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Momentum
By the time a high school athletic team gets beyond the first quarter of its season, a team identity has been established. Not only do the coaches better understand their players, but the players better understand one another and feel more secure in their collective roles. With the East High Tigers now angling toward the middle part of their 1968–69 season with a 6–0 record, team sensibilities were jelling. Roy Hickman knew that when Nick Conner went up for a rebound and yelled, “Go,” it meant he should start streaking down court because Conner was going to let loose with a long pass. Larry Walker knew that when Ratleff and Conner crouched to initiate the full-court press on the opposing team, he should lurk nearby—like a getaway driver—because the ball would often be deflected by Ratleff or Conner right into his hands.
Bob Hart knew that when the Tigers dominated that tough team from Dayton early in the season, it was a good omen. His Tigers had defeated Dayton Dunbar in their second game of the season. Now, in their seventh outing, they had to travel seventy miles west of Columbus to face another Dayton team—Dayton Chaminade. Chaminade had been state champion three years earlier, a victory that was recent enough that the team still walked in the glow of that accomplishment. Even from the confines of the locker room before the game, the East High varsity players could hear the roar of the Dayton crowd: The Chaminade reserve team had defeated the East High reserve team, 60–58, an hour before the varsity teams took to the floor. The Tiger varsity players were intent on seeking atonement and revenge for their underlings.
Bob Hart preached unselfishness. The Tigers, left to right: Nick Conner, Dwight “Bo-Pete” Lamar, Larry Walker, Roy “Handsome” Hickman, Eddie “Rat” Ratleff.
By the end of the first quarter, East High held a 30–13 advantage. Neither team made a first-quarter substitution. East kept up the intensity, and by halftime their lead was an impressive 48–27. The lack of substitutions by the Dayton coach sent a signal to the Chaminade fans that either he hoped to prevent a drubbing at all costs—and he was willing to exhaust his starters in the process—or he imagined that those starters would mount a successful comeback. Bob Hart matched the strategy quarter by quarter, also not making any player substitutions, keeping his starting five on the floor throughout. Hart’s strategy prevailed; by the end of the third quarter his Tigers led, 67–47. The Dayton starters played hard into the fourth quarter, tightening the gap between the two teams, but it was hardly enough; the final score was 78–65. Eddie Rat, a nemesis of every Dayton team since his sophomore season, scored 25 points. Bo-Pete Lamar, no stranger to Daytonians either, walked off the floor having chipped in 21 points. His ten field goals left many in the crowd in awe; a lot of his shots were launched from a bombs-away distance.
In the days ahead, Ohio reporters were rubbing their hands together in anticipation of the looming matchup between Columbus East and Cleveland East Tech. Traffic on Interstate 71 heading south, from Cleveland to Columbus, was always heavy when Cleveland East Tech came to the state capital. Both teams had formidable reputations and a large fan base. On game day, their respective followers packed the Columbus Fairgrounds Coliseum. The reporters who arrived early began setting up their typewriters and checking the teletype machines. Following their morning trip to Columbus, the Cleveland players glided from the parking lot into the tunnel of the arena, many sporting the be-bop and Apple and stingy brim hats that had become so sartorially cool because of a series of blaxploitation movies popular in urban theaters—The Split, Putney Swope, Black Jesus. The two teams bumped into each other while walking around the Coliseum. “I remember we were standing around before the game,” says Larry Walker of East High. “They were wearing these Apple hats. They were saying they were going to kick our butts.” Nick Conner and Eddie Rat were undemonstrative figures away from the court. They could be as quiet as museum guards. They certainly heard the bragging from the East Tech players, but they refused to engage their cocky rivals. Their disposition only added to their mystique. Roy Hickman, however, glowered. He did not like the pre-game bragging by the East Tech players. The players from both teams strutted to their respective locker rooms like agitated peacocks. In the huddle before tipoff—the Coliseum boisterous with more than three thousand spectators—Larry Walker looked at Roy Hickman, who looked at Eddie Rat, who looked at Bo-Pete, who looked at Nick Conner, who looked back at point guard Larry Walker, who said to everyone: “We’re gonna kick their asses.”
And it was East High’s Hickman who did a lot of the ass kicking. He hit three baskets in the second quarter, thrilling the crowd and giving East a 29–17 lead. East would hit on 48 percent of its field goal attempts; by the middle of the fourth quarter, they had put the game out of reach. Cleveland fans were stunned. The stylish be-bop hats on some of the men in the Coliseum seats were pulled off and on and even yanked clean off their heads in frustration. Hart cleared his bench with five minutes left, the time-honored gesture of many winning coaches to the vanquished team at the other end of the court. Hickman finished with 19, Ratleff with 22. The game ended as an ignominious defeat for the Cleveland team, 85–59.
As one of the schools constructed in Columbus in 1963 to contend with white flight—in this instance from the Linden-McKinley area—Brookhaven High sat in the northern reaches of the city. By the time the 1968 athletic season rolled around, it had only been fielding teams for five years. It was not idle chatter to say that East High’s athletes often played sports—basketball, baseball, football—as if their lives depended on it, because often they did: Scholarships and futures were genuinely at stake. At Brookhaven High, the athletes were not playing for such high stakes. Sports were extracurricular entertainment, especially in those early years before the school had a chance to fashion an athletic identity. Losses could be yawned away. Life in the suburbs with Mom and Dad was comfortable and quite nice. There were no civil rights movement clashes or fallout in the neighborhoods surrounding Brookhaven High. So when East High embarrassed Brookhaven, 89–35, to climb to 9–0 for the season, no one at Brookhaven fell apart. Who cared if some black kids from the East Side rode roughshod over our boys? The nights were velvet, even in wintertime. On television that year Andy Griffith was protecting the all-white town of Mayberry. Fred MacMurray was the dad in the all-white world showcased on My Three Sons. But the inner city was finally creeping into TV: there was also the police drama The Mod Squad and its character, Link, played by Clarence Williams III, who had the biggest and most stylish Afro in all of television land.
