Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South

By Andrew Maraniss

New York Times Best Seller
2015 RFK Book Awards Special Recognition
2015 Lillian Smith Book Award
2015 AAUP Books Committee "Outstanding" Title

Based on more than eighty interviews, this fast-paced, richly detailed biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC, digs deep beneath the surface to reveal a more complicated and profound story of sports pioneering than we've come to expect from the genre. Perry Wallace's unusually insightful and honest introspection reveals his inner thoughts throughout his journey.

Wallace entered kindergarten the year that Brown v. Board of Education upended "separate but equal." As a 12-year-old, he sneaked downtown to watch the sit-ins at Nashville's lunch counters. A week after Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, Wallace entered high school, and later saw the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts. On March 16, 1966, his Pearl High School basketball team won Tennessee's first integrated state tournament--the same day Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky Wildcats lost to the all-black Texas Western Miners in an iconic NCAA title game.

The world seemed to be opening up at just the right time, and when Vanderbilt recruited him, Wallace courageously accepted the assignment to desegregate the SEC. His experiences on campus and in the hostile gymnasiums of the Deep South turned out to be nothing like he ever imagined.

On campus, he encountered the leading civil rights figures of the day, including Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King Jr., Fannie Lou Hamer, and Robert Kennedy--and he led Vanderbilt's small group of black students to a meeting with the university chancellor to push for better treatment.

On the basketball court, he experienced an Ole Miss boycott and the rabid hate of the Mississippi State fans in Starkville. Following his freshman year, the NCAA instituted "the Lew Alcindor rule," which deprived Wallace of his signature move, the slam dunk.

Despite this attempt to limit the influence of a rising tide of black stars, the final basket of Wallace's college career was a cathartic and defiant dunk, and the story Wallace told to the Vanderbilt Human Relations Committee and later The Tennessean was not the simple story of a triumphant trailblazer that many people wanted to hear. Yes, he had gone from hearing racial epithets when he appeared in his dormitory to being voted as the university's most popular student, but, at the risk of being labeled "ungrateful," he spoke truth to power in describing the daily slights and abuses he had overcome and what Martin Luther King had called "the agonizing loneliness of a pioneer."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9780826520258

Andrew Maraniss

Andrew Maraniss is the New York Times–bestselling author of Strong Inside, the only sports-related book ever to win two prestigious civil rights awards—the Lillian Smith Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Awards Special Recognition Prize. Andrew is a contributor to ESPN's sports and race website, TheUndefeated.com, and helps run Vanderbilt University's Sports & Society Initiative. He also writes nonfiction for young readers.

Book preview

1

Forgiveness

Bob Warren sat alone in the back of a taxi, bound for Massachusetts Avenue and the law school at American University, where he planned to deliver a message nearly forty years in the making.

As his cab sped through the streets of Washington, DC, far from his home in western Kentucky, Warren’s mind raced back to the 1970s, before he became a preacher—when he was a professional basketball player—a crewcut farm boy passing red, white, and blue basketballs to Ice Man Gervin in the freewheeling American Basketball Association, sharing locker rooms for nine seasons with Afro-coiffed men from places like Tennessee State, North Carolina A&T, and Jackson State University.

It was in those ABA days—in hotels, buses, cabs, restaurants, flights, and conversations with his many black teammates, in becoming familiar with their perspective on the world—that it dawned on Warren what hell one of his brilliant and hardworking teammates at Vanderbilt University, Perry Wallace, must have been going through in 1968, when Warren was a senior and Wallace, a sophomore, was the first and only African American ballplayer in the entire Southeastern Conference.

Warren’s cab reached its destination, and the basketballer-turned-country-preacher made his way up to the fourth floor of the law school. Standing there to greet him was Professor Wallace; it was the first time these old teammates had seen each other in thirty-eight years.

Forgive me, Perry, Warren said. There is so much more I could have done.

2

Short 26th

Long before the day Bob Warren came to visit, there was the day Perry Wallace was elected captain of the Vanderbilt basketball team, the day when he was voted as the university’s most popular student. There was the day he graduated from Columbia Law School, the day he delivered a lecture on global warming entirely in French, the day when he represented the Federated States of Micronesia before the United Nations. There was the day he watched his jersey hoisted to the rafters at Memorial Gym.

But before any of that, there were days when dorm room doors were slammed in his face, accompanied by cries of Nigger on the floor! There were days when grown men dressed in maroon, or orange, or red, white, and blue, threatened to castrate or hang him. There were days when he cried with frustration, days when blood flowed but no referees’ whistles blew, days when so-called friends laughed at his pain.

But before any of this, before Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. even came into this world, there was Short 26th. His story begins in a little shotgun house on a dead-end street on the other side of the tracks.

His parents, Perry Wallace Sr. and Hattie Haynes Wallace, had come to Nashville from rural Rutherford County, Tennessee, not long after their marriage in 1928. Perry Sr. moved to Nashville first, to furnish and decorate the three-room house on Short 26th before his wife arrived. The Wallaces, both twenty-two years old, were eager to enjoy the benefits of city life. The South remained overwhelmingly rural, with only three out of ten people living in cities, but the migration had begun, and while many blacks headed hundreds of miles north to places like Chicago and Detroit, others, like the Wallaces, made the shorter journey to nearby southern cities.

Perry Sr. was just eleven years old when his mother died in childbirth, and his father, Alford Wallace, raised twelve children with a tough-love attitude, and the help of his sisters, on a farm near Murfreesboro, about thirty-five miles southeast of Nashville. It was a typical farm in many ways, full of fruit orchards, corn, cotton, hogs, and chickens; and there was a rock formation that seemed like a vast canyon to the kids, who would run through it barefoot. But the farm was unusual in one important way—Alford, a black man whose father had fought with the US Colored Troops in the Civil War, owned it. Perry Wallace Jr. wouldn’t be the first pioneer in his family.

Hattie Haynes grew up close to Perry Sr. in the Blackman community near Murfreesboro. As children they played together, went to church together, and walked together across an old wood-and-rope bridge on the way to the one-room schoolhouse they attended through eighth grade. Hattie’s teachers considered her the smartest student in the school, and they often let her do lessons on the chalkboard as an example to the others. Most of all she loved music: a traveling salesman had come through her parents’ neighborhood selling affordable organs, and Hattie’s father bought one for her mother.

