More Than a Game

SPORTS TEAMS ARE USUALLY best remembered for their competition record and the idiosyncrasies of team members. But the 1951 Crispus Attucks Tigers basketball team, a state championship semifinalist from a segregated, all-black high school in Indianapolis, Indiana, deserves closer scrutiny. The success of Crispus Attucks basketball teams made the school an institution that blacks and whites warily shared. Attucks's basketball success inspired considerable soul-searching in both the white and black communities, and in the end, Indianapolis residents learned that in addition to sharing common spaces they sometimes shared goals. Investigating Attucks's run to the state championship is more than an opportunity for nostalgic retrieval of past athletic glories. ¹ Rather, such an examination allows scholars to integrate sports with the flourishing study of popular culture and examine how that culture shaped racial attitudes. ² The widespread presumption that success in sports reflected well on a group's potential for citizenship and character shaped the understanding of Attucks's success in 1951 and inspired a range of responses. Black leaders in Indianapolis, in particular, self-consciously worked to parlay athletic achievements into more tangible gains. Their successes, and their failures, reveal the measured pace of racial progress in a midwestern city in the 1950s. ³