In time, the college recruiters began following the East High Tigers everywhere. Coaches from the West Coast who had games in New York City swooped down on Columbus to catch a look at Eddie Rat and Nick Conner, but Bo-Pete Lamar wasn’t on anyone’s big-time recruiting radar just yet. Even though there were still several superb and undefeated teams in the city, East High had climbed to the top of the state rankings. It was a heady feeling to be wooed by colleges. These were looming opportunities the players’ parents had never experienced. “We really wanted Ratleff and Conner. Then we all started paying attention to Bo Lamar because he could really shoot,” recalls Joe Roberts, an assistant coach at Western Michigan at the time and one of the very few black assistant basketball coaches in Division 1, the largest division in college athletics. Roberts had his eye on what was going on at East because he had graduated from the school in 1957 and had a brief pro career before going into coaching.
The seniors on the East High basketball team had pretty much made a collective decision: They were not going to go to college anywhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. Their mothers had warned them not to entertain such offers, and the saga of Randy Smith at William and Mary—the racial taunts he had suffered, his leaving the school after just one season—had affected them all. Eleven of the twelve players on the East High team had southern roots. The murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 in rural Mississippi had made headlines and radio broadcasts thirteen years earlier, but the heart-thumping fear planted in the hearts of black mothers of young boys was still very much alive. “My mother was afraid of any of her thirteen kids going down south, for reasons like Till,” remembers East High student Vonzell Johnson.
Moses Wright had, at great risk, identified in court the white men who had murdered Till. Wright had to bolt Mississippi immediately after the murder happened. One of his destinations was Columbus, Ohio. He was coming to tell what happened in those dark woods to the black teenager who was his great-nephew.
AN INTERLUDE
What the Mothers Feared Most
It happened before Rosa Parks sat on that bus, before Martin Luther King Jr. set foot in Columbus in 1956, when he preached just blocks from East High. It happened before four little girls were blown up in a Birmingham church, and it happened before voting rights activist Medgar Evers was gunned down in his Mississippi driveway. And because Emmett Till was “just a child”—as the black church women lamented in their pews for months after it happened—it was thought to be the tragedy that ignited the galvanizing, soul-stirring, and nation-shaking civil rights movement. In the late summer of 1955, here is what a determined black Chicago woman had made up her mind she was going to do: She was going to get her slain son back to Chicago, and she was going to invite the nation—the world even—to see what those racist murderers had done to her Emmett down in Mississippi. She had made up her mind that his casket would be open. It was as if she had convinced herself that she had no other recourse but to force humanity to look at the gruesomely disfigured face and body of her son. The nation—especially black folk—were aghast, sure enough. More than fifty-thousand mourners would eventually view the battered body. Jet magazine, based in Chicago, published photographs of young Emmett. It wasn’t long after that the thunder of the civil rights movement was in full motion. Emmett Till was both dead and alive. But in looking at the Till family, one could actually feel the gyrations—and possible psychological depth—of black America and its torment even beyond American shores. It helps to peer into World War II and the life of a soldier named Louis Till, the father of Emmett Till.
In many cases the life of an orphan can be sad, disrupted, and unpredictable. Louis Till had two strikes against him: He was black, and when he was born in 1922 he was sent to an orphanage in segregated Missouri. He came of age honing devious habits. As he grew up, he leaned into life with a nasty disposition hidden by a charming smile. He’d get liquored up and become violent. He slapped and beat Mamie, the woman he married when they were both teenagers. They had one child, Emmett. She feared her son would be subjected to violence, so she eventually filed charges against her husband. More domestic violence followed. A judge told twenty-year-old Louis Till he had two options: a jail sentence, or World War II military service. The wife beater shipped off to Uncle Sam’s segregated army. Soon enough he found himself in the European theater. In Italy he worked on a transportation detail. On the night of June 27, 1944, near the small town of Civitavecchia in Italy, three local women were brutally assaulted: Two were raped, and a third woman was shot and killed. The surviving women stated that they had been attacked by four men. An investigation led the army to arrest three black soldiers and a white British soldier. One of the black men admitted that all four had taken part in the crimes. He also admitted that Till—possibly a sociopath—was the one who had initiated the crime spree and had done the shooting. Till remained silent during his arrest and court-martial. On July 2, Till and Fred McMurray—the black soldier who confessed—were hanged in Italy.
It wasn’t just the guilt of Louis Till and the others that would be debated in the years to come. It was also the starkly different judicial treatment meted out to blacks and whites during World War II. Between the years 1943 and 1946 in Europe, seventy American GIs were sentenced to judicial executions. Although blacks made up only 8.5 percent of the military, they comprised 80 percent of those who were hanged. This was the type of inequality that Army Lt. Col. Bob Hart covered in his senior thesis at Ohio Wesleyan University. And this was why the boys on the basketball team at East High School meant so much to him. Beyond the bouncing of the basketballs, he was aware, more than most, of American history and the rickety ladder blacks had to grasp and climb to success.
Mamie Till (née Bradley) did not have many lovely stories to tell her only son about his father, and Chicago was a difficult place to be without a father. In the summer of 1955, Mamie sent Emmett to spend time with relatives in Mississippi. A little country living, she thought, would certainly do him good. And she wanted him to spend time with male relatives. “Avoid trouble,” she instructed her only child.
A fourteen-year-old Chicago youngster who had to grow up too fast without a father thoroughly convinced himself he possessed big-city smarts. He wouldn’t have been much intimidated by the customs of segregation. So when Emmett Till arrived in Mississippi that summer to spend time with relatives, among them his great-uncle Moses Wright, he had no experience of living the way his black relatives down south lived—being careful to hold their tongue and not whistling in the company of white women. Matter of fact, he bragged about white girls he had dated back in Chicago. His cousins listened with rapt awe. Like many enduring those humid summer days in the Delta, Emmett couldn’t resist an opportunity to take a trip to the local country store on that narrow road in Money, Mississippi. The place had shelves of candy and potato chips and cigarettes and cool soft drinks and other items. Emmett had seen big, fancy stores of all kinds up in Chicago, and he was also happy to regale relatives about visits to those places. Once inside Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, he began looking around. And that’s where he first laid eyes on Carolyn Bryant. She was twenty years old and owned the store with her husband, Roy. Roy was a military veteran, an unrepentant racist, and he happened to be away on a fishing trip the Wednesday evening that Emmett strolled in. What Emmett Till did in that store might have seemed harmless and a little flirty and utterly forgettable if he had been visiting one of those white ethnic grocery stores up in Chicago. But in Mississippi, in 1955, he crossed a line: He either whistled—the most common version of the story that swept the world—or winked, or tried to caress her hand, or smiled too suggestively at Carolyn Bryant. Whatever he did, it unnerved her, and she mentioned this young unknown, fresh “nigger” to her husband as soon as he arrived back in town. Roy went into a rage.