Hattie learned how to play, and from then on the Haynes house was full of music, her young fingers flying through a fast melody she called Racing Horses.

Hattie was twenty years old when her mother died, and just two years later Perry Sr. came calling on her father to ask for Hattie’s hand in marriage. They were married on April 1, 1928—their children would later joke about the April Fool’s Day wedding—and soon they were on their way to Nashville, a bit apprehensive about the people and the pace of the city but excited about the opportunities. Two of Perry Sr.’s older brothers were already there; Joe and James Wallace helped the young couple get settled. Perry took jobs at a granary, then a chemical company, then with the railroad, then as a bricklayer, while Hattie rode the bus to clean homes and offices. Perry and Hattie were doing the best they could; these were the standard jobs available to blacks in Nashville at the time—and for decades to come. As late as 1940, nearly 80 percent of working black women in the city were employed as domestic servants or waitresses.

The city where Perry and Hattie began their lives together had been settled after the Revolution, emerging as an important frontier town in the mid-nineteenth century. As the young nation entered an era of Manifest Destiny, Nashville served as a key launching point in the western expansion. Up until the time of the Civil War, most Nashvillians considered their town more western than southern. Located roughly halfway between Chicago and New Orleans, about as close to parts of Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana as to Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, Nashville’s crossroads location made the city more open to new people and new ideas than its Deep South peers.

It also made the city a major railroad hub for the occupying Union army during the Civil War, an especially important depot for General William T. Sherman’s march on Atlanta. More than fifty thousand Federal troops occupied the city from 1862 to 1865 (more than three times the size of the city’s 1860 population), what one historian called perhaps the first, continued occupation of a city by any American army. While those troops cleared the city of thousands of trees—needed for firewood—they did leave some things behind: namely themselves. Dozens of Union soldiers married southern belles and remained in Nashville after the war, and one Federal fort was converted into a college for Negroes in 1866: Fisk University, named for Brigadier General Clinton B. Fisk.

Ten years later, the first medical school for blacks in the South, the Medical Department of Central Tennessee College of Nashville, was established. The school later became known as Meharry Medical College, and for generations afterward it produced most of the black doctors in the country. In 1912 another black college was founded in the city, Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School, which later became known as Tennessee A&I State and then simply Tennessee State.

Clustered in what locals call North Nashville but what is more accurately the near-west side of the city, these three institutions gave Nashville a larger concentration of highly educated, upwardly mobile blacks than most cities in the South. Still, most blacks in Nashville lived in deep poverty, many in a near shantytown just yards from the state capitol building downtown.

The center of black life was near those universities, and one road—Jefferson Street—was the place where everything happened. In a segregated society, the Jefferson Street area was where Black Power flourished long before the slogan was invented. Living in the black cocoon, as Perry Wallace would describe it decades later, meant patronizing black-owned businesses, entering the front doors of black movie theaters, eating in black restaurants. Inside the cocoon, poor as it was, there were no whites-only lunch counters or back-alley entrances. Rather, there were institutions like Isom’s Beauty Shop, Frank White’s Cleaners, Green’s Grocery, and the Ritz Theater. The leading black entertainers of the mid-twentieth century, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole to Little Richard and Ella Fitzgerald, included Nashville on their itineraries, playing at the Silver Streak and the Del Morocco and staying at the Brown Hotel.

Perry Sr. and Hattie, the laborer and the cleaning lady, made a life in this cocoon. It was humble—this was Short 26th after all, just a stub of a road around the corner from Jefferson Street, not even the real 26th Avenue. Their house was small—living room, bedroom, kitchen, bedroom, porch—but soon enough it filled up with kids. First there was Annie, who became known simply as Sister, and then along came James, known as Brother, and Bessie, Jessie, and Ruby Jean.

While some neighbors succumbed to the temptations born of the marriage between a new urban existence and poverty—moonshine, gambling, and violence among them—Perry Sr. and Hattie lived a straight life, and they were determined, in the face of significant peer pressure, that their children would do the same. Of all the traditions and values in the Wallace home, the two most important were religion and education, and church life was especially important to Hattie. She was a regular at the Jefferson Street Church of Christ, a conservative congregation that forbade drinking, dancing, and instrumental music in the sanctuary.

The children went to Sunday School, read the Bible, and attended services with their mother. Mrs. Wallace brought the lessons of the church back to Short 26th, and the kids experienced what they would later call a home-based religion, a vehicle for motivation and inspiration and healing when that was necessary, said Jessie. Much of that motivation and inspiration was directed at schooling. The Wallaces believed that a strong education was a necessary ingredient if their children were to succeed in a society that was not only becoming more urban and fast paced but also was engineered to restrict the opportunities for black people. The Wallace kids were smart, so smart that they encountered more than a little jealousy, more than a few strange looks from friends, neighbors, and other parents. Were those really French-, Spanish-, and German-language records you could hear Annie practicing with when you walked past the little shotgun house on Short 26th? What was that all about? That family is different.

On February 19, 1948, this straitlaced family of seven got quite a surprise: Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. was born at Meharry Hospital.

Can a birth really be that much of a surprise?

For some it was quite unexpected, given that the oldest Wallace child, Annie, was a sophomore in college and the youngest, Ruby Jean, had been born ten years earlier.

For Jessie, then thirteen, it was a real shock. She had had no idea that her mother, who wore billowing smocks around the house, was pregnant; when she heard her mother was in the hospital, she thought she must be dying. So traumatized by the thought, Jessie didn’t ask anyone for days what was going on. Just then learning about menstruation in school, she thought about how this baby was made, and she was traumatized all over again. For Perry Sr. the birth of a healthy baby boy was no small pleasant surprise. Jessie’s fear that her mother was dying was closer to the truth than she could have known. For Hattie, then forty-two years old, childbirth was life threatening. She was in the hospital for more than two weeks before Perry was born, and doctors discovered a tumor on her colon, which at the time they believed to be benign. Still, they took special precautions when Hattie gave birth to Perry. Daddy was tickled to death, Jessie recalled, because his wife had survived and he had gotten a little boy.

