Zak Keefer

zak.keefer@indystar.com

He was alone, this black player in this white world, forced to bunk next to the bathroom in the basement, forced to pick up his food out back while his teammates ate inside, forced to soak up every last drop of racial venom spewed his way, then do nothing, say nothing. Think it was easy? Easy to stand there during a game, sweaty and steaming and silent, while an opposing coach yells at his players to “Jerk that (kid’s) head off!”?

And no – that coach didn’t use the word “kid.” Not back then.

He was alone, wounded deeper and deeper every time that racial slur was hurled his way. A teammate casually crooning in the locker room, a fan in the stadium bathroom, a little girl, no older than four, seeing him in the lobby of a hotel. “Look mommy, a ...” he heard her say.

He was alone, alone with nothing but his thoughts and his resolve, a basketball pioneer whose courage 69 years ago this week barely made a ripple. This was March 1948. Eleven months after Jackie Robinson. Sixteen years before the Civil Rights Act. Eighteen before Texas Western. In 1948, no black player had ever suited up in a national college basketball tournament – they were banned from the postseason – until a young coach named Johnny Wooden decided it was about time one did.

That’s where Clarence Walker comes in.

He was a speedy guard on Wooden’s Indiana State Teachers College team – the team you now know as Indiana State – and the only black player on the 11-man roster. He’d arrived in Terre Haute in the fall of 1946, a simple man with a simple dream: earn his degree, return home to East Chicago, marry his high school sweetheart, start a family. He wasn’t looking to make history. He wasn’t running from it, either.

Then things got messy. After Walker’s freshman season, in 1947, Wooden turned down an invitation to the National Association of Intercollegiate Basketball Championship. The reason: With the ban still in place, he’d have to leave Walker at home.

“How do you do something like that to a young man?” the legendary coach would later write in his autobiography, My Personal Best.

The following spring, March of 1948, the ban was lifted. Of the 32 teams that made the trip to Kansas City, only one did so with a black player. Walker quietly broke the color barrier, wading through a thicket of unforgiving racial tensions along the way, bottling up his private pain for the greater good. He never fired back. He couldn’t.

Instead, he wrote.

That’s how Clarence Walker made sense of it all. He played. He persevered. He took a deep breath. He wrote.

“This was written, I think,” his journal begins, “as a way of getting some things off my mind.” It covers his entire sophomore season, eight entries across nine type-written pages, a lens into a trailblazer’s torment.

“Mr. J.C.,” reads the title. Jim Crow.

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He made history, then he went on with his life. Walker graduated two years later. He returned home, married his high school sweetheart and raised a family, just as he’d planned. Served his country in Korea, was shot in the arm and earned a Purple Heart. Devoted his life to the schools, working as a teacher and counselor, helping hundreds of minorities earn admittance into college. Taught Sunday school. Picked up tennis. Never mentioned the racial barrier he’d shattered, or the path he’d paved for future generations of black college basketball players.

Years passed. Decades passed. History forgot.

Clarence’s middle son didn’t even know, not until he was 17 years old, slumped on the living room couch one afternoon, sulking over a one-point, double-overtime loss in the state tournament, fuming that he’d been benched for a lesser player by his white coach. Basketball wasn’t fair. Life wasn’t fair.

That’s when his father handed him nine, type-written pages he’d never seen before. Kevin Walker glanced at the title. “Mr. J.C.”

“Read this,” dad told him.

***

Before Clarence Walker ever stepped foot in Terre Haute, Johnny Wooden – he was still Johnny back then – had been assured the kid from East Chicago could handle it. Progress wouldn’t come easy, wouldn’t come quick. Certainly not back then.

“If you’re going to get this done,” Walker’s high school coach, John Baratto, told Wooden, according to Walker's oldest son. "Then Clarence is the guy you’re going to get it done with.”