It didn’t take a lot of wits to play country detective, and Roy Bryant quickly found out that Emmett Till was the great-nephew of Moses Wright, a local cotton farmer. Bryant rustled up his brother-in-law, J. W. Milam, in the middle of the night and rode out to Wright’s little shack of a home. Carolyn Bryant was in the car. Bryant and Milam banged on Wright’s door. Wright was a bony stick of a figure with very dark skin. Mississippi, and all she stood for, had crushed so much out of Moses Wright through the years. He opened the door. An unarmed black man now faced two armed white men in the middle of the night. Bloodshed was a mere whistle away. The two men demanded to see Emmett, who was in the back of the house asleep. Wright didn’t want any trouble; he imagined some kind of misunderstanding, and surely it could be worked out. He took the men to where Till was sleeping. They pulled the youth outside, to the car; all the while Wright was stepping to keep up, his heart pumping fast, wondering about the evil intentions of these two white men. They showed Emmett to Carolyn Bryant and asked if this was the boy who had come into the store. She said yes. They then forced a terrified Till into the car and drove away. Moses Wright called the police and reported that Emmett had been kidnapped. The policemen were intent on apprehending the men who Wright told them had taken Emmett. Wright then called Till’s mother in Chicago to tell her that her son had been kidnapped by white men. She knew Mississippi, and she feared the worst.
Emmett may have been just a child, a stout kid really, about to enter high school. But none of that made any difference to his abductors. He was taken to a shed miles from Moses Wright’s place and was beaten mercilessly. Then he was shot in the back of his skull. Using a rope, his killers then tied him to a big fan and dumped his body into the Tallahatchie River. Another kid later discovered the body and ran to get the sheriff. Moses Wright identified the body; Emmett was wearing a signet ring that had “LT” on it, the initials of his father, Louis Till. Milam and Bryant were arrested and charged.
White America had to see this. President Eisenhower had to know about this. Which is why Mamie Bradley insisted that her son’s body be brought back to Chicago. It arrived at the Illinois Central Railroad station. Bradley saw her son’s face was torn and smashed, completely unrecognizable. After studying his body, Mamie Bradley, seemingly beyond rage now and feeling for vulnerable young black boys everywhere, told the funeral home she wanted an open casket. They cautioned her that she might wish to rethink her decision given the condition of the body. The dead boy’s eye sockets bulged out like huge rocks. His jaws were grotesquely swollen. She still adamantly insisted on an open casket and public viewing “so everyone can see what they did to my boy.” The public viewing stretched across two days—people fainted, ministers railed, and the story remained front-page news around the country for an entire week. International news outlets carried coverage about the crime. Jet magazine published the stark photos of Till’s mangled face. Emmett Till’s ghastly murder became a signature moment in the nascent civil rights movement. And it was a deep stain on the American justice system, because the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington steered clear of the case. Roy Wilkins, the highest-ranking official in the NAACP, said, “It would appear from this lynching that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.”
Considerably more had been opened up than just the lid of a casket. The whole way of life in small-town Mississippi—with its fear and tyranny—had been exposed as never before.
Moses Wright had to get out of Mississippi. He had been an eyewitness to the kidnapping. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, he had sometimes taken to sleeping in the woods with a rifle for his own safety. The NAACP realized as much and quickly got him to Chicago, where he was able to commiserate with his niece, Mamie Bradley. He was soon off to New York City, because the NAACP hierarchy wanted him and Mamie Bradley to go on a nationwide speaking tour to help raise awareness of southern brutality and injustice. The two decided to go to separate cities to reach a wider number of audiences. The tour had a long and blunt title: “The National Prayer Mobilization Against Racial Tyranny and Intolerance in Mississippi and Elsewhere.” “Mississippi hasn’t got any law,” Moses Wright said before one gathering. Mamie Bradley was scheduled to appear in, among other cities, Dayton, Cleveland, and Columbus, Ohio. But there were late disruptions in her schedule, and she asked her uncle, Moses Wright, to visit those cities and speak on her behalf. Speaking to a full house at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Dayton, Moses Wright felt compelled to answer a question he had been asked while out on the road: How come he didn’t intervene and fight off the two men who kidnapped Emmett right in front of him? “It didn’t make no sense to fight when a man has a .45 in his hand,” he explained.
In Columbus, William Durham of the NAACP—a constant presence on the city’s East Side fighting for equal rights—played host to Wright. Durham was one of the NAACP’s most respected representatives in the region and handled Wright’s financial compensation for both the Dayton and Columbus visits. Durham informed Wright he’d receive $100 for his Dayton appearance, and another $100 for his Columbus appearance. “Can’t you make it $150 plus expenses?” a relative of Wright’s asked Durham. “Uncle doesn’t have a suit of clothes. He had to leave everything he had down there, crops and all.” Durham agreed to the fee increase. Durham didn’t plan on taking any chances with Wright’s safety in Columbus, so he arranged a police escort. “It will add to the drama of our meeting” he said, aware that this would be good for marketing and publicity. At the gathering in Columbus, Wright looked exhausted and a little bewildered from all the traveling. He told the people the same thing he had told the other assembled groups: Mississippi was lawless and evil. He told them how much he worried about the upcoming trial. He told them blacks in Mississippi lived in daily fear.
Those who had seen Moses Wright in Columbus, would not easily forget his appearance.
Meanwhile, back in Mississippi, a Tallahatchie County grand jury indicted Bryan and Milam for Till’s kidnapping and murder. On September 20, a Mississippi prosecutor presented overwhelming evidence, including solid testimony from some surprise witnesses who also had been in hiding, that Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had kidnapped Till. Moses Wright told the courtroom that Bryant and Milam had kidnapped his nephew. Wright was a smallish man; J. W. Milam was hulking. To Murray Kempton, a New York reporter inside the courtroom, Wright was “a black pygmy standing up to a white ox.”