When mother and son were healthy enough to return home, Perry Sr. drove them back to Short 26th. As they rolled down Jefferson Street and neared the house, a train passed overhead on a railroad trestle. Oh, son, Perry Sr. whispered to his infant boy, before you could even get home you’ve gotten run over by a train. Jessie would later say that she believed her father’s joke foretold the trials and tribulations of life that her baby brother would endure.

The girls gave little Perry baths, brushed his hair, and hauled him around everywhere, using the infant to draw the attention of boys at Hadley Park. The only time they let go of him was when Daddy came home from work. Have to have my boy, have to have my boy, he would say, and then he wouldn’t let his son out of sight all night, putting the miracle baby to sleep in a white bassinet at the foot of his and Hattie’s bed.

Nearly as soon as one boy arrived in the house, the other left. Brother James, realizing that his parents would be struggling to put the girls through college while raising another child, enlisted in the air force as soon as he turned eighteen the November following Perry’s birth. He sacrificed for the family, Jessie recalled. He was gone, and that was devastating.

As his sisters grew older and eventually all moved out of the house, Perry became even closer to his mother. He developed an uncommon sensitivity and was called a mama’s boy; the love and values Hattie passed along to her son began to shape his behavior. In a world of chaos, much of it soon to be directed squarely at him, he would remain above the fray. Some observers would later remark on Perry’s unflappable character when they saw him remain cool under pressure in places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Auburn, Alabama. They should have seen him in kindergarten.

Perry Wallace’s education began in 1954, the same year as the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation decision, at a school for black children named Jewel’s Academy. Every day Perry the kindergartner walked from Short 26th down Howard Street over to the complex of chapels and schoolrooms at the academy, a private school run by the Church of God and Christ. Along the way, he passed by a factory and railroad tracks and, most exotic to him, a retirement home and its constant parade of elderly people with canes, walking by real slow.

Run by a female bishop known as Chief Jewel, whom Perry considered a big, strong, charismatic woman, the school included a mandatory, midday chapel session. Whether it was the imposing figure of Chief Jewel or the lessons on respect he had learned from his parents, Perry was the most even-tempered kid in kindergarten. This didn’t necessarily sit well with his sister Jessie, who occasionally picked up her little brother from school.

Jessie arrived at Perry’s classroom one day, and the teacher, Miss Davis, was nowhere in sight. With free reign, the kids were going berserk, running around screaming, bouncing off walls and windows—total pandemonium. All but one kid, that is. As his classmates went bonkers, there at his tiny desk sat Perry Wallace, not saying a word, waiting patiently for his sister.

I was just enraged, not at the children, but at the teacher, Jessie recalled. But my strongest feeling of all was, ‘Is my brother going to be a wimp? Is he going to stand up for himself with these rougher guys? Is he going to be able to defend himself?’

Her mind flashed to a poem the Wallace children had been given, If by Rudyard Kipling, which begins with the line If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, but she thought that at just five years old, her brother was too young to be heeding the poet’s advice on self-discipline.

I think I would have preferred at that moment for him to be running around, too, Jessie recalled. But looking back, this is when I saw the first instance of that self-control, this discipline, and not only that, this desire to do the right thing and not follow the crowd. He learned all that so early.

If those traits would later serve him well as a pioneer, he didn’t need to look far to see another example of a trailblazer—however unheralded—in action. It was Perry Sr., who despite long odds was making a living as an entrepreneur in the good ol’ boy field of commercial and residential building construction.

Nashville in the 1950s was in the midst of what was known as its Central City Renaissance, a postwar building boom that saw the construction of the city’s first skyscraper, the thirty-story L&C Tower, as well as several new department stores, government buildings, and the continuation of the Capitol Hill redevelopment project to remove the shacks that circled the statehouse. And, as the county’s population ballooned from 257,000 in 1940 to 400,000 in 1960, residential construction—much of it brick—created increasing demand for Perry Wallace Sr.’s services as a bricklayer.

This middle-aged man from the country, father of six children, saw his chance at the American Dream. Just as that dream was fueling the development of these suburban brick homes, Perry Sr. seized on a fundamental truth: the dream required that these houses look beautiful. In the world these new homeowners wanted to live in, the lawns needed to be manicured and the bricks needed to sparkle. Through his bricklaying experience, Wallace knew that the crews often did a quick, sloppy job of removing unsightly mortar from the face of the bricks and the joints in between.

And so with an optimism far exceeding what was expected of a man of his standing, Perry Sr. started his own brick-cleaning business. For years, the Wallace kids called it Daddy’s business in a bucket, and that was no metaphor. Perry Sr. had no car when he first got started, so each morning he would wake up early and load his steel brushes and acid into his bucket and ride the city bus to jobs all over town. Eventually, as business improved, he was able to buy a car—a 1952 Chevrolet—which allowed him to work jobs as far away as southern Kentucky and northern Alabama. This at a time when merely pulling over for gas was a risky proposition for a black man in the South. It wasn’t until decades later that Perry Jr. could fully appreciate the risks his father took to provide for his family.

Here he was in a very tough situation, making his money doing work for white general contractors in the South, Wallace recalled. The construction industry is tough enough if you’re a privileged white male. But to be a black man with his own business in the 1950s in the South, not everybody would cotton to that. So my father was a pioneer. We understood he was working hard, but didn’t understand at the time just what kind of world he had to go out into.

As Perry Sr. began to make a little money, he saw an opportunity to improve his family’s lot. Boxes were packed and Short 26th was home no more; the family moved to a bigger, nicer house at 1110 Cass Street. The new neighborhood was integrated—the all-white North High School was across the street—but was becoming increasingly black as whites moved to the suburbs.

