A true Miami Valley sports legend, and so much more
A Miami Valley sports legend will be laid to rest today.
Michael “Mickey” Carter — an All-American quarterback at Central State, twotime Golden Gloves welterweight champ in Dayton and an AAU champ, second baseman in the Brooklyn Dodgers organization, near scratch golfer as a senior citizen and a member of both the Central State and the Wilberforce University athletic halls of fame — died last Monday at his Wilberforce home.
He was 92.
His family will receive visitors today from 10:30 a.m. to noon at Newcomer Funeral Home’s Beavercreek Chapel at 3380 Dayton-Xenia Road. At 1 p.m. Carter will be buried alongside Barbara, his wife of 52 years, at the Massie Creek Cemetery on Tarbox Cemetery Road in Cedarville.
After graduating from Central High School in Louisville, Kentucky in 1945, Carter accepted an athletic scholarship to Wilberforce University, which two years later splintered into Wilberforce State.
In his final two seasons, Carter led the Green Wave to a 19-2-1 record and the black college football national co-championship in ’48.
Over his last two seasons, Carter orchestrated victories over teams like Grambling, Tennessee State, Tuskegee, North Carolina A&T and Prairie View A&M in stadiums across the country from the Polo Grounds in New York and Kezar Stadium in San Francisco to Chicago’s Comiskey Park, Griffith Stadium in Washington D.C., Houston’s Buffalo Stadium and Rickwood Field in Birmingham.
His senior season, Carter was named a Black All American by the National Negro Press Association, the Chicago Defender and Pittsburgh Courier.
His best sport, though, may have been baseball.
He was signed by Brooklyn and spent two seasons with the Sheboygan Indians in Wisconsin, where he helped shatter racial barriers as one of the first two black players on the team.
His pro career was cut short when he was drafted into the Army during the Korean War.
He became a psychology professor at Central State and also taught swimming there. He later worked as a civilian for the Air Force at Wright-Patterson AFB where he was in charge of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
He and Barbara, who died in 2008, had two children, both of whom survive: Denise Yvette Williamson (Craig) and Michael Derek Carter.
Mickey is also survived by his sister Jacquelyn “Jacci” Turner, a grandson CJ Nickles, five great grandchildren and one great, great grandchild.
While Carter will be remembered today for his athletic prowess, Clay Dixon, the former mayor of Dayton and one of Carter’s freshman psychology students at CSU in 1959, remembers him most for something else:
He didn’t use his sports achievements as currency.
“When I got to Central State he already was a legend on campus,” Dixon once told me. “But he didn’t talk a lot about his athletic days and what he did. He didn’t build who he was around his athletics and he well could have.
“Instead he made the focus education. He encouraged us to do our best in the classroom and to make something of ourselves. He knew that’s the focus we needed if we wanted to be successful in the world.
“And after gradation he wanted us to represent the university — and ourselves — on the highest level.”
Just as he had done for so many years.