginia, settled in among the congregation. All seemed fine until it was discovered that the black man had once been a slaveholder himself, a very rare but definite reality of the slave business. Poindexter abruptly left the church, taking some parishioners with him, and they formed the Anti-Slavery Baptist Church. He became a prominent abolitionist voice in the city. In 1858, his power now unquestioned—at least among blacks—he rejoined Second Baptist Church as its head minister. He soon began a political career, becoming the city’s first black city councilman. It was a long and satisfying career, ending with his death in 1907. At his funeral, some spoke of him with the same reverence they reserved for Booker T. Washington, the great educator.
Dwight “Bo-Pete” Lamar, the dazzling transfer student, was lured to East High with the promise he could keep his black-is-beautiful Afro hairstyle.
To build Poindexter Village, four hundred falling-down homes had to be leveled in the section of the city once known as Blackberry Patch. By the 1950s, the majority of Poindexter Village’s residents were black, its teenagers destined for East High School.
In the fall of 1968, the balled black fist seemed to be everywhere. The Afro—that ornament of cultural pride born of the black struggle—was peeking from storylines in mainstream magazines. Black actors on stage, TV shows, and in major motion pictures were sporting the Afro, and it signaled more than just a hairstyle. Most politicians grew wobbly, mentally snared in a cultural ravine, angry at the youth who were demanding honesty. President Lyndon Johnson—heroic in the cause of civil rights—grew disenchanted over the stalemate in Vietnam, which had been heightened by his own hubris. Black soldiers in Vietnam were constantly writing home telling family members and friends that they were following the press accounts of civil rights demonstrations and that the protests filled them with pride. White politicians had a hard time connecting the war in Vietnam with the war on American streets for racial justice. President Johnson finally announced a halt to the bombing. He also stunned the nation when he said he would not run for re-election. “There is division in the American house now,” he said to the nation. “There is divisiveness among us all tonight. And holding the trust that is mine, as President of all the people, I cannot disregard the peril to the progress of the American people and the hope and the prospect of peace for all people.” There was great weariness upon his face in his address to the nation at the end of March 1968. He went on: “With America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home,…I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes…Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
The Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey, and he faced off against the Alabama segregationist George Wallace, who was running as a third-party candidate and constantly nipping at Humphrey’s heels. No one could forget what happened in Chicago during Humphrey’s coronation when demonstrators were beaten bloody by Mayor Richard Daley’s goon-like police squads. Did Americans want to usher another Democrat into the White House? Richard Nixon, defeated in 1960 by John F. Kennedy, rose up on a law-and-order platform. The social protest comedian Dick Gregory, mindful of racist police conduct, opined that “law and order” was just “a new way to say, ‘Nigger.’ ”
In late September, a Gallup Poll delivered ominous news for Humphrey: He was 15 points behind Nixon. George Wallace faded when he picked his running mate, the World War II hero Curtis LeMay. (Wallace initially offered the running mate position to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an archconservative who privately loathed men of Wallace’s ilk.) LeMay, born in Columbus and, like East High coach Bob Hart, a graduate of South High School, came under attack when he started talking about nuking perceived foreign enemies of the United States. People questioned his mental competence. LeMay’s poor judgment, coupled with Wallace’s racist language, proved a toxic combination. Humphrey belatedly began opposing the Vietnam War. Democrats finally began rallying to his side. The Mexico City Olympics—and the protests by black athletes—stole some political thunder, as did the soap opera–like news that Jacqueline Kennedy had jetted off to Greece to marry Aristotle Onassis, a shipping magnate. But Nixon kept making promises, an end to war, more law and order—especially more law and order. He had a modern political machine, with pollsters and advertising gurus; his running mate, Spiro Agnew, tapped into racial hostilities by dismissing minorities. “If you’ve seen one city slum,” he said, “you’ve seen them all.” On election day, Nixon got 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey, 42.7 percent. “Well, sir,” Humphrey confided to one of his staffers, “the American people will find that they have just elected a papier-mache man.” In time Humphrey’s comment would prove to be an understatement.
In the late summer of 1968, just as East High School was starting to come to life—teachers were getting their classroom materials ready, school officials were finishing up necessary paperwork, janitors were waxing floors—a neatly dressed lady walked into the front door of the school, asked directions, then made her way to the principal’s office. Paul Pennell, assistant basketball coach, had never met Lucy Lamar. He happened to be in an adjacent office, several feet away. “I’m Lucy Lamar,” he heard her say. “We’ve moved into Poindexter Village. And I’m here to enroll my son Dwight Lamar.” Pennell was astonished. He went to a phone elsewhere in the building and dialed up head basketball coach Bob Hart. “I said, ‘Are you sitting down?’ ” Pennell proceeded to tell Hart about the school’s new enrollee. Hart was practically speechless. Coaches were not allowed to “tamper” with rival high school athletes. Pennell did not know about the secret mission undertaken by student teacher Doc Simpson and principal Jack Gibbs, or about Nick Conner’s own personal overtures to Lamar.
When school began, it did not take long for word to get around that Bo-Pete, the dazzling basketball player from North High School, was now an East High School Tiger. Many people began looking beyond football season to the upcoming basketball season. And the school’s grapevine grew hot with questions about Bo Lamar. “We were looking for him to fit in,” says Karen Caliver, a school cheerleader at the time. “It was up to Bo to see if he could fit in.” Kevin Smith, who was penciled in as a starting forward, began telling others that if Bo-Pete didn’t play defense, he didn’t see how he could benefit the team. Lamar ignored the concern.