It was around this time that young Perry’s own view of the world and its possibilities began to expand. He was now living at the fringes of the cocoon, old enough to take note of the disparity between certain things that he heard or read about and the environment in which he lived. One of the few benefits of his mother’s job as a cleaning lady downtown was the fact that she brought home magazines she found in the trash at the Bennie Dillon office building and the Maxwell House hotel: Life, Look, Ladies’ Home Journal, Redbook. Flipping through the pages with the children, Hattie would say, ‘Oh, look at this, look what you can have if you want it,’ Jessie recalled. "She didn’t say, ‘We wish you could have it,’ or ‘We wish we could give it to you,’ but ‘Oh, look what you can have if you go to school and if you want it. There are things you don’t have now, but that’s what they are used for.’ So we learned about things that we didn’t actually have. And we always had a National Geographic. Thank God some doctor subscribed to that."

Perry was mesmerized by Madison Avenue’s portrayal of the ideal American lifestyle, fascinated by the photos, the advertisements, and the articles, all pointing to a world he did not know. "A person would wonder why you would spend your time looking through Ladies’ Home Journal or Redbook or whatever, he recalled. But the idea was that you were locked out of the American mainstream. So if you wanted to live a life of meaning, you looked at whatever sources you could, within the black community and outside it, into the great American mainstream. How many other ways could you peek into it?" The seeds were planted that this was a life he wanted to have.

And then he found another way to peek into this other world—literally. He could see the white students walking to and from North High School across the street, and on Friday nights in the fall, there were the football games.

Perry and his buddies would walk over to Robertson’s corner store and buy some Cokes and cheese and bologna and crackers, and then make their way over to the chain link fence that sat atop a hill overlooking the floodlit football field. Invisible to the crowd below, they popped open their Cokes, stood at the edge of the fence, built their sandwiches, and watched the spectacle—one they were prohibited from seeing any other way. As they peeked through the chains, Wallace later concluded, he and his friends were in effect looking through what W. E. B. DuBois called the veil that separates the races. It had a profound impact.

We stood there for two or three hours on Friday nights and we watched the games, but we also watched the people, Wallace recalled. We watched whites live and enjoy being an American. They had popcorn and candy and a band and cheerleaders and hot dogs, and it just looked like they had a better place than we did. And I think the subtle signal that was sent was that even though they were poor, they were better than we were and they were more a part of the real America than we were.

Perry became interested in finding other ways to escape the rigid boundaries society had placed around him, some superficial, some more meaningful. The family’s black-and-white television brought a new world into their home, with Perry watching Steve Allen, Perry Como, Leave It to Beaver, The Dick Van Dyke Show, all programs that depicted a certain image of the American middle class that intrigued him. When a black performer like Sammy Davis Jr. or Harry Belafonte appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show, it was a stop-what-you’re-doing event, with Perry calling out to the rest of the family, There’s somebody colored on television! For a black kid in the Jim Crow South of the 1950s, mistaking Hollywood sets for a real America and daydreaming about the idyllic scenes depicted in magazines were no faulty pastimes. Reality, after all, was insane, even in a moderate city like Nashville.

In his voluminous study of Nashville-based civil rights activists, The Children, David Halberstam wrote that the racial texture of [Nashville’s] daily life seemed less edgy than that of comparable cities in the Deep South. Here was a capital city in which blacks had a history of voting and had representation on the City Council. The city’s morning newspaper, the Tennessean, had a long liberal tradition. Nashville’s segregation was largely of a soft kind, administered, it sometimes seemed, not with the passion of angry racist officials but more as a cultural leftover from the past, Halberstam wrote. True as all this may have been—Nashville was different from Memphis or Birmingham or Selma, so much so that one disgruntled segregationist declared Nashville the worst city in the world—the fact remained that there could be no soft segregation, no genteel Jim Crow.

By the 1950s, historian Don Doyle noted, the races in Nashville had never been more segregated, as tens of thousands of whites moved out of the city into the surrounding suburbs. And yet even as they came to make up a greater percentage of the city’s population, Nashville’s black residents were excluded from most white-owned restaurants, forced to enter the downtown movie theater through the alley entrance and sit in the balcony, barred from public parks, pools, and golf courses. They were made to sit in the back of the bus and in special sections at the Ryman Auditorium and Sulphur Dell baseball field, steered to segregated bathrooms in the basement of city hall and the county courthouse, relegated to segregated schools and confined mostly to service occupations.

In this context the big question for Nashville’s power brokers was how they would handle the issue of school desegregation in the wake of the Brown decision. Following a successful 1955 lawsuit brought by the prominent black Nashville attorneys Z. Alexander Looby and Avon Williams, Nashville’s Board of Education was ordered to implement a desegregation strategy by 1957. In what became a national model dubbed The Nashville Plan, the system called for one grade to be desegregated each year—starting with first grade in year one, adding second grade the following year, and so on. As gradual and conservative as the plan was, it still included convenient outs for white parents, including the ability to transfer their children to other schools with a written request and a gerrymandering of school districts that would cluster black students even closer together.

And yet there was still significant organized opposition to this cautious plan from elements of white Nashville. Vanderbilt English professor Donald Davidson (an aging former member of the fugitive and agrarian literary movements) and some downtown business leaders formed a coalition opposed to federal intervention in southern race relations, and a group of parents created a committee calling for the creation of a three-tiered system: one set of schools for whites, a second for blacks, and a third that would be integrated. The plan was endorsed by the state legislature before it was declared unconstitutional.

With local segregationists splintered into various ineffective factions, an outsider stepped into the mix. His name was Frederick John Kasper, a racist and anti-Semite from New Jersey who found support in pockets of the south. After sparking a bout of violence in Clinton, Tennessee, that required National Guard intervention, Kasper arrived in Nashville in 1957, passing out literature urging parents to keep the niggers out of white schools and placing threatening phone calls to black families. The KKK arrived from out of town, too, with bands of young toughs riding around Nashville in cars emblazoned with Klan stickers. Had these groups not been so hateful, the situation might have been comical, a kind of supremacist family feud. The Klansmen couldn’t quite embrace a Yankee like Kasper, and the more intellectual segregationists of Davidson’s ilk were put off by the tactics of both Kasper and the Klan. No true leadership emerged, but still there was violence.

