Athletics shows us potential of dream
Randall High didn’t understand segregation when he was 5 years old. His family may have been Black and his next-door neighbors white, but everyone got along all the time.
“They had a fenced-in backyard,” recalled the man who later became the first Black player for the Tennessee Temple University basketball program. “I’d go over there almost every day and play in the backyard. If my friend’s mom bought him something to eat, she’d buy me something, too. I never thought about Black and white. It never came up. It just happened that my best friend was a white guy.”
As most of the world knows, February is Black History Month. It has been nationally recognized as such in the United States on an official basis since 1976, five years after High was discharged from the military six months early to play hoops for the Crusaders and coach Bruce Foster. Eventual Temple coaching legend Ron Bishop was Foster’s assistant at the time.
“I enrolled in December of ’71,” High recalled earlier this week. “First game I’m on the team, Coach Foster puts me in. I didn’t even know the plays. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you the ball.’”
It sounds like a dream come true. Especially for High, who was a prep star on the first Howard team to play a schedule against fully integrated schools in the winter of 1967.
“I was fine with the military,” he said of his time in Stuttgart, Germany. “About all I did was play basketball for the base team. I scored 46 points in one game.”
But it was also nice to return to Chattanooga and be a civilian again while still shooting the ball through the net with the same uncommon ease he’d earlier displayed at
Howard. Yet as High learned in a letter from Foster written on April 22, 2000, behind the scenes the Tennessee Temple head coach was getting grilled for integrating the Crusaders.
Wrote Foster: “Speaking of pressure, I read plenty of bad mail. Some of it was even from preachers. My wife said we also got death threats.”
But both coach and player stood firm. High graduated, worked as an assistant manager in men’s clothing for three years at Kmart, then landed his career job, working 28 years at TVA.
“Because I’d been in the military and that’s considered a government job, I already had three years of government experience when TVA hired me,” High said. “It was perfect.”
The Chattanooga of the 1960s was far from perfect. Crime. Pollution. Poverty. Racial strife. The Scenic City had it all.
But in the spring of 1966, an all-white Kentucky basketball team coached by the legendary Adolph Rupp faced the all-Black starting lineup of Texas Western in the NCAA title matchup that would later come to be known as the “Brown v. Board of Education Game,” a reference to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down segregation in public schools from a case that originated in Topeka, Kansas.
When the Miners shocked the lordly Wildcats that March Saturday night in Maryland’s Cole Field House to win the school’s first and only NCAA title (Texas Western is now the University of Texas at El Paso, better known as UTEP), that game also became an inspiration for young Black athletes the nation over.
“It gave us leverage,” High said. “If (Texas Western) could do it, we could, too. Now we had something to reach for. That game gave us hope that we could reach for the stars.”
If sports does anything well, it’s the gift of hope, regardless of race, creed or color. It is, as much as anything, a meritocracy. You perform well, you’re likely to be rewarded. If the opponent plays better, you learn you must work even harder to accomplish your goal.
“Sports breaks down a lot of barriers,” the 72-year-old High said. “You have to take care of each other. You have to be unified. When I played basketball, nobody cared if I was Black or white as long as I was playing well.”
And while High will freely admit he and his friends “wanted to play white schools” in the winter of 1967, it might not have been entirely for the reasons you’d think.
“We wanted to get our names and pictures in the newspaper,” High said. “That never happened until integration.”
Yet even with a reasonable argument to play with chips on their shoulders, High said that was rarely the case. He even forged a lifelong friendship with Chip Liner, the longtime Lakeview-Fort Oglethorpe baseball coach, at a Fellowship of Christian Athletes summer camp.
“We’ve been friends since 1966,” High said.
Come the early spring of 1967, Liner got to open his newspaper sports page and read how his friend Randall High had buried a shot with three seconds to go to knock off Riverside in the Region 4 final and send the Hustlin’ Tigers off to an integrated state tournament for the first time ever.
“I still have dreams about it sometimes,” he said.
All of us who’ve read and heard the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech know that one month of the year to educate us about Black history won’t cure all our racial divides and mistrusts, and that frustrates High.
“It’s way better than it was when I was growing up,” he said of the current racial landscape. “But I thought by now it would be even better, and it’s not at this point.”
At this point, you wonder how many Februarys must come and go before it is.