Surviving members of the all-Black Tennessee A&I basketball team have fought for recognition since they won three back-to-back national championships at the height of the Jim Crow era.
In 1957, the men’s basketball program at Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University in Nashville had all of the makings of a great team: a coach dedicated to the fundamentals of the game and a fast-breaking offense that applied relentless full-court pressure.
“We felt that if we stayed focused, there was nobody else who could beat us,” said Dick Barnett, a shooting guard for the team.
That was true, three times over. The Tennessee A&I Tigers would become the first team from a historically Black college or university to win any national championship, and the first college team to win three back-to-back championships.
But the team, caught in the headwinds of the Jim Crow South, has struggled for recognition ever since.
Barnett, now 87, who went on to play for the two New York Knicks championship teams in the 1970s, has spent the last decade working to correct that. He has spent years campaigning for the Tigers to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and is teaching a new generation of basketball players at Tennessee State University, as the school is now known, about the barrier-breaking team.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