But before basketball season could get under way, there was the Tiger football season. Many saw enduring the football season as an opportunity mostly to applaud the school’s celebrated marching band. The football team opened their season by being blanked by Newark High, 34–0. Four games later Watterson High embarrassed them, 54–14. Their fierce rival, Linden-McKinley, got the best of them, 32–12. They tallied six losses and just three victories. Football season was often simply a letdown. But the Tiger faithful hardly complained, because of the marching band. It wasn’t just any band; it was arguably the best band in the city. They were a high-kicking, horn-blowing musical combination of jazz, rhythm, and syncopated style. And because East High was the only high school in the city whose football field sat several blocks away from the school, band members had to strut those blocks to the field on game nights. And strut they did, lining up outside the school, horns honking at them, their instruments coming alive, before they began marching, drums thumping, down Parkwood Avenue. Local police would shut the streets off to traffic as they marched. At Greenway Street—the whole neighborhood seemingly on front porches in the autumn twilight, marveling—they’d turn right. Children would be shrieking, screen doors slapping open, the incessant beat of car horns melding into the band music. Entire families would be waving from porches. Four blocks down Greenway they’d reach Harley Field, home of the Tigers’ football team, where the band’s very presence softened the blow when the team was defeated.
We are the Tigers, oh yeah, uh-hun, the mighty mighty Tigers, oh yeah, un-huh
Homecoming night represented the first celebration of any kind in the community since the death of Martin Luther King Jr. (Basketball players Eddie Ratleff and Grady Smith sat on the Homecoming Court, both looking dapper in tuxedos and ready for a night of dancing under the watchful eyes of teachers.) It rained that night—which came after the official indoor homecoming dance—the klieg lights slicing over and around Harley Field. Wanda Suber, Donna Bates, Sandra Montgomery, Linda Phillips, and Alice Flowers all competed for Homecoming Queen, smiling their black-is-beautiful smiles as they were paraded around the field in convertible automobiles. They had to open their umbrellas, but their smiles were undiminished. Alice Flowers was crowned queen. She looked incandescent in a checked outfit, white gloves, and a bow in her hair.
With the end of a dreary football season, the sound of basketballs inside the gymnasium was a sweet sound to Coach Bob Hart. The school was overcrowded, so it was not surprising that large numbers of boys showed up for tryouts. This had been a consistent occurrence in recent years, so much so that school athletic officials—in an effort to provide opportunities for the many boys sulking around the school after not making varsity—created a Hi-Y basketball team. It was like a third-tier varsity. The team members played in their own league throughout the city and suburbs. Jim McCann, the Hi-Y coach, was always around as Bob Hart made his first wave of cuts. He’d scoop up some of the players who didn’t make the varsity team. He’d do the same with the final wave of cuts. The Hi-Y players had become stereotyped: Many believed that these players were difficult to coach, that they ignored academics, and that they didn’t qualify to be on varsity—even if they were talented enough—because they exceeded the age deadline. There were kernels of truth in some of the insinuations, but Jim McCann believed they were good kids who just landed outside the numbers game, as Bob Hart kept only twelve players for his varsity team.
During varsity tryouts, a lot of eyes landed on Bo-Pete Lamar. Hart wasted little time in explaining to Bo-Pete how the team would be set up. “He told me, ‘It’s going to be Eddie’s team,’ ” Lamar recalls, referring to Eddie Rat. “And he said, ‘If you can’t accept that, go back to North and average forty points.’ ”
Eddie Ratleff (though in the hallways at East the name had morphed into “Eddierat” or just “Rat”) was born in Bellefontaine, Ohio, a small town in Logan County, to the west of Columbus. (Norman Vincent Peale, the widely praised minister, lecturer, and author who wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, had graduated from Bellefontaine High School. The book became a sensation, though some considered it full of baloney passing off as deep wisdom: “Find the upside of the problem”; “Focus on today.”) The Ratleff family was one of the few black families who lived in the small, mostly white town. “Everybody knew everybody,” Ratleff recalls. “No one had money,” he adds of his own family and many others whom he knew. His uncles introduced him to sports at an early age. He fell in love with baseball first. Jackie Robinson was his hero. But when he began to sprout he was encouraged to play basketball, which he did, showing quite a smooth talent. He was not close to his birth father. His mother remarried and the family moved to Columbus, in time for Eddie to begin junior high school. His stepfather was a drunkard and a braggart, habits his stepson abhorred. At Champion Junior High, Eddie began to dominate in basketball. He started on varsity as a seventh grader. “He had natural ability,” his junior high coach, Tom Brown, recalls of Ratleff. The coach also thought the kid—even-tempered, calm, and cool—had “a beautiful personality.” Brown was somewhat astonished that a kid could have so much talent. So, because he often doubted his own coaching prowess, Brown adopted a different type of coaching philosophy: “I didn’t coach basketball and baseball,” he says, fifty years later while sitting in his basement office in Columbus, Ohio. “I coached life—and applied life to baseball and basketball.” Translation: He coached on the fly; he mimicked other coaches. “Hell, if I saw a coach yelling, I’d yell.”
