Among the aspects of racial awareness stirred by Black Lives Matter demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in police custody, here’s one I hadn’t considered: Young African-American athletic prodigies choosing historically Black colleges over traditional high-profile powers such as UCLA, Kentucky and Kansas.
The New York Times last week reported several instances of top basketball and football hotshots either declining offers—or transferring—from predominately white institutions in favor of lower-profile operations at Howard University, Norfolk State, Arkansas-Pine Bluff and the like.
If that becomes a trend, it could precipitate a fundamental shift in control—from the rich schools and athletic departments which profit mightily off the exploits of uncompensated (mostly Black) athletes in the two revenue sports—to the labor force, the players. In basketball, especially, it takes only one star to carry a team and lure television’s visibility and big bucks.
With moves afoot to allow college athletes some compensation for use of their names and images, all jocks are beginning to acquire bargaining chips regarding their choices. For Black athletes, typically part of a tiny campus minority when they compete for predominately white schools, an added bonus would be that studies indicate they will experience more supportive professors and mentors at Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
This comes more than a half-century after the good-news/bad-news of desegregation. While that nudge toward more equal opportunity belatedly opened some doors for Blacks, to polish their athletic skills and resumes at the professionally run white college factories, it meanwhile dried up the quality of sports talent at the HBCUs. And, as a consequence, lowered the already minimal public profiles of those schools.
As Clarence (Big House) Gaines put it to me a good 35 years ago, the last time the best Black players opted for HBCUs was “when it was the only place they could go.”
Gaines, who died at 83 in 2005, was the Hall of Fame basketball coach at Winston-Salem University for 48 years, averaging more than 18 victories per season. His proteges included Earl Monroe, 13 years an NBA star, and Cleo Hill, the first first-round NBA draft pick from an HBCU (in 1961). But with the lifting of Jim Crow restraints, Gaines soon was unable to compete for elite talent against the sport’s aristocracy.
Potential recruits would ask, “Are you Division I?”
“No,” Gaines would tell them.
“Will I be on TV?”
“Not hardly,” he would say.
Gaines described Winston-Salem as “a school with a Division II philosophy, a Division III budget and high ideals. We run this program on the money from student activity fees and gifts from alumni and friends. The gifts we get, I couldn’t support two kids. All our problems could be solved by one thing: Money.”
Among Gaines’ contemporaries was Davey Whitney at Alcorn State which, despite being the first HBCU to play in the NCAA Division I tournament (in 1980), hardly realized a recruiting bonanza.
“We used to get at least three of the best kids in the state of Mississippi [before Southern white schools began to gradually integrate in the 1970s],” Whitney said back then. “None of the major schools in the South cared about basketball. Now, we’ve got to recruit against the Alabamas and the Ole Misses as much as the DePauls.”
The chore was to “somehow show your kids that they’re just as good as anybody else,” he said. “They read about players from the white schools. They see them on TV, and they’re in awe.”
They wanted “to go where the action is,” Whitney’s athletic director, Marino Casem, said. “They wanted the bright lights”—something the underfunded HBCUs couldn’t offer.
If now, as some prominent young Black players have indicated, they can athletically prosper at an HBCU—even as they bring attention (and money) to schools in the Black community—it feels to them as if that piece of their lives will matter.