The defense’s argument was that the body of Till was so mangled that there was no way to definitively establish that it was Till. They opined that Till might have fled the state and might be hiding anywhere up north. During the trial, local whites first heard the story of Louis Till having been hanged in Europe by military authorities in 1945 after he was found guilty on charges of rape and murder. An all-white jury—its own native prejudices further poisoned by Louis Till’s military record—acquitted both Bryant and Milam of murder in just sixty-seven minutes. Whites inside the courtroom nodded their approval and slapped backs. There was sweaty laughter. In response, former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, “It is true that there can still be a trial for kidnapping, and I hope there will be. I hope the effort will be made to get at the truth. I hope we are beginning to discard the old habit, as practiced in part of our country, of making it very difficult to convict a white man of a crime against a colored man or woman.” Her hopes were dashed. Another grand jury acquitted the men of the kidnapping charge. Protected by double jeopardy, the accused men later admitted they had killed Till. This was the story they told to the ethically unbalanced journalist William Huie, who paid the men to talk.
Of course, it wasn’t just Mississippi. It was the entire American South that could elicit fear. A year after Emmett Till’s death, Joe Roberts, who had been a senior at East High School in Columbus in 1956 and was a star on the school’s basketball team that year, begged his parents to allow him to return to Alabama to visit friends. School was out and it was summertime. The Roberts family hailed from Lanette, Alabama, and had moved to Columbus in the late 1940s. Roberts’s parents were against the trip, but he kept pleading. The students and families he wished to visit were people he had known from his Alabama childhood. Finally, the family relented when an uncle told them he’d allow Joe to drive his new Pontiac, relieving them of their worry that he might experience mechanical problems on the long drive. Joe loaded up the car and took off from Columbus. A couple days later, he crossed the state line into Alabama. “I rode into this gas station,” he would recall years later. “I was driving my uncle’s brand-new Pontiac. This white guy came over and started calling me names. I knew I had to get out of there. From 1956 to 1985, I never went back to Alabama.”
In 2007, the United States Senate passed the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crime Act. The bill was designed to provide funds and resources to investigate civil rights murders between the years 1955 and 1969. The organizers of the bill realized just how real civil rights killings remained throughout the South up through 1969 and that justice needed to be found for the victims.
Not long after the Till Unsolved Crime Act was passed, Carolyn Bryant—now Carolyn Bryant Donham—confessed to author Timothy Tyson that she had lied about Emmett Till. He had never touched her, she told the author, who in 2017 published a book about her confession and the case. It was all a damnable lie, a lie that ran deeper than the Mississippi River, a lie and a horror that weighed on black America for generations, a lie that propelled black mothers out of the South.
When the 1968 calendar flipped over to 1969, the nation was still contending daily with reverberations from the King assassination. High school superintendents and teachers across the country were reporting more student activism. Black students in particular were threatening school walkouts at an alarming rate. Their complaints revolved around school reading lists, the racial makeup of cheerleading squads, the right to protest perceived injustices. Jack Gibbs held gatherings inside East High to talk about the teachings of Dr. King. The simmering tensions made him nervous, as he explained to a group of educators: “We’ve got 18 groups in our community, anywhere from the Urban League at one extreme to Black Panther type groups at the other extreme, but we have all these groups doing something constructive for our school. People can do two things with a brick: They can throw it at you or they can carry it for you, and I want those people carrying bricks for East High School.”
At the beginning of the year, stories showed up daily in the Columbus newspapers and elsewhere about the aftermath of the King assassination. Many blacks were calling for a governmental probe. James Earl Ray was saying he was looking for a new set of lawyers. The word “conspiracy” took on new weight. The white school officials in Columbus spent a lot of time worrying about the student political leaders inside Linden-McKinley, West, and East high schools. Winter in the Midwest seemed somewhat to slow high school talk of rebellion. And at East High, Jack Gibbs figured if he could keep the students busy—academics, sports, music—he would have a good chance of keeping the school under control. And while he contentedly welcomed discussions about King’s life among faculty and students, he continued to monitor carefully any signs of agitation or threatened rebellion. It helped that the basketball team was winning and remained a powerful marquee attraction.
The only students allowed to run up, down, and along the labyrinth hallways of East High were athletes, and that was only after the final bell of the school day had rung. (Pity the male student wearing hard-soled Stetson shoes caught running down the gleaming hallways of Jack Gibbs’s school and leaving scuff marks. There would be after-school detentions.) As school commenced after the holiday break, a new group of athletes could be seen and heard running East High’s steps and hallways. It was the baseball team, engaging in their own version of spring training. Hardly anyone paid attention to the baseball team. During the previous season, attendance at some of the home games had been in the single digits, a laughable fan base. But Assistant Basketball Coach Paul Pennell, also the head baseball coach, was happy to see his baseball players stretching, running, engaging in voluntary workouts. So Garnett Davis, Roger Neighbors, Robert Kuthrell, Richard Twitty, Phil Mackey, and other team members ran the hallways getting in shape. When he caught a glimpse of them, basketball star Eddie Rat realized how much he himself couldn’t wait for baseball season. He was the team’s star pitcher.
Fresh into the new year, Bob Hart had to prepare right away to face two teams—South High and West High—that could not be taken lightly. South was second in the City League standings, impressive enough to be ranked fourth in the state, and, like East, undefeated. West High had a gritty team, featuring Mike Stumph, one of the top centers in the state and the second highest scorer in the city behind Ed Ratleff. Athletic officials wished they could have scheduled the South High game at the fairgrounds, but the Coliseum had already booked another event for that week. The matchup was going to be a huge draw wherever the teams played. The game got shifted to South High School—Bob Hart’s alma mater.
There were four high schools in the city whose basketball courts were built on a raised stage: Central, South, East and West. It was a stylistic feature of these older schools, and it gave the games played upon those stages an extra bit of theatrical drama. For players who were not used to playing in such a confined space, the court could create problems, a sudden feeling of vertigo inside the fast-moving action when one realized there was a drop-off into an offstage pit. But East High’s cagers knew the dimensions of the floor very well and had adjusted their game to it.