In the summer of Ratleff’s eighth-grade year, Bob Hart gave him a brand-new basketball and told him that when he returned it, he wanted it to be scuffed and well worn. In ninth grade, Ratleff led the City League in scoring. “He was the best basketball player I’d ever seen in my life,” remembers Gene Caslin, a seventh grader at Champion Junior High when Ratleff was in his final year there. “Every time he took a shot, he would follow it up.” (A player with quick instincts follows up any shot he attempts, giving himself an opportunity to retrieve a possible miss and either attempt another shot or start a play anew.)
Ratleff’s reputation spread throughout the City League during his junior high years with a near spectral force. But not every player destined to play against him had seen him play, because other junior high players also had games on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Boys will be boys, competitive to a fault, and many players had no intention of expressing fear of Ratleff, even as his reputation grew. In anticipation of their upcoming game at Champion Junior High, the coach at Indianola Junior High warned his players about the prospect of facing Ratleff. “We all knew that we had never played anyone like him,” recalls Curt Moody, who was on the Indianola Junior High team at the time. Moody remembers his coach creating a strategy of very aggressive play against Ratleff: “Our coach said, ‘He can’t be stopped by a normal defense. So we have to have a guy smack him around the face. And it can’t be a starter.’ ” The Indianola coach quickly settled on a bench player by the name of Bodiddley Harris. Harris was a short, compact athlete, known in the neighborhood for having a quick temper. “All week in school,” recalls Moody, “Bodiddley was talking about how he was gonna smack Ratleff.” On the bus ride over to Champion Junior High, Bodiddley continued his bragging about his planned assault, much to the delight of his teammates, who hoped the tactic might unnerve Ratleff. The Indianola players alighted from the team bus and made their way inside the school, to the gymnasium and locker room. They were the first ones to take the court; Bodiddley was particularly happy and excited that he had been made an integral part of the game plan. There was a rumbling and clapping in the crowd as the Champion players trotted onto the floor in single file. The Indianola players couldn’t help themselves; they slowed their pre-game shooting, swiveled, and watched. “Ratleff,” remembers Moody, “was the last guy through their door. He looked like a giant. Bodiddley said, ‘That’s Ratleff? I ain’t smacking that guy! No way! Are you crazy!’ ” Indianola, like every other team that faced Ratleff that year, became just another victim of Ratleff’s junior high team.
Miller Barnes had considered Tom Brown a mentor. Barnes ended up being named basketball coach at Roosevelt Junior High, another mostly black school in the city. Miller Barnes had Tom Brown’s number; his Roosevelt team was the only team that delivered a defeat to Eddie Ratleff during his junior high basketball playing days. One lesson that Brown took from the encounter was that he saw how a rival coach had plotted to stop his marquee player and he would be better prepared going forward in the season. The loss so bedeviled the players that they all quit, en masse. They were ashamed; they stalked off the court. “Eddie called a meeting,” Brown recalls of his mature player. “And he told the team, ‘Listen, we just don’t need to lose any more games.’ ” So they regrouped and didn’t lose any more games after the Roosevelt loss.
Bob Hart was always looking to the future. He was engaged in a constant youth movement. Any sophomore—a first-year student at the school—who had basketball prowess would draw his attention. Juniors on his basketball team had to worry over the summer about their senior year roles. If they were not bona fide stars, like Eddie Rat and Nick Conner, they risked being replaced by a sophomore or junior with greater potential. It was a brutal attrition scheme. When basketball practice began in the fall of 1968, Hart faced a conundrum: There was an abundance of seniors on the practice floor. Ratleff, Conner, Kevin Smith, and Bo Lamar were obvious locks. Beyond those players, however, Hart was unsympathetic and unemotional about winnowing the team down. Seniors not slated to start were vulnerable, and Roy Hickman was a senior. The previous year Hickman had been a backup forward, coming off the bench. Bob Hart had told him at the end of his junior year that he would not be guaranteed a spot on the following year’s team.
Roy Hickman had a muscular build. Classmates called him “Handsome.” He lived half a block off Mount Vernon Avenue, behind the Macon Bar, in a small home. In the 1950s and early 1960s, before integration, the St. Clair and the Macon were the two hotels that catered to a black clientele. The Macon became known for hosting touring black musical acts that came through town. By 1968, the hotel above the bar had closed and the bar had lost much of its luster. Roy owned a bicycle and he would ride it to play basketball all over the city. Leaving his home, he’d always have to be careful not to roll his tires over broken beer and wine bottles. He’d return late in the evenings and would be forced to dodge the drunks lolling behind the Macon Bar. Then he’d rise the next morning and take off again. “I had tunnel vision,” he says. If it was raining, he’d wrap his sneakers in a bag, tie the bag over his handlebars, and start rolling. His father, who hailed from Tennessee, worked at the Timken factory; his mother, a Georgia native, had a civilian job with a government manufacturing plant. He adored his parents. They let him play basketball without making many demands on him, a luxury for a teenager. They’d been disappointed in their two daughters, who had gotten away from them, spent too much time on the streets, enjoying the fun and freedom of the sixties. “My mom,” Roy recalls, “would say, ‘I wanna see one of my kids do something.’ ”
She worried about him during the disturbances that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Roy had no intention of getting into trouble, but still, he grieved over the King killing. “King was everybody’s hero. And you could feel his death through the whole neighborhood. Some handled it well; others didn’t,” he says.