As an elementary school student in Nashville, Perry Wallace was often accosted by young white kids on his way to school. I had to figure out the basic law of the jungle, Wallace recalled. It was fight or flight. Courtesy of Perry Wallace.

When the first black students and their parents arrived at previously all-white schools on September 9, 1957, they were greeted by a crowd of whites who hurled insults, sticks and stones. Later that night an entire wing of Hattie Cotton Elementary was destroyed by a dynamite blast.

In hindsight, Doyle concluded, the violence instigated by Kasper and the Klan had the ironic effect of galvanizing support for peaceful integration among most white Nashvillians. Their city was on the brink of chaos, and support for desegregation became a necessary element in a defense of Nashville’s integrity as a community.

In the midst of this charged atmosphere, one that he was only vaguely able to comprehend, Perry Wallace, an asthmatic kid who had been taught by his parents to stay out of trouble, had to walk to elementary school. And to get there, on his way from Cass Street to Elliott Elementary, he had to walk through white neighborhoods, past white schools.

Sometimes the white boys threw rocks at him. Sometimes they called him names. Sometimes a carload of teens sped by, throwing things and calling him names. And at least one group of punks surrounded him and threatened him with a knife. In those moments, Wallace later recalled, he had to figure out the basic law of the jungle. It was fight or flight. It was classic and it was raw. Sometimes he fought, sometimes he ran. Sometimes he took the bus, just to avoid the hoodlums.

But even that plan didn’t always work. Nearly fifty years later, Wallace vividly remembered one incident. Late on a spring afternoon, he stood alone at the corner of 5th Avenue and Madison Street near Elliott Elementary waiting to take a bus downtown, where he would transfer to another bus back home.

A car packed with young white males rolled down the street toward him, the teens shouting insults as they approached. Perry had endured this before, and he stood his ground, just waiting for the car to pass by. But this time, as the car got closer, one of the guys leaned out and pointed a gun right at him. Time seemed to slow down, the shouts now just so much white noise, and Perry’s eyes grew large as he stared down the barrel of the gun. The car slowed to a crawl as it turned the corner in front of him, and the guy just kept pointing the gun at Perry—pointing it, pointing it, pointing it—everything in slow motion. And then he didn’t shoot.

Maybe they were just kidding, because people just didn’t shoot people in Nashville in those days, Wallace recalled. But who knew? Who knew?

Faced with no easy solution—ride the bus or walk, it made no difference; trouble could lurk anywhere—Perry lost himself in other pursuits. There were chores at home: feeding and grooming his father’s hunting dogs out in the back yard, waking up early in the winter to fill up a freezing-cold bucket with coal for the stove. He found comfort in attending church with his mother, ignoring the taunts of the neighbor kids as he clutched his Bible on the walk over to the 15th Avenue Church of Christ.

Where you going, Preacher?!

I’m going to church!

And he came to love music. Perry’s father, no musician himself, had surprised him one day in fifth grade by bringing home a trumpet. Though Perry was never told exactly why he received the gift, he later got the sense that his father wanted him to enjoy the benefits of the study of music, believing that he would enjoy music as a source of expression, that it would serve as a safe way to help him forget the troubles he encountered and escape to new worlds.

As Perry’s trumpeting skills blossomed, he was invited to participate in the All-City Band, made up of kids from various elementary schools around town. To today’s ears, that sounds like some sort of All-Star ensemble, but back then it was the only band available to black schoolchildren in Nashville. Since the schools didn’t have their own bands, this was a way for music teachers to give their students the opportunity to play concerts. It was while playing in the All-City Band that Perry met a small, cheerful, neatly dressed clarinet player named Walter Murray. Though at the time they were just a trumpet player and a clarinetist who happened to play in the same band on weekends, Wallace and Murray would become best friends a few years later in high school (the black Mutt and Jeff, some friends kidded them, with Wallace so tall and Murray so short). It was a friendship that would grow deeper when they entered Vanderbilt together and continue all the way to Murray’s deathbed, when Perry was one of the last people to sit with Walter and to console his wife, Donna, Walter’s high school sweetheart.

Perry’s love for the trumpet continued as he graduated from the Elliott School and enrolled at Wharton Junior High School, one of two schools that fed into the legendary Pearl High, a major source of pride in North Nashville. Almost immediately, Perry noticed one comforting advantage to attending Wharton: the walk to school was peaceful. While the journey to Elliott had taken him through some white areas, the walk to Wharton took him in the opposite direction, closer to Fisk and Tennessee A&I and deeper into the heart of black Nashville. My life shifted into the black world, Wallace recalled, and I encountered no problems once I started heading in that direction.

Reverend James Lawson is arrested after organizing student sit-ins at downtown Nashville lunch counters in February 1960. A Vanderbilt Divinity School student, Lawson was expelled from the university after his role in the nonviolent protests became known. Lawson’s arrest and expulsion set in motion the events that led to the hiring of the progressive Alexander Heard as chancellor, the integration of Vanderbilt’s undergraduate schools, and the recruitment of Perry Wallace. Nashville Banner Archives, Nashville Public Library, Special Collections.

As the scenery changed, so too did Wallace’s curiosities. The year was 1960, and Nashville was the stage for some of the first, dramatic scenes of the civil rights movement. James Lawson, a black divinity school student at Vanderbilt, had been teaching the principles of nonviolence to students from Fisk, Tennessee A&I, American Baptist Bible College, and other area schools, students whose names would become legendary, including Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and Marion Barry. In February of that year, the students staged nonviolent sit-ins at Nashville’s segregated department-store lunch counters. Though angry whites beat them, poured coffee on them, and burned cigarettes into their flesh, and though they were arrested, these students remained true to Lawson’s teachings on nonviolence, appealing to the moral conscience of white Nashville.

For Wallace it was the beginning of an education unlike anything he had ever imagined. His teachers talked about the demonstrations, and a classmate raised the question, Why do we have to sit in the back of the bus? This was something Wallace had never thought about before. That was just the way it was: you went to the back of the bus. Suddenly, these teachers and classmates were opening his eyes. Why did he have to use a different water fountain downtown? And the more curious he became about these questions, the more he had to see what these older students were doing at the protests. He and some friends would sneak downtown—their parents would kill them if they knew what they were up to—sometimes by bus, sometimes by darting in and out among the marchers, and watch the action at the department stores and cafeterias from a safe distance.