Tickets for the South vs. East matchup sold out within an hour. “It was the hottest thing going,” remembers South High guard Terry Holliman. “At school, everybody was hyped up.” Dick Ricketts, the South High coach, told his players that they could beat East. “Everything would have to go right,” he told Holliman and his teammates. During pre-game warm-ups for the Friday night game, school janitors at South High had to scramble and bring in extra chairs. The crowd kept swelling until a school official announced no more people would be let in. At the end of the first quarter, East was up by only two, 13–11. The foot stomping upon bleachers sounded like the hooves of horses breaking from a barn. The noise inside the South High gym was so loud both coaches had to scream instructions to their players while cocooned inside the huddle. In the second quarter, South High’s sweet shooting guard Brad Hoffman had time and space in the corner to launch another jump shot. Like a giraffe rising up above a tree line, East’s Nick Conner stretched in the direction of Hoffman and forcefully slapped the ball out of bounds. The Tiger fans roared. South’s players seemed to come unglued. It was as if Conner had given the entire South High team a stern warning: that even on their home court, they were not safe. East scored 28 points in the second period while South only scored 14. At halftime the score was East 41, South 25.
In the second half, Bo-Pete Lamar, with prodding from Coach Hart, went to work. He began firing from long range, some of the shots from beyond twenty-five feet. South fans followed the arc of each shot when it left his hands, then blinked in disgust when it swished through the net. Of the seven shots he took, he misfired on only one. The South High Bulldogs also had a wicked time contending with East High’s full-court press. They committed 21 turnovers, giving the ball away like cheap raffle tickets. With two minutes to go, the Tigers were leading 71–55, and Bob Hart decided to remove his starters from the game. He quickly regretted it. South clawed back as East turned the ball over several times. “If you had one turnover,” recalls East High’s Larry Walker, “you were going to be sitting.” The action was fast, and Hart had to reinsert his starters. South didn’t have enough time and the horn blew to end the game, with a final score of 71–66. Hart exhaled, happy to have escaped. He half grinned and half scowled. He was beginning to realize that Bo-Pete Lamar, with his shooting prowess, was a godsend. The game against the Bulldogs was Bo-Pete’s breakout game as a Tiger: The senior guard scored 25 points. Lamar’s fellow guard, Larry Walker, thought that Lamar was providing a secret and dangerous ingredient to the team: “Coming into our senior season, we had no good outside shooters. I knew with Bo, we could always be in the hunt,” Walker says.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the East High basketball team was back in uniform for another engagement, this one at West High. It was one of the schools in the city where many whites rebelled against black political aggressiveness, and the friction was felt almost daily. “There was racial tension in the school,” concedes Mike Stumpf, the six-foot-six star of the West High team. “But not on the basketball court.” Fred Heischman was coach of the West High Cowboys. He was an older coach, a retiring gentleman, and one who rarely raised his voice. East led at halftime, 37–28. A 9-point deficit was nothing for the Cowboys to be ashamed of; the West players imagined they were still very much in the game. Perhaps Coach Heischman would come up with a new defensive game plan to stop Bo-Pete Lamar, who was scoring from deep corners on the court. But he did not. Heischman remained unemotional, like a man whistling his way toward retirement. “I remember at halftime all he said was, ‘Boy, they can surely shoot free throws,’ ” recalls Stumpf. Lamar was like a one-man campfire. He remained hot from having tamed South High, and he torched West High with jump shot after jump shot. By the end of the third quarter, East held a more comfortable double-digit lead, 64–43. “We had a full-court press,” remembers East’s Larry Walker. “No one from West could get the ball up court on us. Rat and Nick would be up front on the press. Someone would try to throw the ball over the top of them and that’s when I could steal it.” East held West’s big man, Stumpf, to 18 points and won by a score of 71–58. Lamar tallied 25 points, the same number he had scored a day earlier. He was becoming more dangerous as the season went on.
There were those who would look at Bob Hart’s players and wonder just how much coaching he actually had to do. The grumbling sometimes annoyed him, but he paid it little mind. They were mostly armchair analysts, jawboning from the comfort of Coliseum seats. Down on the court, with Ratleff slicing behind Conner for a perfectly thrown pass from Bo-Pete Lamar, or Roy Hickman suddenly appearing from ten feet out to accept a crisp pass from Kevin Smith, one could sense drawn-up plays, specific designs. Hart’s full-court press looked like some kind of algorithm, with players subtracting and adding their presence depending on the amount of pressure needed. His Tigers had the ability to execute both classic basketball—clinical, methodical, fundamentally sound—and jazzy basketball, a spirited, stylish, free-form, and improvisational way of playing. “They were structured,” says the West High player Mike Stumpf. “They were not only talented but disciplined. In order to have discipline, you have to have structure.”
The young black boys of the East Side of the city—elementary and junior high kids—were already among East High’s most fervent followers. (At the time, the local high schools didn’t field girls’ basketball teams.) But then the fever began to spread to the white sections of the city.
Dave Hanners was one of the young white kids in Columbus who became enamored of the 1968–69 East High basketball team. He played basketball for Johnson Park Junior High. He’d beg his folks to let him go to the Fairgrounds Coliseum to see East High play. He’d cadge a ride with Chuck Fowler, his junior high coach who happened to also be the announcer for the high school games at the Coliseum. Some still referred to the Coliseum as a cow palace because of the rodeos that took place there. Fowler loved the place; even the smell of manure didn’t bother him. Fowler had gotten his first job working at the Coliseum back in the 1950s, when the locker rooms had potbellied stoves filled with coal to warm the players. He’d pile the coal in while the players were out on the arena floor. By the time the 1968–69 basketball season rolled around, Fowler was convinced he was looking at pure dynamism. “That’s the reason he took me down there with him,” Hanners recalls of Fowler and his desire to watch East High play. “He told me it was the greatest high school team, talent wise, he had ever seen,” Hanners says. Hanners peppered the coach with questions during the ride to the Coliseum, wondering how the East High players learned to jump so high, to shoot with such lethal accuracy, to play with such controlled flair. Young Dave Hanners might as well have been stepping into some version of Xanadu. “They’d win by fifty,” he says of the Tigers. “But they were gracious. They were running up the score and couldn’t help it.” If he wanted to get good, Hanners figured he had to go find where the East High players played during the summer. There was a funky playground on the East Side, at the corner of Main and Eighteenth, but the rims were sturdy and had nets, and the competition was always fierce. So he’d bum a ride to the playground and join in the pickup games. “I wanted to find the best caliber basketball players,” he says. “It just so happened in Columbus the best players were black.” The black players called him Youngblood. Sitting inside the Fairgrounds Coliseum, he’d get lost in his concentrated focus on the style and play of the East High team. “There was no one within five states like the three of them,” he says of Ratleff, Conner, and Lamar.