Hickman was only six feet tall—not ideal for a power forward—but played taller because he was blessed with a potent jumping ability. He knew to survive Coach Hart’s penchant for cutting seniors he would have to make himself invaluable to the team. And that’s what he set out to do in practices. He was quick and brutal beneath the rim, getting rebounds, intimidating other players with his strength. He also acted like a leader, barking out plays and showing great focus. And at the end of every practice, Hart found it impossible to cut him from the team. He decided he would have to keep Roy Hickman.
Nick Conner had always had to play in the shadow of Eddie Rat. But he didn’t seem to mind; he knew what he could do, how much respect he had garnered from Ratleff. They were a duo now. Going into their senior year, both players were attracting nationwide attention and write-ups in boys’ basketball magazines. It was common knowledge that Conner was the best jumper in the city. He had led every team he had been on in rebounding. Nick’s mother worked in the cafeteria at Champion Junior High School. She was a tall, stout, single lady who beamed with pride when talking about her son. On East High game nights, she could be seen swooping through the neighborhood, picking up some of the “good boys” she just knew would want to go to the East High game. And off they’d all go in her beat-up automobile.
As Hart began filling his team out, he stuck to his belief about sentimentality and seniors: Any senior had to be an impressive contributor. Billy Nicholson, Ronnie Tucker, and Garnett Davis had played varsity basketball as juniors a year earlier. But now, as seniors—and as players who did not quite distinguish themselves in their junior years—they were vulnerable. Nicholson and Tucker were cut. Davis quit, partly in protest, believing his close friend Nicholson should not have been cut from the team. But Davis also convinced himself he should focus on the sport he loved the most, baseball. “Seniors tend to be disgruntled if they’re not starting,” says Assistant Coach Paul Pennell. “And Hart knew it.” A year earlier, Hart had only three seniors on his 1967–68 team, and each had been a starter. For his 1969 team, Hart decided to keep six seniors—Lamar, Ratleff, Conner, Larry Walker, Grady Smith, and Hickman. He felt certain they would be his top players.
It fell to Larry Walker to keep this gifted contingent together on the court. He was only five eight, but he was the fastest player on the team, a thief in the open court when the other team had the ball. Walker was the team’s point guard, charged with bringing the ball up the court and running the plays. A team’s point guard is an extension of the coach on the floor, anticipating what plays the coach might want to call. A coach has to depend on his point guard, and Bob Hart depended on Larry Walker, because Eddie Rat depended on Larry Walker. The two had been teammates together at Champion Junior High and were close friends. They chased girls together and played pranks on each other. They had played so much basketball together through the years that they could communicate with one another by a head roll or eye contact. Larry Walker knew exactly when it was necessary to get the ball into the hands of Eddie Rat.
Ollie Mae Walker and her husband, Charles, arrived in Columbus in 1948. Like many others, they had had enough of the South. They came as yet one more black family clutching battered suitcases and boxes of clothes and moving to the Poindexter Village housing projects. Charles worked as a janitor. There were eight Walker children. One day Charles announced he was leaving, going back to Georgia. His wife and children assumed something was wrong on his side of the family, or there was some kind of family business he had to attend to. But he left and never returned. Ollie Mae had to raise the children all alone. She worked as a maid at the Jefferson Hotel downtown, and after her husband abandoned the family, she asked her supervisor if she could start doubling up on her shifts. He often would let her, so some days she worked sixteen hours. All she seemed to care about was keeping her family together, under one roof.
When he was in the ninth grade at Champion Junior High, Larry Walker turned an ankle on the basketball court. The team trainer taped it and he returned to the court. But over the next few days the pain wouldn’t go away. At the hospital, X-rays were ordered, and they showed a tumor. “My mother worried it might be cancer. She didn’t know if they were going to cut a part of my leg off or what,” Walker recalls. He went into the hospital for surgery, a bone marrow graft. The tumor was non-malignant, but he lay in the hospital for a week. The welfare agency picked up the entire hospital bill. Every day his mother, Ollie Mae, would come gliding through the doorway of his hospital room, sometimes straight from a double shift.
Hart also prided himself on his bench talent, players whom he could use to spell the starters and insert into a game in strategic situations. He chose some savvy juniors who would accept their role playing. Kenny Mizelle—the oldest of nine children—was a gritty kid who lived in the Bolivar Arms housing project. He was a deft passer with Houdini-like hands, and nearly as fast as Larry Walker. Larry Mann, a junior forward, was smart and slithery around the basket and had a good basketball mind. Hal Thomas made the team as a sophomore.
Players who sat on Hart’s bench were often asked why they didn’t transfer to another school, with less fierce competition, where they might gain a starting position. And it came down to pride, to the old-fashioned joy—especially in the case of Robert Wright—of being on a team with a vaunted history, of playing and practicing alongside the likes of Nick Conner and Eddie Rat and now Bo-Pete Lamar. “We were precocious enough to understand who we were playing with,” recalls Robert Wright. “We knew it would be an honor to practice with these cats every day.”
