Breaking Through: John B. McLendon, Basketball Legend and Civil Rights Pioneer

Journal of Southern History, Nov, 2008 by Kurt Edward Kemper

Breaking Through: John B. McLendon, Basketball Legend and Civil Rights Pioneer. By Milton S. Katz. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2007. Pp. xxii, 256. $29.95, ISBN 978-1-55728-847-9.)

In this thoroughly readable biography Milton S. Katz has rescued from relative obscurity the outstanding basketball coach John B. McLendon Jr. McLendon rose from humble origins in Kansas to pursue a path of outsized accomplishments both in his coaching career and in his significant efforts to achieve racial integration. Basketball enthusiasts will find interesting McLendon's seminal role in developing such strategies as the fast-break offense and the full-court press, as well as innovating what became the "four-corners" delay game made famous by legendary University of North Carolina coach Dean Smith. In 1969 McLendon retired from college coaching with a 76 percent career winning record.

Of greater significance, however, are McLendon's contributions to the struggle for black equality and opportunity. From his earliest days as an undergraduate at the University of Kansas, McLendon challenged racial restrictions and prohibitions wherever he found them, and he continued doing so throughout his coaching career. Most significant, McLendon was instrumental in the formation of the National Athletic Steering Committee, aimed at pressuring the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA) to allow historically black colleges (HBCs) into their annual postseason basketball tournaments. While the NCAA remained hostile to the idea (a point Katz unfortunately does not pursue), the NAIA proved far more receptive and allowed HBCs into its tournament in 1953. Fittingly, in 1957 McLendon led his team from Tennessee A&I State University to the first national championship won by an HBC. Following his hugely successful college coaching career, McLendon also broke barriers as the first black coach of a professional team, before ultimately serving the U.S. Olympic Committee and working as a consultant for the Converse Shoe Company.

As good as Katz's book is, it stops short of rising above merely telling the story of one pioneer. Based mostly on newspaper accounts and an impressive number of oral interviews, the book is not able to delve very deeply into McLendon beyond the basketball court, largely because McLendon apparently left no diary or in-depth correspondence. Katz is able to offer only the barest sketch of McLendon's formative years; and, other than an admission that coaching often made him an absentee father and husband, we learn little about his relationship with his children or his three wives. Additionally, Katz is unable to expand on McLendon's thoughts and motivations regarding larger, historically significant events. Katz notes that McLendon opposed the 1968 Olympics medal stand protest of American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos but does not offer much analysis of McLendon's views on such a controversial episode; indeed, the section is not even footnoted. These are likely not issues that Katz failed to consider but ones for which no source material remained to allow him to probe his subject with the kind of depth that first-rate, insightful biographies provide.

To focus on such things, however, is to criticize Katz for the book he did not write and ignore the fine volume he did produce. And in that regard, he has offered a sound introduction to an immensely significant figure at the intersection of sports history and American race relations.

KURT EDWARD KEMPER

University of South Dakota