His thirst for knowledge was intense. After school and on weekends, he walked a few miles to the Hadley Park library and flipped through the pages of Ebony and Jet, buried himself in the works of W. E. B. DuBois, and absorbed Walter White’s accounts of southern lynchings. While he was fascinated to discover these black writers, his interests were broad. A self-described Sputnik-affected kid, Wallace was influenced by teachers who were determined to improve the math and science skills of their students, lest the country fall further behind the Russians. He began to take a genuine liking to those subjects, checking out college-level math and science books and sitting for hours at the library trying to make sense of it all.

When the bystanders at Hadley Park didn’t see the Wallace kid trudging over to the library to read DuBois, they may have seen him lugging his trumpet to private lessons on the Tennessee A&I campus. Though bouts with asthma had occasionally interfered with his trumpet playing (his band teacher at Wharton, Mr. Howell, grew upset with him when he botched a solo in the Carnival of Venice because he simply couldn’t breathe), he had a desire to get better. Howell respected his young pupil’s determination and set him up with the university’s assistant band director for private lessons in the summer. A few days a week, Wallace carried his trumpet three or four miles to the offices of Edward Louis Smith, a demanding teacher who later became a jazz trumpet player of note. The lessons lasted an hour, and Smith had Perry practice four hours a day, five days a week, using the classic method books of the legendary French trumpeter Jean-Baptiste Arban, which were printed with instructions in English, French, and German. It was exactly four hours a day, Wallace recalled. I would time it, because I didn’t want to practice that long. I would read the English and then see if I could understand the French and German. I spent a long time with those melodies and rhythms, and I came to really appreciate the notion of clear, pristine, very good music.

Even with its racial discord, there were obvious signs that Nashville was proving to be a good place for the Wallaces to raise their children. The music, the exposure to role models, the educational opportunities, and the job prospects were simply better than they were back in rural Rutherford County. And yet it was important to the parents that their children retain some of the country spirit, a closeness to nature and a measured outlook on an increasingly fast-paced life. For Perry Sr. and Hattie, there was a value to being out in the country, sitting on the front porch, walking through the fields, and walking the country roads where nature is really in charge, Wallace recalled. It’s not like in the city, where if it’s dark or if it’s light it has to do with the switch on the wall. Out there, it has to do with the forces of nature. There’s a different tempo, a different feel, and when it all comes together right, there’s a sense of the world and your place in it.

During the summer and on Sundays after church, Perry rode out to the country with his father, visiting cousins at the Wallace family farm. For the perceptive youngster, the trips were full of lessons on social status, especially divisions within the black community. First there was the exotic drive itself, which marked the distance between the branches of the family in the very roads it required to travel from Nashville to the farm near Murfreesboro.

You’d start in poor North Nashville, and take Lafayette out to Murfreesboro Pike, and eventually the road would become more gravelly than paved, Wallace recalled. And then you’d get to roads where you’d have bridges where you’d have to wait, because only one car could pass at a time. And then the roads would get unpaved and ungravelly, and there you’d have big limestone rocks in the road. There would be brush scraping against the car because it hadn’t been trimmed, and you’d see little creeks off to the side. And, finally, you’d come to a clearing, which was Alford Wallace’s farm.

Somewhat bewildered, somewhat enchanted by the trip, Perry felt like quite the pampered city boy in the presence of his country cousins. These kids were bigger and stronger, their hands were rougher, they knew how to run around on the limestone rocks and the gravel without cutting their feet. Perry, meanwhile, used a lot of big words and did a lot of talking—talking about what, the cousins didn’t always know. Education was making this boy crazy. By the standards of young rural boys, it was the country kids who were on top. They were more down to earth, and that was a good thing. And yet Perry sensed that these cousins were aware of their disadvantage, knew that he had opportunities in the city that they would never have, and there was a bit of envy. While still trying to hold on to their rural culture in as many ways as possible, Perry’s parents, like so many others, had made a break from their own families in pursuit of a better life. And so what did that say about those who chose to stay behind? The dynamic created a bit of tension.

What the country cousins did not know was that Perry, the one they thought was a little too citified, was equally marginalized by many of his peers back in Nashville. The city kids would give me hell, and my sisters, too, because they thought we weren’t street smart, he recalled. Every member of the Wallace family knew exactly why they were catching hell, and they chose to endure the insults, accepted being called different, sacrificed some ephemeral pleasures, because they believed that someday, it would all pay off.

My father talked a lot about what it takes to make it in America now, Wallace recalled, "what skills you needed, what ways you need to be, what was the worthless way. Not that people were worthless, he wasn’t someone who condemned people, but he did understand unintelligent behavior and approaches to life. He had seen a lot of it. It was his passionate desire for black people to do well, Wallace said, that often made his father concerned about their well-being and critical of bad habits and behavior: Probably the best proof of this was his willingness to let people work for him in his business. The only ‘catch’ was that he was a tough boss—not a mean one, but a tough one—in the sense that you had to be punctual, work as hard as he did, and conduct yourself in a respectable manner."

To keep the kids out of trouble, like other families trying to prevent their children from making bad choices, the Wallace parents kept their kids in the house. There was no hanging out at the fast food joint after school, no detours on the way home from band practice. While other guys in the neighborhood developed their own signature struts, that wasn’t an option for Perry: Daddy said, ‘You can’t have a cool walk. Cool walk? That’s out.’ The Wallace kids even sounded different from their peers, and that was no accident. They were taunted for this, too, told they were trying to sound white.

The notion was not trying to be white; that was the last thing you wanted to be, Wallace recalled. It was what works in America now, and what is going to work in the future? The idea was to look at television, listen to the radio, and listen to the basic way that these people expressed themselves. We were living in a very humble place where people up and down the street talked and acted a whole different way. And what we understood was that these people were locking themselves in, potentially in a perilous and maybe even tragic way. So you understood what you needed to do, and you took the hits. People would give you hell, and you always would have doubts. But this was a decision I thought made a lot of sense and would pay off.