Still, it remained a bold move for a young coach, especially in the Ku Klux Klan hotbed that was Indiana. College basketball in the 1940s remained a white man’s game; for years, in the Big Ten, coaches had an unspoken agreement not to recruit black players. Not until Indiana’s Bill Garrett, in 1947, did a conference team feature a black player. (The NBA wouldn’t have its first black player until 1950.) And even then, they remained banned from college basketball’s three major tournaments: the NCAA, NIT and NAIB (now known as the NAIA).

Yet the racial undercurrents of the era never seemed to seep into John Robert Wooden, the Martinsville boy who’d starred at Purdue and was about to make quite a name for himself in the coaching world. His father, a simple-as-they-come farmer named Joshua Wooden, taught him better than that.

“You’re just as good as anybody,” dad told him, “but you’re no better than nobody.”

Wooden landed his first college job at Indiana State in 1946, installed his fast-break system and won immediately. The Sycamores went 18-8. Wooden mulled his decision. Leaving Walker – a reserve whom Wooden later described as the “ninth or tenth man on the roster” – at home for the NAIB tournament would’ve been the easy call.

Wooden wouldn’t do it.

He wouldn’t publicize it, either.

Instead he gave a phony excuse, telling the Terre Haute Tribune Star that Indiana State “was unable to accept due to a conflict with college final examinations.” The real reason remained Walker. Earlier in the year, Wooden elected not to take him to a game in New York, largely due to the discrimination the team would face on the road trip there. This time, with far more at stake, Wooden refused to leave Walker behind.

“I was being asked to participate in segregation,” the coach would later write. “That’s not what dad taught me.”

A year later, though, Wooden reversed course. As Walker notes in his journal, before a February game against Valparaiso, he noticed teammates passing around a piece of paper in the locker room, a piece of paper everybody was signing except him. He then learned why. It was an entry form into the NAIB Tournament, “a national tournament where every athlete in the region desires that he can be able to play,” Walker wrote.

Indiana State intended to play this time, even if Walker had to be left at home. He was crushed.

“I asked Wooden what the dope is on the Kansas City Tournament,” Walker wrote. “In his suave but candid way he told me, of which I expected ... that Negroes could not play. This is the second big opportunity which hurt me in a peculiar way. This first one rendered me unstable for almost a week.”

Then, suddenly, the ban was lifted. Since the NAIB champion was, at the time, one of eight teams invited to the U.S. Olympic Trials, pressure mounted from East Coast schools to allow black players to participate. The firmest stances came from schools such as Manhattan College, Siena, Albany – not, it’s worth noting, from Wooden and Indiana State.

Three days before the tournament tipped off, the NAIB offered a compromise: Walker could play in the games but couldn’t otherwise be seen with the team. Wooden said no.

“I felt this humiliation as worse than leaving Clarence behind in Terre Haute,” he recalled.

The NAACP called, begging the coach to reconsider. Clarence would be making history, the organization argued. This would be a monumental first step.

Wooden discussed it with Clarence and his parents. They all agreed: He’d play. Progress wouldn’t come easy, wouldn’t come quick. But it would come.

He’d be the only black player in the entire field.

***

They sat for lunch, the white players served, the black player ignored. Then the restaurant manager piped up.

“We don’t feed black people,” he declared.

“If he don’t eat here, none of us do,” Johnny Wooden shot back.

So the Indiana State team strolled out of the restaurant, leaving their warm food untouched.

The hurdles came not on the court but off it: Society made life very hard for Clarence Walker that week. During an overnight stay on their way to Kansas City, the Sycamores stopped at a hotel in Columbia, Mo. While his teammates slept in rooms upstairs, he was told to sleep next to the bathroom in the basement, in a room with broken furniture in it. "A cot was rolled in there and that was my quarters for the night," he wrote.

About 2 a.m. a group of young men stumbled down to the bathroom, loud and drunk enough to wake Walker up. “About 10 minutes later they all cleared out, but believe me they did not take everything with them,” he wrote. “One can guess how much sleep I got.”

