Bill Garrett was the Jackie Robinson of college basketball. In
1947, the same year Robinson broke the color line in major league
baseball, Garrett integrated big-time college basketball. By
joining the basketball program at Indiana University, he broke the
gentleman's agreement that had barred black players from the Big
Ten, college basketball's most important conference. While enduring
taunts from opponents and pervasive segregation at home and on the
road, Garrett became the best player Indiana had ever had, an
all-American, and, in 1951, the third African American drafted in
the NBA. In basketball, as Indiana went so went the country. Within
a year of his graduation from IU, there were six African American
basketball players on Big Ten teams. Soon tens, then hundreds, and
finally thousands walked through the door Garrett opened to create
modern college and professional basketball. Unlike Robinson,
however, Garrett is unknown today.
"Getting Open" is more than "just" a basketball book. In the
years immediately following World War II, sports were at the heart
of America's common culture. And in the fledgling civil rights
efforts of African Americans across the country, which would
coalesce two decades later into the Movement, the playing field was
where progress occurred publicly and symbolically.
Indiana was an unlikely place for a civil rights breakthrough.
It was stone-cold isolationist, widely segregated, and hostile to
change. But in the late 1940s, Indiana had a leader of the largest
black YMCA in the world, who viewed sports as a wedge for broader
integration; a visionary university president, who believed his
institution belonged to all citizens of the state; a passion for
high school and college basketball; and a teenager who was, as
nearly as any civil rights pioneer has ever been, the perfect
person for his time and role. This is the story of how they came
together to move the country toward getting open.
Father-daughter authors Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody spent
seven years reconstructing a full portrait of how these elements
came together; interviewing Garrett's family, friends, teammates,
and coaches, and digging through archives and dusty closets to tell
this compelling, long-forgotten story.
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