In countless circumstances, Wallace made a conscious effort to be different from the people around him. He was shy, he was smart, and he tended to have a more limited social life; I wasn’t going to have a bunch of friends. But in one very important way, he fit in just fine.

When Perry Wallace stepped onto a basketball court, he was just one of the guys.

3

Woomp Show

Do you know how to dribble a basketball?"

In the chain of events that would come to define Perry Wallace’s life, all the tragic and heroic moments, it was this simple question from his cousin Clarence, son of his father’s brother Dewey, that set everything in motion.

Around ten years old at the time, Perry answered, no, he never had dribbled a basketball. He didn’t even have a basketball.

Clarence, one of the cousins from the farm, moved up to Nashville and lived with the Wallaces after graduating from high school, earning some money working for Perry Sr. He hung out with some of the guys in the neighborhood, young men whose fathers had brought them up on the pastoral game of baseball, but who were drifting toward the more modern, more lively sports of football and basketball. With his brother James off in the air force, Perry found his charismatic cousin an intriguing role model. If Clarence, so athletic and smart and handsome and nice, thought playing basketball was a good thing, then it must be true.

Hattie and Perry Sr., the protective parents, allowed Clarence to take Perry across the street to the playground at North High School—when the white kids weren’t around—to teach him how to play. On long summer nights, Clarence taught his younger cousin the fundamentals of the game. Dribbling. Shooting. Passing. Rebounding. His pupil—the trumpet-playing, Sunday-School-teaching, mama-obeying, voracious reader—loved every minute of it.

I caught the bug, Wallace recalled, and things took off from there. Perry began spending more and more time at the North High hoops, learning the game from older kids who cut him no slack. The late bloomer excelled.

It was at this same time that Perry—fascinated by the people and lifestyles that appeared unbound by the narrow walls of segregation that confined his own existence—found a new outlet for his imagination. He could look around town and admire the basketball players at Pearl High and Tennessee A&I, young black men who not only were succeeding in a segregated society, but whose talents were recognized and even celebrated. And he could turn on the television and see black role models of a different sort, stars like Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell, and Oscar Robertson out there on the biggest stages of the North, East, and West, playing alongside whites and succeeding in the America he had read about in the magazines.

You didn’t see many blacks on television back then other than in subservient roles, Wallace recalled. But guys like Chamberlain and Russell were actually getting a chance to look like real-life, dignified figures. It was so spectacular to see them out in a world where they were in the mainstream. And what we knew about the mainstream at the time was that we weren’t allowed to be in it. To see these guys have their strength and artistry respected in the larger world was huge. They were the ones you tried to be like.

And then, nirvana. Wilt Chamberlain and his Philadelphia Warriors came to Nashville to play an exhibition game at Tennessee A&I’s gym. Somehow, Perry got permission from his parents to go to the game. There, decked out in the blue and gold of the Warriors, was the Big Dipper: huge (seven foot one), charismatic, and dunking like crazy.

To actually see Chamberlain, this had such an impact on me it’s hard to describe, Wallace recalled. I decided right then that I was going to learn how to jump so I could dunk the ball like Wilt.

Some kids in the neighborhood wished they could fly through the air. Others dreamed of making themselves invisible or as fast as lightning. The only superpower Perry Wallace wanted was to dunk a basketball like Wilt Chamberlain. Never mind that Wilt was virtually without peer in those days, as rare a sight as any caped crusader. Perry had a plan.

Every night, after finishing dinner and his homework, he made his way to the living room, took a spot in front of the family’s black-and-white television, turned the channel to Leave It to Beaver or The Three Stooges, and got down to business. He knew he had to strengthen his skinny legs if he wanted to jump high enough to dunk a basketball, so he improvised a workout regimen. One. Ten. Fifty. One hundred. Who knows how many squats he did in that living room, bending at the knees over and over and over again, his eyes on Lumpy and the Beave and Curly and Moe and his sights on the prize, that rim that loomed ten feet off the ground on every backboard in town. To see how he was progressing, he’d leap at anything in sight, his random lurches at door frames, ceilings, and window sills not exactly a crowd-pleasing routine for his captive audience of Perry Sr. and Hattie, who preferred a quiet home.

Certain athletic skills, like speed or leaping ability, are often diminished as simply God-given traits, implying that the athlete in question didn’t have to work as hard as the teammate who succeeds on heart or hustle. But Perry Wallace wasn’t born with springs in his legs. Dunking was a goal he set for himself, something he worked at for years without success. There were the squats, night after night on Cass Street. He even looked for a silver lining in those fight or flight moments on his journeys to Elliott School and the long walks to trumpet practice, believing that whether he was running from danger or trudging miles to a music lesson, at least he was strengthening his legs in the process.

As his legs grew stronger, he tested himself on the baskets at North High. From age ten to age twelve, he was a fixture on those courts.

The dog’s baying at the moon, I’m jumping at the goal, he recalled.

For Perry and the other neighborhood kids, the progression toward the rim proceeded at a methodical pace. At first, they grabbed a ball and backed up all the way to the baseline at the far end of the concrete and ran as fast as they could toward the basket—like a plane hurtling down a runway—and then there was liftoff.

Plop.

Their flights were as brief as they were earthbound.

Little by little, the puddle jumpers transformed into jets. First the contest was to see who could run down the court, leap, and touch the rim with his fingertips. For months, Perry and crew worked at this. Finally, success. And then, if you were good enough, you didn’t need the running start anymore, you could just stand under the basket and jump up and touch the rim. For months they worked at this. And when you could do that, then you’d back up again, and get a running start and soar through the air and actually try to dunk the basketball.

I tried and tried and tried, and then one summer, I had to be twelve years old, I finally dunked the ball, Wallace recalled. Literally and figuratively, he had reached a goal. And with that fulfillment came success on two important fronts.

One, he gained a measure of respect from the same neighborhood kids who mocked his studiousness. In some respects, our enthusiasm for the game was what we had in common, and the dunk was the high point of that, Wallace recalled. Otherwise, I would have been a very different, strange little kid playing the trumpet four or five hours a day and listening to classical music when everybody else was listening to Motown. On the court, we all came together and we were just the same.