Wright’s mother, Erma, was a domestic worker in the white suburb of Bexley. Sometimes she found herself on the same bus gliding down East Broad Street as teammate Kenny Mizelle’s mother, Mildred “Duckie” Mizelle, two black maids on their way to clean houses. Erma’s husband, Daniel, was a criminal and had spent time in the notorious Ohio State Penitentiary. “He told me he once killed a man,” Robert recalls. Daniel died when Robert was twelve years old. As a young boy, he figured he needed an extracurricular hobby to latch on to. He found it in basketball. When he reached East High, Bob Hart grew fond of Wright’s work habits and dependability.
Still, when the school doors opened in the fall of 1968, Robert Wright, like many of the East High students, remained rattled over the King assassination. “We were, for the first time in our lives, frightened,” he says of the entire East High student body. “We were used to white folks killing presidents. But Dr. King? We thought if they could kill King, they could kill any of us.” Wright also felt the impact of the protests that had taken place at the Olympics in Mexico City. “We saw what was going on with John Carlos and Tommie Smith. We understood the only way to escape the neighborhood was to play basketball, and play it well.” Wright also sensed a growing shift in sentiment among the student body: “We didn’t look at King with the same reverence as with H. Rap Brown or Stokely Carmichael. You now had cheerleaders at East who wouldn’t straighten their hair any longer,” he says, referring to the growing numbers who preferred to wear Afros.
So the Afros grew thicker, as did the inquiries about freedom and equal rights everywhere. It could be felt in the classrooms. Seniors at East had to take a course titled “Problems of Democracy.” (Everyone referred to it as POD.) The textbook was thick, its contents all about the challenges of government and governmental institutions. But many of the students now wanted to know exactly who was going to solve the ongoing problems of democracy right out there on the streets of Columbus, Ohio, and in Chicago, and in Indianapolis, and in Los Angeles—in all those places where riots and urban rebellion had taken place, and were still taking place. The students started insisting on conversations with their teachers about current events, about race and inequality. “I felt like I wanted to go out in the streets and throw rocks,” recalls David Reid. Reid, however, thought better: He was manager of the boys varsity basketball team.
Sometimes Bob Hart wished he could whip that term paper out he had written back in college about the travails of black people, and the need for the nation to face its flaws and demons. But his power now lay in coaching a group of black kids in a tough neighborhood.
His team assembled, and with a couple weeks of practice behind them, Hart scheduled a scrimmage with the East High Hi-Y team, those basketball players who had been deemed not good enough to make varsity. Because many of those players still nursed grudges about having been cut, Hart always relished the opportunity to show them the beauty of playing under control, with a ref’s whistle—the game skills he demanded of his varsity players.
Hart was playing coy with local reporters about announcing his starting lineup. His starting five would certainly come from among his top seven players. For the Hi-Y game he put a lineup of Conner, Hickman, Ratleff, Larry Walker, and newcomer Bo-Pete Lamar on the floor. The game was closed to the public. Some of the Hi-Y players were hyped up, figuring this would be a good time to show Hart he had made a mistake by cutting them. They were scrappy and fearless. As the game got under way, Hart could see it would take practice for Lamar to mesh with the rest of the players. There was the usual grunting and exhaustion, since the players from both teams were not yet in their best shape. But for all their prowess, Ratleff and Conner and Lamar and their teammates couldn’t keep up with the Hi-Y team. The Hi-Y team was winning. Their players began wolf whistling, taunting the varsity players. Hart stopped the game and decided that at the end of every quarter the clock would be stopped. When each new quarter began, the game clock would start over, the score zero to zero. “The rules changed when we were losing,” recalls varsity member Robert Wright.
“They beat us,” remembers varsity member Kenny Mizelle.
“We were working on some things,” Larry Walker says, going on to explain that correcting technique was more important to the team than a scrimmage that didn’t count.
The varsity players indeed brushed it all off, telling classmates the next day it was just a scrimmage, that they were not about to overly exert themselves and get hurt, especially against the Hi-Y team. They promised all who kept asking that they would be ready when the season opened.
If there was a facet of the game in which Bob Hart wanted his current team to improve, it was long-range shooting. His teams had always been thought of as overdependent on inside caginess and muscle. At the beginning of the 1968 season, Hart brought Scott Guiler onto his staff as an unpaid volunteer coach. Guiler was in graduate school at Ohio State University, and he was a shooter. At Canal Winchester High School, an all-white school located east of Columbus in farm country, he had been one of the best high school shooters in the school’s history. He possessed a picture-perfect jump shot. Were it not for a serious ankle injury in his senior year of high school, he would have gone on to play college basketball. Hart figured the jump shooters on his team—which mainly meant Bo-Pete Lamar—would benefit from just watching Guiler launch beautiful, high arching jump shots from all over the court. “Before practice,” Guiler recalls, “I’d play three-on-three with the players—me, Nick, Rat, Hickman, Bo-Pete, Coach Pennell. I really enjoyed that.” Bob Hart watched Guiler shoot and his Cheshire grin was hard to miss.
While he was sitting in a London prison awaiting extradition to America—and while the students of East High School in Columbus, Ohio, were demanding classroom time to discuss the King assassination—James Earl Ray was being hailed in some circles in America, namely by the Ku Klux Klan, and the Patriotic Legal Fund, the latter a crackpot mélange of undistinguished attorneys. Prison authorities at Wandsworth prison worried about Ray’s mental state and were on guard for suicide attempts. None occurred. “He just hated black people,” a prison guard who had befriended Ray would recall. “He said so on many occasions. He called them ‘niggers.’ In fact, he said he was going to Africa to shoot some more.” Alexander Eist, the prison guard, concluded that Ray might be insane. “I can raise a lot of money, write books, go on television,” Ray told him. “In parts of America, I’m a national hero.”