Hanners himself played guard, so he paid particular attention to Bo-Pete Lamar: “He never got tired. He was fast. He could jump. He could dunk; he was only six foot two, and nobody did that. He was also a tremendous jump shooter. He took shots nobody else would take.” The player in the professional basketball ranks who reminded Hanners of Lamar was Earl “The Pearl” Monroe, who was the National Basketball Association’s 1968 NBA Rookie of the Year. Monroe had also been an All-American at Winston-Salem State College, which he had entered in 1963. A lot of the local kids couldn’t stop talking about the night the Pearl came to the Fairgrounds Coliseum to play against the Cincinnati Royals, led by Oscar Robertson. It was only an NBA exhibition game since Columbus didn’t have a professional team. But for every kid in the city who could get Mom and Dad or Aunt or Uncle to take them to the game, it was simply divine. There was Earl “The Pearl” in living color. “Bo-Pete was a better shooter than Monroe,” Hanners believes.
Following their victories against South High and West High, East High prepared to face Walnut Ridge. The game would have a sentimental resonance for both coaches: Jack Moore coached the Walnut Ridge team, the same Jack Moore who had been at East High years earlier and who had encouraged Bob Hart to come to the school. The two schools were genuine proof of a tale of two cities: Walnut Ridge boasted a student body of twelve hundred. They had one black student. “It was still quite a segregated mess,” says Ed Stahl, a member of the Walnut Ridge basketball team.
The game between the all-white school and all-black East High was played on Walnut Ridge’s home court. Jack Moore’s team had some talented young players, among them Stahl, a six-foot-ten sophomore who had earlier in the season scored 27 points in a City League game. But every Walnut Ridge player realized the strength of the East High team. “We had such great respect for those guys,” recalls Stahl. “They were the standard of excellence. Not only in the state, but in the country.”
Greg Olson, a player on the Walnut Ridge team, was another white kid who dared to venture into black Columbus to play pickup games against the best players. “This was during the late 1960s during racially charged times,” Olson recalls. “But we wanted to be like them,” he says of the East High players. Everyone feared Ratleff and Conner, but East High’s Bo-Pete Lamar really worried Olson. “He was probably the most prolific scorer and creator I’d ever seen. He was rail thin and could really jump. He was cocksure of himself, to the point of borderline arrogance.”
There were more than a few times when teams stayed close to East High for the first quarter of action. At the end of their first quarter, Walnut Ridge could be proud they trailed by only 4 points. But it was a cruel mirage. By halftime, Bob Hart’s Tigers had exploded for a 20-point lead, the score 43–23. “I remember being in the three-second lane,” recalls Olson. “I gotta do something. I ball fake. Nick Conner doesn’t go for it. I shoot the ball. He knocks it fifteen rows up into the stands.” By the end of the third quarter, the Tigers were up 31 points, 64–33. Eddie Rat had 34 points already. That was enough; Bob Hart sat him on the bench for the entire final period. The final score was 77–51. Equally impressive was that East High turned the ball over only eleven times, playing the role of Scrooge beyond the holiday season. Both Stahl and Olson of Walnut Ridge went on to fine college careers, but they never forgot their matchup against East High. “If you looked at them,” Stahl recalls of the Tigers, “it was like a show. Some teams play with an aura. They earned it. They kind of moved like a marching band.” Greg Olson was perhaps the most socially conscious player on his Walnut Ridge team. He had sat down that year and explained to his parents that the 1968 Fair Housing Act was going to be a good thing. Even in a large school with just a single black student, change was coming.
On the East Side of Columbus—and in the much smaller black pockets of the city—those visual displays were now becoming more noticeable than ever: There were portraits of the slain Martin Luther King Jr. displayed in retail shop windows, in barbershops and hair salons, on telephone poles, in community meeting halls, on the dashboards of the taxis operated by the all-black East Side Taxi Company. In emblem and portraiture, it was as if Martin Luther King Jr. were rising from the grave. Blocks from East High, over at Union Grove Baptist Church, King’s longtime friend, Rev. Phale Hale, was already constructing a room devoted to his friendship with King and King’s visits to the church.
Before Martin Luther King Jr. there had been no singular black figure who claimed, from church pulpit to street corner, the breadth and reach of his message across racial divisions.
There were only three games left before the start of district tournament play for the Tigers; they were within shouting distance of the City League title. But with their unblemished record, they were now most certainly thinking of bigger goals. In setting up his team’s schedule at the beginning of the season, just as he had done in years past, Bob Hart was aggressive in arranging out-of-town matchups in the season’s schedule. The strategy was twofold: His team just might meet one of those out-of-town squads in the state tournament, and already having played them would be of benefit. Secondly, the later games kept his team sharp and gave them a sense that if their coach feared no opponent, neither should they. So Cincinnati’s Purcell Marian High School confidently entered the Fairgrounds Coliseum with an impressive 10–2 record, and featuring one of the state’s best players in Derrek Dickey, the leading high school scorer in Cincinnati. True to form, the Tigers—like hungry animals lying in the shade until ready to sate their appetites—showed tricky benevolence toward Purcell, allowing the team from Cincinnati to race out to a 10–5 start. Then it happened: Ratleff scored, Conner scored, and Bo-Pete Lamar scored. East led by 7 points by the end of the first quarter. Their lead was even wider by the end of the first half, 51–26. East went on to whip Purcell, 83–65. Bo-Pete Lamar and Roy Hickman led the Tigers with 24 and 20 points respectively. Eddie Rat scored 15 points, well below his average. Some afternoons Bob Hart, because his team had such a scoring lead, had the comfort to sit Eddie Rat on the bench. A little rest for the golden boy. And Eddie Rat would sit there with the serenity of an old man on a park bench whiling away a weekend afternoon.
