The DuSable Panthers: The Greatest, Blackest, Saddest Team from the Meanest Streets in Chicago

Preface

This book tells the story of a high school basketball team in Chicago in 1954 referred to at the time as The Wonder Five.

The team was from DuSable High School. It was an important team not only because of its spectacular skill, but for its historical and sociological impact and the drama of the fortunes of the players.

DuSable of 1954 was the first all-black team with a black coach to reach the highest levels of an organized, integrated, traditional sports program in America, when it gained the finals of the state tournament in Illinois. The championship game itself was one of the most emotional, suspenseful and bizarre ever seen and had a lasting effect on the DuSable players. In that game they played a team from the small southern Illinois town of Mount Vernon—an all-white team except for one black, who was their star. The outcome of the game made an impact on the lives of these boys as well.

The title game could have been seen as a confrontation between big city and rural town, between black and white, and between north and south—since Illinois is decidedly split that way.

Nineteen fifty-four was a decisive year in American history. It was the year of the Brown vs. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court of the United States made the landmark decision against separate but equal public schooling. It was the first truly important ruling in the modern-day fight for civil rights. DuSable was an unwitting but nonetheless emphatic symbol of the changing times.

An often quoted remark by George Santayana goes, Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to relive it. DuSable’s story is at least a reminder of where in racial terms in America we’ve come from. But more, it is a reflection of where we are today and why.

PART ONE

1

A First Time

January 1, 1954. A crisp, glittering night in Chicago. I traveled with a friend on an elevated train that rumbled across the city to the black south side slums—to 47th Street, said to be the meanest street in town—to watch DuSable High School’s basketball team. DuSable had an all-black enrollment. The team had been last season’s Chicago Public League champion and was undefeated in eleven games so far this season. That night DuSable was playing in the finals of the annual city high school Christmas tournament at the International Amphitheater. I was thirteen years old, a freshman in an all-white high school. This was the first time I would see the DuSable Panthers, and it remains in my memory a chillingly festive event.

Sportswriters viewed DuSable’s fast and incautious style as reminiscent of young Harlem Globetrotters; for me, the names and nicknames of the players added to the allure of the team, particularly the three stars: guard Paxton Lumpkin, called Sugar Lump; center Reggie Henderson; and forward Sweet Charlie Brown.

Reggie had a hefty younger brother known as Crisco because he was fat in the can. The Hendersons were one of three sets of brothers playing at DuSable, along with the Dennis boys, Karl and Brian, and the Webbs, Sterling and Preston. Other teammates included Bobby The Bull Jackson, McKinley Cowsen and Curley Johnson—Curley was no nickname, his full name being Curley Del Johnson.

The L train jerked to a stop. My friend Teddy and I stepped out onto a rickety hooded wooden platform, with its row of bare light bulbs strung up. We hurried with a gathering crowd the several blocks to the Amphitheater. We hurried not only out of anticipation of the game—or because of the reputed dangers lurking in this dark and foreign land—but in order to plunge into the Amphitheater and escape the thick smell of slaughtered livestock from the adjoining stockyards. It was a stench so unmercifully powerful that someone unaccustomed to it had to gasp.

DuSable is located about a mile southeast of those stockyards. I later learned that the players I watched that night could tell time by their nostrils; that is, at 11:30 each morning in the enormous stockyards the butchering of thousands of head of cattle would commence. The mighty odor of fresh blood would easily travel that mile and waft through the open windows of DuSable High School.

Teddy and I sat beside a girder high in the balcony among the capacity crowd of nearly ten thousand. The majority of the black people—the DuSable followers—sat on one side of the old sprawling building, and the whites sat on the opponents’ side, the Marshall High side. Marshall was predominantly white.

The teams made their separate entrances into the glare of the court, but it was DuSable that caught our attention. The players came running in in single file. They wore black and devil’s-red warm-up uniforms with flapping half-capes. They opened their drills with slam dunks. Some teams had no players who could dunk; a full one-half of DuSable’s fourteen players were tall enough or springy enough and with hands large enough to smash the ball through the hoop with one hand after a long bound and leap, or with two hands after circling under the basket and then jumping and stuffing the ball backwards.

When they took off their warm-up clothes, we noticed something else unusual. They sported pro socks—unusual for high school teams—long black and red stockings that rose to their white knee guards, which looked all the brighter against their pipe-lean black legs. Their basketball shoes were also white. On their red jerseys were black numerals like 83, 63, 75, and 68, even for the first-string players, instead of the standard low even numbers. A closely cropped hair style was one of their few concessions to convention.

DuSable did not shrink from the young Globetrotter association. It was, in fact, encouraged. One DuSable player had a cousin on the Harlem Globetrotters and another player’s father had once played for that popular barnstorming basketball team.

I had read that DuSable sometimes practiced to the Globetrotters’ theme song, Sweet Georgia Brown. The socks they wore were remindful of the ‘Trotters, as was the jazzy style of basketball. In games, for example, when they got far ahead, DuSable players dribbled between their legs and passed behind their backs. Growing up, they had, under baskets in schoolyards and alleys, emulated the only pro basketball players who were black—the Globies. The National Basketball Association up to the early 1950s was strictly lily-white.

DuSable’s three on-court staples, however, and the elements of their game that would revolutionize basketball in the state and in fact be a harbinger for college and pro play, were: their fast break, their full court zone press defense—both used, surprisingly, throughout the game—and their shooting bombardment. Through strong rebounding and lack of pattern-play, DuSable could unleash twice as many shots in a game as the other team. It was a demanding style of play but generally devastating because of their talent.