Back on American soil and in a heavily guarded cell in downtown Memphis, James Earl Ray confronted the overwhelming evidence against him. There was a good chance of a first-degree murder conviction, for which he might be executed in the electric chair. So Ray pleaded guilty in lieu of a jury trial and received a ninety-nine-year prison sentence. He soon told a feverish and fanciful story about the King killing to journalist William Bradford Huie, claiming that he had been a pawn in a conspiracy, that he personally didn’t pull the trigger. Huie was the perfect vehicle for such a tale. In his reporting career, Huie had seesawed between itinerant magazine reporting and giving lectures. He was a hustler of words and stories and storytelling. In 1955 he had covered the trial of the white men in Mississippi who had murdered fifteen-year-old Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. The all-white Mississippi jury quickly acquitted the men. Huie then paid them $4,000 to tell him of their guilt. The men, realizing they could not be charged twice, took the money, told Huie of their murderous deed, and Huie wrote his story, forever becoming identified with “checkbook journalism.” Huie didn’t seem to mind the stigma. He certainly knew how to track and follow a good, dramatic story. Huie had covered the trial concerning the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights workers who were cut down by police officers and rogue associates on the night of June 21, 1964, in rural Mississippi. The local court acquitted the men, but they were eventually sentenced to prison on federal charges. Huie wrote the story in Three Lives for Mississippi, a book about the murders. While covering the civil rights movement, Huie had met Martin Luther King Jr. He was able to engage King to write an introduction to an edition of Three Lives for Mississippi. King was enamored of Huie’s interest in telling civil rights stories. Not long after that book’s publication, Huie was interviewing King’s assassin and writing a book about the murder. The King and James Earl Ray assassination story, in all its permutations, would appear in newspapers and magazines throughout the 1968–69 Tigers basketball team’s season.
The first game of the East High season was scheduled against Mohawk High School. The public clamor for tickets to the Saturday night contest was so intense that city athletic officials moved the game to the Fairgrounds Coliseum. Mohawk High was located near downtown Columbus and had been built in an effort to ease some of the overcrowding at East High School. Basketball fans were eager to know which five players would start for Bob Hart’s Tigers. Hart coolly planned it this way: The public would know at the point the players were introduced inside the Coliseum. One thing was for sure: Bo-Pete would have plenty of followers at the game. The Coliseum sat on Eleventh Avenue, just a few blocks from his former home on the city’s North Side.
The public announcer made a big deal of introducing the starting East High lineup. On the East High sideline—after the players in their white cotton warm-ups had trotted from the bowels of the stadium onto the Coliseum floor, greeted with thunderous applause—the bench players stood, shielding the starting five from the crowd. One of the things rival teams always gushed about were the East High warm-up uniforms, the outerwear players wore over their game uniforms. The Tigers’ were white cotton, pants and a jacket—the cotton as soft as the cotton that some of their parents used to pick in the South. “You dreamed of wearing that uniform,” remembers Gene Caslin, Ratleff’s former junior high school teammate. Bob Hart had long sensed there was something important about appearance on the basketball court. “Basketball color is an intangible quality that can be identified with morale,” he once wrote. “This can be incorporated in your equipment, uniforms, or style of play. Clean, well-fitting uniforms will dress up your boys and make them look like champions, whatever else they may be.”
As the announcer’s voice boomed, the standing players parted and, one by one, a player would rise from the bench and trot to the middle of the floor. There came Ratleff, the standing players parting—like an accordion—then closing again once Ratleff was out on the floor. There came Nick Conner. (He and Ratleff were team captains.) There came Roy Hickman, the players continuing to close after each starter had slipped out onto the floor. There came Larry Walker. There was one more player to be introduced. And when the standing players parted one last time, there he sat—Bo-Pete Lamar, the gunslinging rebel from the neighborhood, the player who came of age on the courts just down the street from the Coliseum. The crowd exploded. Bo-Pete, a wide grin flowing across his face, rose and coolly trotted to center court.
The Mohawk fans made their own noise as their starters were introduced. Mohawk’s premier players were Al Harris, a gritty-playing forward who would have attended East were it not for overcrowding; Fred Saunders, a six-foot-six forward with a steely determination; Bruce Nelson, sporting the biggest and wildest Afro on the team; Keith Young, a player who depended on finesse; and Louis Hale, their point guard who was a dangerous streak shooter. The Columbus Citizen-Journal, the morning newspaper, had predicted that Mohawk would be one of the top teams in the City League. Coach Hart echoed a similar sentiment: “Mohawk will be a serious threat for the league title,” he said, “and a very formidable foe for an opener.”