Two, he found in basketball a passage to freedom and accomplishment in a society engineered to limit both. Playground basketball allowed a sense of expression in a world that was dark and uncertain and in which there were a lot of ways that you were weak, he said. This, on the other hand, was bright. You could express all these different things, this artistry. It was like a big lift, and the dunk was like a freedom song.

A youngster like Wallace couldn’t have fully comprehended it, but his game was blossoming at the very moment in time when Nashville was at the center of black basketball in the South.

In the days before integration siphoned off its best athletes, Tennessee A&I was a powerhouse. Coach Ed Temple and his Tigerbelles (including the legendary Wilma Rudolph) dominated not just collegiate track but the entire world, winning Olympic medals in 1952 and 1956 and dominating the 1960 games in Rome. Football teams coached by Henry Kean, Howard Gentry, and John Merritt won seven black college national championships between 1946 and 1970. And on the hardwood the pioneering coach John McClendon built one of the winningest basketball programs in the country.

McClendon would go on to be considered one of the game’s true innovators, credited with developing both the fine points of the full-court press and the fast break as well as the four-corners stall game that is most often attributed to Dean Smith. If McClendon is a father of the game in some ways, it’s no wonder: he learned it from the father, James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, while a student at the University of Kansas.

After successful runs as head coach at North Carolina College for Negroes and Hampton University, McClendon arrived at Tennessee A&I as an assistant coach in 1954 and took control of the program for the 1954–55 season. Along with the coaches at other black programs, he unsuccessfully lobbied the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) for years to allow black schools into the organization’s tournament. In 1953 a small-school counterpart to the NCAA, the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA), allowed the black colleges to participate in their tournament. By the time McClendon took the reins at Tennessee A&I, a national platform awaited if he could get his Tigers to the NAIA’s big dance.

And that’s just what he did. After recruiting a flashy, sharpshooting guard from Gary, Indiana, named Dick Skull Barnett, McClendon led the high-scoring Skull and the Whiz Kids on an unprecedented run, winning the NAIA title in 1957 to become the first black college team to win a national championship against white competition in any sport. And then they did it again in 1958. And again in 1959.

Meanwhile, black high school basketball had flourished in Nashville since before Wallace was born. In 1945 Tennessee A&I president Walter Davis and athletic director Henry Kean saw an opportunity to raise the profile of the game—not to mention their university and athletic program—by reviving a national high school basketball tournament that had previously been held at Hampton before World War II.

For the next two decades, the National High School Athletic Association tournament was held on the A&I campus and at Pearl High, and it became the place not only to spot the South’s finest black basketball players, but also Nashville’s most enterprising young gym rats, who discovered countless ways to sneak into the gyms to watch some of the best basketball being played anywhere. Teams from sixteen states traveled to Nashville for the tournament each year, with the city’s own Pearl High winning three consecutive national championships between 1958 and 1960, just as Perry Wallace was teaching himself to dunk.

I’ll never forget watching those teams who came from all over the South, Wallace recalled. You had all of these teams coming from all these places, and all this drama and all this talent and the movement and the shooting and the dunking. It was magnificent, just a super high.

Coached first by William Gupton and then by Cornelius Ridley, the Pearl Tigers were big men on campus and all across North Nashville. Adults jammed Pearl’s old gym for Tiger games, whether they had children in the school or not, and neighborhood boys dreamed of one day wearing their own red letter jackets with the big white P.

Pearl’s star players usually went on to play their college ball at black colleges like A&I and Fisk; the recruiting trail was only a few blocks long. White schools in the South still hadn’t integrated their teams (or even their universities, in many cases), and most colleges outside the South recruited only a limited number of blacks. But three standouts from those national championship teams were recruited out of state and challenged longstanding stereotypes about black ballplayers. Ron Lawson headed west to join John Wooden’s team at UCLA in 1960, and Les Hunter and Vic Rouse were lured to Loyola of Chicago by Coach George Ireland, where they led the Ramblers to an NCAA title in 1963 on the same night Pearl High won its fourth national high school championship. Nashville’s budding black stars, hiding in plain sight for so many years, were no longer ignored.

I was the only white coach in the stands at the tournament at Tennessee A&I in Nashville when Hunter and Rouse were seniors in high school, Ireland once said. The year after we won the [national] championship there were so many scouts there that you couldn’t get tickets.

In this context of excellence emerged the twelve-year-old kid who could dunk. Harold Hunter, who had taken over the Tennessee A&I program from McClendon before the 1959–60 season, made sure to take care of the boy, inviting Wallace to the A&I gym in the summer to play pickup games with his own players and other local kids with talent. The older guys were amazed, Wallace recalled. I was running around playing full-court basketball. They’d say, ‘Look at this young boy dunk!’

Wallace continued playing in pickup games at A&I all the way through junior high. He was never the best player running the court; the bigger and older kids made sure he knew that. But he was something of a curiosity, especially early on—the young kid who could dunk. Just as he had done on the playground at North High, he was playing ball against older kids. They were a big influence.

And then one day Big Daddy D strolled into the gym.

Bye-bye, old influences. Hello, David Lattin.

In three years, Lattin would lead an unheard-of school named Texas Western to the NCAA championship, part of an all-black starting five that would startle Adolph Rupp’s Kentucky Wildcats in the 1966 title game and serve notice to a national television audience that the days of all-white basketball were over. But for now, Lattin was about to enroll at A&I, a school that had already sent the same message, with far less fanfare, with those three consecutive NAIA championships. Lattin wouldn’t last a semester in Nashville before transferring to El Paso and making history, but none of that mattered now. He was big, strong, and menacing, Wallace recalled, the baddest man in the gym.

Wallace, of course, could dunk. The guys he played with at A&I could dunk. He had watched Chamberlain and Russell dunk. All these guys would pull out the occasional in-your-face slam, but in that era most dunks were still quick little stuffs, more about efficiency than theater. For Wallace, still looking for cues on how to play the game, Lattin took the dunk