East High had two remaining games—Whetstone and Northland—on its City League schedule. Both schools played a role in the city’s desire to retain a certain social order: Whetstone opened in 1961 and Northland in 1965, both to accommodate white flight from the inner city of Columbus. Neither school possessed the pedigree or talent to contend with the Tigers. The Whetstone matchup was first. The Whetstone reserve team whipped the East High reserve team, 51–44, and the Whetstone varsity players slapped the palms of their reserve players by way of congratulations. It would be their last moment of giddy joy for the evening. At halftime of the varsity game, East had doubled their lead, 35–17. By the end of the third quarter, it was 49–26. When Bob Hart relieved his starters in the fourth quarter, it meant the Tigers had secured the City League championship. The final score was 70–37. Whetstone’s nervousness had showed in its anemic shooting percentage. They made just 16 of 62 field goal attempts, and committed 27 turnovers—the equivalent of giving money away at the bank teller’s window. East High’s starting five distributed the ball with an egalitarian flair: Ratleff and Walker had 12 points (nearly 20 below Ratleff’s average), Conner 11, and Lamar 14. “It didn’t matter who scored,” Ratleff said years later. “We just wanted to win.” Hart congratulated his players in the locker room for securing another City League title. But because they had bigger dreams so vividly in mind, they were rather calm. They showered and dressed like young men at the end of a business workday.
Northland was next, the final game for the Tigers before the start of district tournament play. It would have been hard to convince the Northland players of Ratleff’s expressed sentiment that it did not matter who scored. In fact, he reminded Northland of his All-American stature by hitting for 33 points, while Bo-Pete Lamar tossed in 20. In a season already chock-full of scintillating moments, Bob Hart stared at the stat sheet in wide-eyed wonder after the game. His Tigers had hit 15 of 20 shots in the third quarter alone. They bested Northland by 40 points, the final score 100–60. The regular season was at a close.
Hart and Paul Pennell, the Tiger coaches, were convinced they had done as much as they could to make their team ready for the district, regional, and—should they get that far—the final games of the state tournament.
It had become evident deep into the season that the Tigers were doing things on the basketball court beyond the teachings of their coaches. They were doing things instinctually, carving up designed plays and improvising at the last minute, causing fans to rise from their seats as if they were at some kind of revival. Individually, they were all gifted players. But collectively, they were better than even the sum of their individual parts, a formula that seemed to naturally jell because Bob Hart refused to “over”-coach his team. He allowed them to impose their will on the opponent. And their cohesion had resulted, thus far, in an undefeated record.
Hart and other coaches from the Ohio High School Athletic Association met in February at the Willard Restaurant in Columbus to find out which tournament brackets they would be playing in. Every Class AA team would be invited to play in the tournament. Hart often found it difficult to look beyond the very next game. “He was always aware of playing one game at a time,” Assistant Coach Pennell says.
When the tournament matchups were finally announced, East High drew an intriguing first-round game. They would be playing an assortment of young juvenile delinquents from the Boys Industrial School in Lancaster, Ohio. The young men were serving time for a variety of crimes, among them assault, robbery, breaking and entering. The inmates had their own high school on the grounds, Lancaster Reemelin. The East High coaches were a bit challenged trying to attain dependable scouting reports. “Their enrollment was fluid, month to month,” recalls Pennell. “A player might be on their team one month, then his sentence is up and he suddenly gets released.”
One of Reemelin’s most famous alums was comedian Bob Hope, sent there May 18, 1918, from his home in Cleveland, charged with juvenile delinquency. Before the end of 1918, Hope was paroled, but back for a parole violation in March of 1919. He found the place grim and unfunny, so he escaped. The school authorities never heard from him again until he became rich and famous and started donating money.
Lancaster Reemelin was the kind of school that pained East High principal Jack Gibbs. The students were the dead-end kids, and he wondered how many boys were just being warehoused there without sufficient efforts at rehabilitation. He knew many came from broken homes. Still, when boys from the Boys Industrial School were released and came back to the East Side of Columbus, to East High, Jack Gibbs had a stern lecture ready for them: They would be given a solid second chance, but they would have to join the janitorial corps at the school. They would have to work themselves back into Gibbs’s good graces. They would have to rake leaves, shovel snow, and mop. If they screwed up on work assignments, they would be booted from the school for good. In the mind of Jack Gibbs, they had paid their debt to society; now they had a debt to pay to East High School.
As the game against Lancaster Reemelin got under way, some of the East High fans found themselves having empathy for the opposition. “We knew they were jailbirds,” East player Larry Walker says. “We thought we’d give them something to remember when they got old.” The Reemelin fans in the Coliseum were a touching sight. They consisted of school staff, parents who had made their way to the game, and former involuntary residents of the school. Instead of wanting to remember, the Reemelin players might well have wanted to banish the game’s final outcome from their memories: East, 101, Reemelin, 33. The margin of victory was one of the largest in tournament history. After the game, the East High ballplayers—after bestowing courtesies to the Reemelin players—boarded their team bus for the ride back home. The Reemelin players—with a law enforcement officer accompanying them—returned to their place of incarceration.
Westerville High faced East High in the next round. Westerville came to the Coliseum with a decent 15–6 record, but by halftime they were down 44–20; by the end of the third quarter they were losing by 31 points, 69–38. Westerville, like nearly all of the suburban Columbus schools, featured a predominantly white student body. The Fairgrounds Coliseum had become the main setting in the city for the largest comingling of blacks and whites. The Coliseum seating was segregated by choice and based on school pride. Still, it was a stark spectacle: East’s black following on this side of the Coliseum, Westerville’s white following on the other side. Both school principals had preached against foolishness, and everyone was kind to one another. When the final seconds ticked off the clock, the foot-stomping and well-mannered East High Tiger fan base was treated to another invigorating victory, 93–55. Eddie Rat had poured in 32 points.
There were beautiful rural settings beyond the city limits of Columbus, wide fields dotting quaint little towns like Chillicothe, Zanesville, London, Urbana. They were farm towns populated by whites, where cows grazed and the corn grew high in season. Because the towns’ schools were small, their basketball teams often had to be cobbled together. Coaches in those settings figured the mechanics of the game of basketball had to be taught with a vigilance; stylish individualism, which rarely erupted anyway, was almost frowned upon—save for the eye-popping jump shooter who sometimes emerged from behind the doorways of a farmhouse. Jerry West was one such player. His family lived in a tiny West Virginia community, down in a hollow. His picture-perfect jump shot got him the hell out of there and into West Virginia University, where he had a great career. By 1968 he had been in the NBA for several years, punishing opposing teams with his shooting. He was revered by high school basketball players everywhere, including those at East High.