By then he was used to it. Back in Terre Haute, he’d been forced to pick up his food from the back of the kitchen, forced to hear opposing coaches yell slurs at him during games, forced to overhear teammates use them in the locker room. Wooden routinely came to his defense. After the “Jerk his head off!” comment came in a game against Southeastern Oklahoma, Wooden fired right back at the opposing coach.

“Why don’t you go back to Oklahoma!” he shouted.

The word scarred him, Walker admitted in his journal, but his skin grew thick, his resolve unshakable. He played. He persevered.

“I find myself not being affected by such as much as I used to,” he wrote. “I find, the more a Negro thinks something affects him, the more it will.”

Again forbidden to stay with his teammates in Kansas City, Walker instead bunked with a black minister. He broke the color barrier, scoring three points in the Sycamore’s first game. The newspapers of the day hardly noticed. “(Walker) became the first of his race to see action in the 10-year-old tournament,” was the final line of the game story in the following day’s Indianapolis Star. Neither the Kansas City Star nor Terre Haute Tribune mentioned it at all.

Indiana State reached the championship game but fell to Louisville, Wooden’s last game on the Sycamore sidelines. On the way home, during an overnight stay in Effingham, Ill., the white Indiana State players stayed in hotel rooms. Walker again slept in the basement.

His journal reflects a young man wrestling with the injustice he endured. He is not rash but reflective; he saw the bigger picture when it couldn’t have been an easy thing to see. Still, he was alone, this black player in this white world of college basketball, soldiering on, for himself and for his dreams, sure, but also for all those black players who would follow in his footsteps.

“I was taught to stand up for your principle until proven wrong,” Clarence wrote. “In the most nebulous sense it is a permanent stigma ... to know that socially one is looked upon as inferior, not because of his character, but only because of his obvious features.

“Let’s be frank, can a boy of (my) age or at my level in life be proud he is a Negro? The thing he aspires to do can be done, I meant the opportunity comes, but cannot be taken, not because I am not capable or my ability is not up to par, but only because I am a NEGRO. God bless this inane world.”

***

Kevin Walker read every last word of the journal his father handed him that day, then read them again. The journal was nine pages of perspective, the story of a racial pioneer he never knew. Benched by his coach? Sulking over a double-overtime loss? Dad had it worse.

“It told me to take my tail out from between my legs and move forward,” Kevin says in an interview 42 years later.

Clarence Walker waited for the right moment to tell each of his four children about what he'd endured at Indiana State. His oldest son, Keith, found out after he returned home from military school when he was 13, haunted by some of the same discrimination his father had faced decades earlier. “My dad understood the bigger picture better than most,” Keith says, looking back. “I have no idea how he was able to hold back when they called him those awful things. But I think back to one thing he said to us all the time – you finish what you start.”

Through it all, Walker remained in awe of his coach. “As far I know, he is not bias,” Walker wrote of Wooden. “If all people were in mind as he is character, I think Mr. J.C. would be trivial.” After Wooden’s departure to UCLA was announced, Walker wrote that “a truly wonderful man is leaving.”

The progress the black player from East Chicago commenced in March 1948 continued, step by step. The year after Walker broke the color barrier for postseason tournaments, in 1949, three teams brought black players to Kansas City. A year later, City College of New York won both the NIT and NCAA with two black starters. The signature breakthrough, though, arrived in 1966, when Texas Western upset Kentucky in the NCAA final with an all-black starting five.

By then Walker had graduated and returned to East Chicago, keeping the nine-page journal tucked away in his office in the basement.

Sixty-nine years after his father opened the door for black college basketball players, including himself, Kevin Walker sliced through his salmon inside a crowded restaurant while NCAA Tournament coverage blared on the big screen. His dad’s been gone for 28 years now. Cancer stole him in 1989. Kevin thinks about his father, about his laugh, about his stories, about the lessons he left behind. He thinks about the saying he used to share with his kids all the time.

“Be humble, don’t grumble, and you won’t stumble.”

Fitting. Because Clarence Walker never did.

Call Star reporter Zak Keefer at (317) 444-6134 and follow him on Twitter: @zkeefer.