Honor Rupp if you will but bring his full legacy to the party

A bit of Kentucky history unearthed for these forgetful times

By Jacalyn Carfagno | Kentucky Lantern

Recently I’ve had occa­sion to look into the 1960s world of Lexington and the University of Kentucky, par­tic­u­lar­ly the fraught nexus of the two with race. It’s been an inter­est­ing jour­ney through local myth, oral his­to­ries and, of course, basketball. 

By the time I got to Kentucky in 1992 it had been 20 years since Adolph Rupp had coached the Wildcats and 15 years since his death. But he was still a dom­i­nat­ing pres­ence in Wildcat and Lexington lore, his name even enshrined on the bas­ket­ball arena 

As my fam­i­ly could tell you, big time sports, whether so-called ama­teur or pro­fes­sion­al, are not my thing. I’ve learned to hate Duke and to avoid dri­ving into town on Tates Creek/High Street on game nights but beyond that I’m a Kentucky men’s bas­ket­ball agnostic.

Perhaps that’s why it was years before I learned about Rupp’s rep­u­ta­tion as a racist. And it was even longer before I came to under­stand that for decades that rep­u­ta­tion was large­ly respon­si­ble for a yawn­ing gap between the uni­ver­si­ty and the Black com­mu­ni­ty in Lexington. 

If you type “was Adolph Rupp racist” into a search engine you get a lot of results, most of them pret­ty sym­pa­thet­ic to the man still known as the Baron of the Bluegrass. Wikipedia for its part walks del­i­cate­ly around the issue. “Rupp’s views on racial issues and inter­est in sign­ing black play­ers remains a sub­ject of dis­pute, with Rupp deny­ing accu­sa­tions of racism dur­ing his tenure at Kentucky,” a sen­tence so nuanced in Wiki world that it requires four citations. 

One per­son who was much less ambiva­lent was John Oswald, pres­i­dent of UK from 1963 to 1968. Oswald was no stranger to col­lege sports. As an under­grad­u­ate at DePauw University he played var­si­ty foot­ball, cap­tain­ing the team one year, and let­tered in bas­ket­ball and track.

Oswald was eager to see UK’s teams inte­grat­ed and went him­self on recruit­ment vis­its to the homes of Nate Northington, one of the two first Black foot­ball play­ers at UK, and of Wes Unseld, who wound up play­ing bas­ket­ball at Louisville. 

Oswald recounts in a 1987 oral his­to­ry inter­view that when he got to UK he broached the sub­ject of recruit­ing Black bas­ket­ball play­ers with Rupp. “It was clear if he wasn’t a big­ot, he sound­ed like one. He used the word n – – – – –  all the time and he used oth­er names to refer to them, a jig and so on.”

Nonetheless, Oswald per­sist­ed and sug­gest­ed Rupp try to recruit Lew Alcindor, who lat­er became one of basketball’s greats as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and at the time was con­sid­ered the best high school play­er in the nation. Rupp was will­ing to con­sid­er Alcindor, Oswald said. 

“‘If I get a n – – – – -, he’s got to be the best,’” Oswald recalled Rupp say­ing. The Baron of the Bluegrass fret­ted about the crit­i­cism he might endure if he had a Black play­er and benched him. “‘They’d all give me hell every day. … I can­not have one unless he is absolute­ly going to be among the top five but bet­ter the top one or two. That’s why I’d take Alcindor if I could get him.’” 

Of course, he didn’t get him. Nor did he get any of the out­stand­ing Black play­ers in Lexington, depriv­ing his UK teams of some great local talent.

During many of the years he was coach­ing at UK two Black high schools in Lexington were excelling at bas­ket­ball in the seg­re­gat­ed sys­tem. At Douglass, Charles Livisay’s teams fin­ished sec­ond in the 1953 National Negro bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment and won the Kentucky High School Athletic League cham­pi­onship in 1954. (The KHSAL was the Black coun­ter­part of the Kentucky High School Athletic Association). His 1957 team com­pet­ed in the first inte­grat­ed KHSAA-sanc­tioned bas­ket­ball tour­na­ment in Lexington, beat­ing Nicholasville 87–45 in the open­ing round. In 22 years of coach­ing at Dunbar, S.T. Roach “amassed 512 wins, cap­tured six region­al titles, and secured two Kentucky High School Athletic League” cham­pi­onships, the Black Sports Hall of Fame writes. After inte­gra­tion, Roach’s teams com­pet­ed in two KHSAA Sweet Sixteen tournaments. 

The fam­i­lies, friends and fans of those play­ers nev­er had a hope of see­ing them play at the University of Kentucky where Rupp field­ed all-white teams for 41 of his 42 sea­sons as coach. 

All of this made life even more com­plex for the few dozen black under­grad­u­ates at UK in the ’60s. P.G. Peeples, the long­time head of the Urban League in Lexington, went to UK to fin­ish his degree after attend­ing Southeast Kentucky Community College close to his home in Lynch. While he was proud to be at UK, “I nev­er had any asso­ci­a­tion or iden­ti­ty and pride in that bas­ket­ball thing,” he explained in a 1993 inter­view. He soon under­stood that was also true of the peo­ple whose young ath­letes had been shunned for so many years. “I got here and start­ed to learn … what a gap there was between the Black com­mu­ni­ty and the University of Kentucky, … some­times I would take that (UK) sweat­shirt and put it inside out when I’d come downtown.” 

This lit­tle his­to­ry les­son may seem to come out of nowhere. But I thought it was worth recount­ing in this moment. Another sea­son of UK bas­ket­ball is upon us in an are­na that remem­bers Rupp while pow­er­ful fig­ures in Washington and Frankfort tell us to deny the his­to­ry of racial prej­u­dice and exclu­sion that is part of his lega­cy. Kentucky fans may be will­ing to for­give the leg­endary coach but no one should for­get this part of his legacy.