More often than not, most white players were not playing as if their lives depended upon the sport—as Bob Hart had once said his players were. A white rural coach might get lucky and come across a Jerry West. But the city game of the black player seemed to mature beyond X’s and O’s; the late-night hours of practice—if a player was coachable—added a certain type of rich seasoning to a player’s game. There was also the added depth of history: The white players, more often than not, had a community lineage. Their families had been in London, Chillicothe, Zanesville, and other places for years. So many black players in Columbus, Ohio, had been products of a family migration from the South. They were not rooted. There was no family farm or lineage to fall back upon. Success in a sport could make a family’s surname respected. A better future could be envisioned. This was opportunity. The awful things that had gone wrong in their families could be righted, fixed, altered with a basketball, a football, a baseball. By the time Bo-Pete Lamar arrived at East High, he had already advanced beyond anything Bob Hart could teach him. His family had nothing. But now they had his basketball prowess. It was for Lamar as it was for Ratleff, Walker, Hickman, and Smith: Beyond the death of Martin Luther King Jr., they were cracking a world open.
More than seven thousand fans arrived at the Fairgrounds Coliseum on a Tuesday night to eye East High take on their next opponent, the London High Red Raiders. Ray Chadwell was their well-respected coach. His team had won their conference title and came bouncing into the Coliseum with a formidable 19–1 record. School kids had lined the corridors of the old, creaky Coliseum, hungry to see the high school players from both teams, but especially Ratleff, Lamar, and Conner. To the entire black community, the East High Tigers had become the city’s marquee team. Ten months after King’s death, East High had given the black community a reason to hope again, even to strut a little.
Once again East High fell behind its opponent shortly after the outset of the game, 8–4. And once again, they shifted into gear and became unstoppable. They went on a 15-point scoring binge in that first quarter, dizzying the opposition. Eddie Rat scored 10 points. There were two more runs of 10 and 11 points, with Bo-Pete Lamar showing some lovely passing, smooth as a butler handing off a cup of tea: This pass is for you, Mr. Ratleff. London was being blitzed; the halftime score was 56–24. Having been beaten only once that season, Ray Chadwell’s team was not accustomed to this kind of manhandling. By the end of the third quarter, East still had a significant lead, 74–37. Hart began pulling his starters in the final quarter. Eddie Rat left the game with 28 points, Conner with 13 points and 12 rebounds. Both had seen only twenty-five minutes of action. The final: East, 94–51.
The beauty of the admission price at the Coliseum during tournament play was that a single ticket gave you the opportunity to stay the entire afternoon and into the evening to watch all the games you desired. There could be as many as four games in a single day. It was heaven for basketball junkies, as well as the grown-ups working the concession stands. Not many East High partisans decided to leave the Coliseum after their team’s victory against London. They wanted to see who won the following game; the victor would be the Tigers’ next opponent in the upper bracket of the tournament. It turned out that opponent would be Linden-McKinley, East High’s hated rival.
Jesse Owens, the great Olympian who had shamed Hitler in Berlin, addressed a group of Columbus athletes and coaches on the eve of the state basketball tournament that year.
Bob Hart and Paul Pennell also stayed around to watch the contest between Eastmoor and Linden-McKinley. If there was one team in the City League of Columbus that made them nervous during tournament time, it was Linden-McKinley. The Tigers had beaten them by a mere 8 points during the regular season. Linden-McKinley’s players were already champing at the bit to take on East High again. They wanted to advance, and they wanted revenge. That evening, fans were already rushing to the ticket counter at the Coliseum to buy a seat for the looming matchup between the two teams. Bob Hart’s team had three days to prepare for a game that would either lengthen their season—or bring it to an abrupt end.
On February 28, the Sideliners Club of Columbus hosted their annual awards banquet at the Sheraton-Columbus Motor Hotel. The group consisted of black former OSU athletes, most of whom had played for football coach Woody Hayes. Since they had been so often blocked from participating in mainstream awards banquets, in 1964 they simply formed their own club. An array of sports figures—professional, college, high school—were honored. Jack Gibbs was mighty proud that his basketball coach, Bob Hart; one of Hart’s players, Nick Conner; and his baseball coach and basketball assistant coach Paul Pennell were among the honorees. But the star of the show, the guest speaker, was Jesse Owens, the onetime track star who, more than three decades earlier, had revealed to the world quite a bit about the grace of a championship athlete, about world politics, about swift black beauty. When Owens walked to the microphone, the applause was loud. “That was a real coup,” Paul Pennell remembers. “He was star power. He was very commanding. His delivery and presence stood out.”
Jesse Owens was still a handsome man; he still walked with the grace of a sprinter. But his emotions were sometimes conflicted. Yes, Owens was among his fellow Ohio State alumni, and yes, he had brought glory to the school. But the school had also refused to give him a scholarship, forcing him to work as a night elevator operator to pay his way through college. And the school had not allowed him to live on campus with the white athletes. Further, his life after the 1936 Berlin Olympics was peripatetic and challenging. He joined up with a jazz band. In 1942, he took a personnel job with the Ford Motor Company, given supervision over only black workers. After four years he quit to join the West Coast Baseball Association, an offshoot of the Negro baseball league. The nascent franchise folded in eight weeks, and the great sprinter was reduced to racing those horses on racetracks to earn money. He told those who thought such activity beneath him that he couldn’t eat gold medals. Whites were perplexed by the comment; blacks understood it from all angles. At one point the great Jesse Owens found employment working at a gas station, pumping gas for customers, some of whom drove up to the station just to see if it really was him.
By the time Owens walked into the Sideliners banquet and looked out over the East High athletes and coaches and others seated at the tables, his fortunes had been on an upswing. Three years earlier, in 1966, the United States government had named him a goodwill ambassador. There were speaking engagements overseas, then more engagements when he was back on American soil. “Time has stood still for me,” he said about his Olympics fame. “That golden moment dies hard.” His talks were about patriotism, honesty, and living a good, clean life. William Oscar Johnson, in Sports Illustrated, summarized Owens’s speechifying as “a kind of all-round super combination of 19th century spellbinder and 20th century plastic p.r. man, full-time banquet guest, eternal glad-hander, evangelistic small-talker.” When Owens finished his speech, Bob Hart, Paul Pennell, and Nick Conner stood in awe. Hart choked up; he had fought in the European theater to defeat Hitler, and in 1936 Hitler had sent his German Olympians out to defeat Jesse Owens, and, by extension, black America. Owens was not just a special human being to Hart. He was a symbol of what had been overcome, what could be overcome, and what still needed to be overcome.