Little, Brown and Company
In the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University), Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of James Naismith, the game's inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become the highest-scoring college team in America—a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. Yet his players faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads.
Historian Scott Ellsworth (AM ’77, PhD ’82) takes readers to the sidelines of the first integrated college basketball game in the South between the then North Carolina College for Negroes and a group of Duke University students. Ellsworth, who earned his doctorate in history at Duke, uncovered the story of the secret game via his research of college basketball. The result is a riveting, little-known story reminding readers of a rising generation of risk-takers who fought against Jim Crow laws and ushered in the Civil Rights Movement.