via: The News&Observer
DURHAM — As he scanned the legendary basketball coach’s bio, interviewer Scott Ellsworth suddenly stopped on this line:
“1944 – Coached N.C. College vs. Duke Navy Medical School in a private, unpublicized, no spectators allowed, basketball game.”
Must be a typo, Ellsworth thought.
Coach John McClendon, who had provided the information, must have meant 1954. Or 1964. Surely, there had been no whites-versus-blacks basketball game in Durham in 1944. It would have been illegal. And dangerous. Crazy, really.
But it did happen.
When a group of students from Duke and N.C. Central University get together Saturday at NCCU for a basketball tournament, they’ll commemorate that game, a daring defiance of the Jim Crow era that remains a historic thread connecting two vastly different universities just miles apart.