As gifted as Mohawk was, from the outset of the game they seemed bewildered by the array of East High’s offensive weapons. Both Ratleff and Conner began by scoring at a wicked clip. Hart unleashed his vaunted 2-2-1 defense, the opposing team staring at twin giants Conner and Ratleff as they simply tried to get the ball inbounds. “It was designed for you to throw the ball away,” Mohawk player Al Harris remembers of the East defense. During a Mohawk timeout, Harris was furious, questioning his teammates’ drive and nerve. Players were talking over one another. “I’m like, shut up and play,” remembers Harris. It appeared fruitless. By halftime Ratleff had scored a whopping 32 points. By game’s end, Bob Hart’s Tigers seemed to be sending a warning: They would be worthy foes for any team. The score: East, 95, Mohawk, 63. Bo-Pete scored 17 points in his debut for the Tigers. Mohawk’s Harris, who had a nifty 22-point game, mused that East had got the better of Mohawk because it was the first game of the season, and three of their stars—Harris himself, Fred Saunders, and Louis Hale—had been on the school’s football team and were still rusty from the season. It was the type of reasoning that elicited little pity.
Back at school on Monday morning, up and down the East High hallways, the Hi-Y basketball players who had whipped the varsity team in the earlier scrimmage had to wonder: Had the varsity boys been playing possum with them?
East High’s next foe was Dayton Dunbar, a game that was quickly moved to the Fairgrounds Coliseum as well because of ticket demand. Coach Hart had always held the Dayton high school teams in high regard, so he cautioned his players. But Hart’s running and gunning Tigers showed little concern on the court. By the end of the third quarter, they were up by 20 points, 70–50. Conner and Ratleff each poured in 27 points; Conner went a cool 10 for 20 from the field. Bo-Pete chipped in with 17 points again, and Roy Hickman finished with 13. The final score felt like déjà vu: The Tigers beat Dunbar, 92–69.
When high school students look outward, across neighborhoods, they often reduce those alien neighborhoods along socioeconomic and class lines. Which houses look better? Which neighborhood has the sleekest cars in the driveway? The two largest public housing complexes in Columbus—Poindexter Village and Bolivar Arms—were both on the city’s East Side, which meant East High educated the students who came from those housing projects. And while not all East High students lived in abject poverty, enough did that the school was sometimes maligned and stereotyped. The racial angst left the student body alternately with a chip on its shoulder and with a determination to cultivate its own pride.
Eastmoor High School was the East High Tigers’ next opponent. Eastmoor sat northeast of East High, and East High students knew that the kids at Eastmoor were, for the most part, better off economically than they were. The school was located in the Berwick neighborhood of Columbus where many of the black middle class—lawyers, teachers, doctors—resided. The high school students who lived in Berwick wore their stature with a certain panache. Gene Caslin, who had played with Ratleff in junior high, was now a varsity player for Eastmoor. Only a sophomore, he did not expect a lot of playing time and sat listening to his teammates boast that they would upset the Tigers. Eastmoor had two stars in Harold Sullinger and Ron Lech, and their coach hoped their talent would offset some of the Tiger firepower.
At the end of the first quarter, Eastmoor had taken a 21–16 lead, which did much to boost their confidence, but with Ratleff and Lamar firing at will, East snatched the lead by halftime, 42–35. After halftime, Lamar reminded the throng of onlookers why he had led the city in scoring the previous year: He netted 13 points in the third quarter alone. After that, the Tigers began to pull away. The East High margin of victory against Eastmoor was 27 points, the final score 85–58.
The team’s next foe was Marion-Franklin, on Friday, December 13, on Marion-Franklin’s home court. At halftime the score was East 68, Marion-Franklin 34. By the third quarter, Marion-Franklin’s bad luck had worsened: the Tigers held a 40-point lead. In the fourth quarter, Bob Hart, realizing it was the charitable thing to do, took his starters out of the game. Tom Kahler, the Marion-Franklin coach, didn’t appreciate the gesture and left his starters in. The tactic annoyed Hart, who summoned his starters back into the game. “I put ’em back in because the guy at the other end wouldn’t take his regulars out,” Hart snapped later. “Our first string made the gap and he leaves his boys in after we took ours out.” Ed Ratleff scored 45 points, tying a City League one-game scoring record going back to 1959. East High logged a 109–76 victory.
It might have been thought Bo-Pete was overly eager to face the next opponent, North High, his former team. But the team’s approach was calm and even-keeled, as if they were above plotting petty revenge against the school that had given up on Bo-Pete. East scouted opposing teams and wrote scouting reports, which they distributed among team members. But they didn’t bother to scout North High. The team had lost not only Lamar, but also its other leading scorer, Donnie Penn, who had transferred to Linden-McKinley, his own personal rebuke to North High for what they had done to his friend Bo-Pete. East High had another victory by another wide and embarrassing margin: East 63, North 36. Coach Hart did not stop Bo-Pete from lingering after the buzzer sounded, chatting with former North High teammates. He had a huge smile on his Afro-framed face as he embraced old friends from the neighborhood.
There was still a long way to go in the season, but it was becoming difficult to hide the optimism that this 5–0 East High team was already generating. Ratleff and Conner seemed as unstoppable as ever. Bo-Pete had started jelling with the starting five, even if he had yet to have the kind of explosive game he routinely showcased at his former school. There was enough trickiness in his repertoire that the Tiger faithful—whose hands cupped their mouths when they witnessed a long jump shot or a dazzling spin move—knew it was only a matter of time. And the bruising forward Roy Hickman was playing as if he had something to prove every game. He remained annoyed that the coach had wondered about cutting him this very season.
