Historian sees Chamberlain as playing role in race relations
Chamberlain, a 7-foot-1 high school star from Philadelphia, was recruited to Kansas in 1955 by coach Phog Allen. He scored 42 points in his first game as the freshman team beat the varsity. Because freshmen couldn’t play on varsity teams in that era, Chamberlain’s official debut with the Jayhawks came the following season.
He had 52 points ? still a Kansas record ? and 31 rebounds in his first game, and the Jayhawks finished 24-3, losing the national championship to North Carolina by a single point in three overtimes. After a junior year in which he averaged 30.1 points a game, Chamberlain passed up a final season at Kansas to turn pro.
He spent a year with the Harlem Globetrotters before switching to the NBA, where he had 31,419 points over 14 seasons and once scored 100 points in a game for the Philadelphia Warriors.
Aram Goudsouzian, a historian from the University of Memphis, reviews Chamberlain’s time at Kansas in a cover article in the latest issue of Kansas History, a publication of the Kansas State Historical Society.
Beyond the skills which made him “the first real, black celebrity star in college basketball,” Goudsouzian said, Chamberlain helped effect racial desegregation in Lawrence.
“His size, ability and race threatened the established patterns of college basketball,” the historian told the Lawrence Journal-World for a story Monday, adding that Chamberlain “foreshadowed the changing landscapes of American sports and race relations.”
Chamberlain’s presence and influence, Goudsouzian said, planted seeds of doubt about de facto segregation in Lawrence among some of the community’s leaders.
“It’s complicated,” he said. “It wasn’t that he a) had no effect or b) that he integrated Lawrence. It was somewhere in between. And what he did was on more of a personal level rather than as a barrier-breaker or a symbol of a political movement.”
“He was the most pre-eminent symbol of racial change in Kansas from the late 1950s and into the 1960s,” Goudsouzian said. “If one man embodied the power to change racial attitudes at that time, he was it.”
Lawrence native Leonard Monroe, a longtime friend of Chamberlain, who died in 1999, told a story about Chamberlain going into a Lawrence restaurant with Mitt Allen, a lawyer and son of the Kansas coach. Monroe said when the restaurant owner announced Chamberlain would not be served, Allen angrily countered that he would close the place down.
“They served him,” Monroe said, adding, though, that other blacks still couldn’t get service there.
“Me? Oh, no, I couldn’t eat there,” he said. “Wilt could, but the rest of us couldn’t.”
Jesse Milan, one of the first black teachers in the Lawrence public schools, also knew Chamberlain but doesn’t see him as having a major role in bringing about change.
“When you go back and look at how blacks couldn’t buy a house outside of certain neighborhoods, that there weren’t any black clerks ? not a single bank in Lawrence had a black clerk ? that businesses all over town wouldn’t serve blacks; Wilt Chamberlain didn’t change any of that,” said Milan, who at the time headed the Douglas County chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“Wilt Chamberlain was not an agent of change,” Milan said. “He was an instrument of his own convictions. I don’t mean that in a critical way. I’m just saying the focus shouldn’t be on him when there were so many unheralded heroes who did so much more.”
Bill Tuttle, a professor of American studies at the University of Kansas, said Goudsouzian’s article got past what he described as the “folklore and mythology” surrounding much of what is known about Chamberlain.
Tuttle said it’s true that Chamberlain was no-nonsense in his individualism but wondered if he was also adept at “picking his targets.” He said Chamberlain was well-known for taking on restaurants that denied access to blacks but didn’t go after a fraternity and sorority system that Tuttle said was then by far the most segregated system at the university.
Chamberlain lived in the former Carruth O’Leary dormitory, which now houses university offices, later joining the all-black fraternity Kappa Alpha Psi.
Less than two years before his death at 63, Chamberlain, wearing his old Kansas letter jacket, made an emotional return to Allen Field House for a ceremony retiring his jersey number.
“I’ve learned in life that you have to take the bitter with the sweet, and how sweet this is,” he said. “I’m a Jayhawk and I’m proud to be a part of the tradition here. I’m very proud to be here.”
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Information from: Lawrence Journal-World, http://www.ljworld.com