They were a slick bunch, led by a strong-minded young black coach named Jim Brown. He wore a lucky outfit to games: light suit, plaid vest and bow tie.

DuSable’s cheerleaders were in their own right distinctive. There were twelve when most schools had only six or eight. The girls wore red bandanas and red sweaters with a big black block D on the chest; loose pleated skirts fell nearly to the ankles and swirled extravagantly with the girl’s flow. They wore black bobby socks and white tennis shoes. Their cheers were more like dance routines. They toe-tapped, they clapped, they stamped, they kicked and they cancanned. They had a choo-choo train cheer in which they lined up touching each other and took quick little rhythmic steps forward and backward, forward and backward, with arms rotating and the crowd supplying the chugging sounds.

As the game heated up, so did the cheerleaders. The Marshall game was very close. The Marshall team was strong and tall and could shoot, too.

And when DuSable scored, late in the game, the cheerleaders and the DuSable fans responded accordingly. The great black side of the Amphitheater began to sway in unison, almost as if it had been carefully choreographed. Oooooh, yeah, oooooh, yeah, oooh yeah-yeah-yeah. Repeated. Faster. Louder. The girls danced in blurry synchronization. The whole blend may have had roots as far back as Africa, probably in cotton fields in the American South, and surely in the store-front revival churches along 47th Street.

The chanting grew deeper. Oh yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah-yeah!

The game ended at 60–60. Now overtime. And overtime ended in a tie, 64–64. Sudden death. The place was exploding. Everyone was on his feet. The noise—the noise! Reggie Henderson got free under the basket. Lumpkin snapped him a pass. Henderson took it, jumped and put the ball in softly off the backboard. Game-winning shot! DuSable remained undefeated…

Teddy and I left the Amphitheater limp from the frenzy. We were filled with the spectacle. We gave no thought to what the players were like personally, of how they lived, of what their dreams were, of what their futures held. Such thoughts would have been an unwelcome intrusion in our excited recalling of the game as the train sped us home in the night.

2

Young Globetrotters

DuSable High School, with an enrollment in 1954 of 2,075, is a blocky, three-story building made of bricks the color of cafe au lait. It was built in 1935 and was then the lone all-black high school in Chicago. The main entrance to DuSable is located at 49th Street and Wabash; about six miles due north is Chicago’s Loop. A few miles to the east is Lake Michigan where, in winter, it produces a freezing, wicked wind that has been nicknamed with deference, The Hawk. To the west are the stockyards. To the far south are the smoking, gray steel mills and other industrial plants of East Chicago and Gary, Indiana.

DuSable is in the heart of the Chicago Black Belt, as it has been called. Around the turn of the century, however, the neighborhood was primarily white and down some of the wide tree-lined streets of the area, such as Prairie and Michigan, great houses were built for the wealthy. The huge migration of blacks from the American South to Chicago and other big northern cities developed after 1914. Blacks, who were once slaves or, now, the sons and daughters of former slaves, eked out a living on scrabbly farms or cotton fields in the South. Social and political exclusion of blacks persisted. Life looked better up north: Jobs and freedom loomed. Blacks in Alabama and Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee and Louisiana tossed their belongings into metal suitcases, tied them up with a rope or a belt, and took the train north. Sometimes, they could afford only train fare and not a seat on the train. They sat on their metal suitcases and dozed. One train that coursed through Mississippi and then up through Illinois was called by them The Smokestack Express.

They came to Chicago in great numbers during the First World War to work in the factories and plants producing arms and clothing. They moved to poor housing on the South Side, the area closest to the plants, and closest to the stockyards, where they also found work. In a sociological pattern that has been repeated continuously in one American city after another, one lower-class group moves in, driving out the class above it. So it happened on the South Side. Whites retreated from the black invaders. Soon, a house with ten rooms that once held one white family, now held ten black families. And as blacks sought more space to stretch and breathe, some whites resisted. In the heat of July 1919, a race war, the first race war in an American city, took place. It began when a black youth, swimming in Lake Michigan, found himself in waters past an imaginary but prescribed line where whites swam. The black youth was stoned to death. This was the catalyst for a battle that flared for five days on the streets of Chicago. It resulted in the deaths of fourteen whites and twenty-two blacks. From then on, blacks and whites rarely ventured upon the other’s turf. But in the early 1950s black families did occasionally move into a house in an exclusively white neighborhood. One case was in the western suburb of Cicero. Bricks crashed through the family’s windows. Harassment by neighbors continued until the family was forced to move out.

In the main Chicago shopping areas, such as the Loop, blacks were not employed as clerks in the major department stores, and even rarely as porters or charwomen.

So blacks in Chicago for much of the first half of the twentieth century confined themselves to their neighborhood. There were few single-dwelling homes. Most of the people lived in apartment buildings that were generally three stories tall. The main street of the neighborhood from which DuSable drew its students was 47th Street. The street took on a different aspect at different points along the thoroughfare. In one stretch, there were nice shops, and restaurants, including Chili Mac’s, a teenagers’ hangout, along with Morris’s Eat Shoppe, considered one of the finest black restaurants in the city. The Savoy Ballroom and the Regal Theater welcomed black entertainers when they were embraced in few other places in the city. People such as Count Basie and Duke Ellington and Fletcher Henderson got their first significant exposure at these theaters.

But also along 47th Street, particularly from Indiana Avenue to Prairie to Calumet, was slum. At this point, 47th Street was known by the DuSable students as Bourbon Street; on