The Tigers’ next opponent was Linden-McKinley, its longtime foe and the only school to beat East High in the past two basketball seasons. The game was played at the Fairgrounds Coliseum as part of a much-hyped doubleheader, the other game pitting undefeated South High against Central High School. There were more than a few titillating attractions in the East-Linden matchup. Linden’s backcourt, featuring Donnie Penn—Bo-Pete’s former teammate at North High—and Calvin Wade, an electrifying guard, was being talked up by many as the best backcourt in the city. Linden’s forwards, Cliff Sawyer and Willie Williams, were both drawing the attention of college scouts. And Linden’s first-year varsity coach, George Mills, had become the first black head basketball coach in the city. There was also the issue of student politics. Because of white flight on the city’s North Side, the number of white students at Linden-McKinley had been rapidly declining. By 1968, the school had the second largest concentration of black students, just behind East High. So inner-city bragging rights were at stake.
At the top of the East High scouting report on the Linden-McKinley Panthers, Coach Hart had inserted a little piece of Norman Vincent Peale–like advice: “If you have something to do that is worthwhile doing, don’t talk about it. Just do it. After you have done it, your friends and enemies will talk about it.”
The game went back and forth, with flashes of athletic brilliance from players on both teams. At the end of the first half, East held a fifteen-point lead, 49–34. But the Panthers were dangerous, and no lead was quite comfortable enough. In the third period, East misfired shot after shot, hitting a miserable 4 of 16 attempts. Hart was furious. It certainly did not help that East High’s Eddie Ratleff was in foul trouble and sat out a large portion of the third period. With Ratleff on the bench, Linden’s Willie Williams went to work, scoring nine points in the period. The Coliseum grew raucous, each school’s large fan contingents trying vainly to out yell the other. On three occasions in the fourth quarter, Linden inched to within two points. But then the Tigers found their shooting touch, hitting their next seven of ten shots from the field. They went to the free throw line five times, hitting all five shots. Linden, on this afternoon, did not disrupt the Tigers’ winning streak; the East team triumphed, 77–69. Ratleff finished with 30 points, while Bo-Pete Lamar slipped in 20, and Roy Hickman 16. The Tigers’ most reviled foe had been vanquished again.
On the East Side of the city—where the sorrow over King’s death lingered the deepest—the influx of jobs to the area was undeniable. Many actually traced the development to King’s activism. In his 1964 State of the Union speech, President Johnson vowed “an unconditional war on poverty.” Nearly a fifth of the American population of 192 million at the time made less than $3,000 a year. Hungry babies were clawing paint off of walls in ghetto apartments and eating it, becoming sick. “It will not be a short or easy struggle,” Johnson said of his War on Poverty. “No single weapon or strategy will suffice. But we shall not rest until that war is won.” In LBJ’s mind, the assault on poverty would be similar to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s ambitious New Deal. The LBJ program flowed from his Economic Opportunity Act, which funded community-based programs to “give every American community the opportunity to develop a comprehensive plan to fight its own poverty—and help them to carry out their plans.” Suddenly a gigantic machinery was created to combat poverty and provide opportunity. Among the various agencies were the Neighborhood Youth Corps, Legal Services Program, and Head Start; the impact of all of these programs was felt in Columbus.
On the East Side of Columbus, the biggest War on Poverty programs were headquartered at 700 East Broad Street, several blocks west of East High School. People from the impoverished East Side went there to seek training and jobs, made possible by the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA). These were the first jobs that were created to lift blacks in the community away from oppressive and dangerous factory jobs. (There was a satellite office on Mount Vernon Avenue, just around the corner from where East High player Roy Hickman lived.) Many of the East High athletes found summer jobs during 1968 through one of the War on Poverty programs.
As the 1968 basketball season had gotten under way at East High, the presidential campaign was also in motion. Yard signs supporting one or the other candidates could be seen up and down East Broad Street. Five years of war, ongoing civil unrest, and their bloody and chaotic convention in Chicago did not bode well for the Democratic ticket of Humphrey and Edmund Muskie. Civil rights advocates were leery of both Nixon and Agnew. Alabama governor George Wallace, a segregationist and a frightening figure to blacks, didn’t stand a chance of winning, but he was making noise throughout the South, heightening racial tensions throughout the country. Nixon’s “law and order” approach to civil protest caught on with the so-called silent majority, whites living in the suburbs across the nation. When, after the election, Nixon failed to name a black to his cabinet—or to any high-level position—many in the minority community who distrusted him felt they had even more reason to do so. The Nixon administration tried to curb efforts to implement school integration plans, leaving all-black schools, such as East High, in limbo in the decades-long fight for educational equality.
If an outsider was looking for a school that was ripe for civil protest beginning in the fall of 1968 in Columbus, Ohio, they would have quickly learned about East High School. The school sat on the city’s activist East Side. The school had an all-black student body, and one-fifth of its teachers were black, far more than at any other high school in the city. The students were full of cultural pride. Every day they walked by those Black Power posters that peeked from the storefronts on nearby Mount Vernon Avenue and East Long Street. The students were also blessed with a beloved figure in Jack Gibbs, the city’s only black high school principal.
Inside the story of Jack Gilbert Gibbs lay plenty of complexity and mystery. At East High, as every student—and gaudily dressed pimp who tried to recruit the comely young ladies at the school during lunch period would tell you—Jack Gibbs may well have been loved. But he was also feared.