1941 photograph of Norbert Slim Downing (middle) and members of the Basketball Team . On March 22, 1941, during an end-of-season men's basketball tournament in Cincinnati, Ohio, North Carolina Central University (then known as North Carolina College for Negroes) played four games in one day.

The Eagles defeated three conference champions on the same day and lost a protested decision to the fourth on the same night. NCCU defeated Clark College (Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) 61-54 at 10 a.m., West Virginia State College (West Virginia Intercollegiate Athletic Conference) 61-39 at 2 p.m., Kentucky State College (Midwest Athletic Association) 43-37 at 7 p.m., and lost to Southern University (Southwestern Athletic Conference) 48-42 at 9 p.m.

Under the direction of legendary coach John B. McLendon, the Eagles finished the season with 19 wins and five losses, capturing the CIAA Visitation Championship.

The 1940-41 team was honored among the inaugural induction class of the NCCU Athletics Hall of Fame in 1984. Members of the squad were Buford Allen, Floyd H. Brown, John A. "Big" Brown, Harold "Slam" Colbert, Monroe Collins, Norbert "Slim" Downing, Reginald "Hawk" Ennis, Leo Fine, James "Boogie" Hardy, Rudolph "Rocky" Roberson, Albert Johnson, George R. "Mighty" Mack, Richard "Dick" Mack, William "Bill" Peerman, Lee W. Smith, Jr., and Walter Womack

Source: Photo by North Carolina College for Negroes, now named North Carolina Central University - via Getty Images
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Norbert Slim Downing was also one of the players in the The Secret Game. The five players who were part of the core NCCU team that played in the 1944 "secret game" against the all-white Duke medical school team were Aubrey Stanley, James "Boogie" Hardy, Floyd "Cootie" Brown, Henry "Big Dog" Thomas, and George Parks

The Secret Game
WUNC | By Anita Rao, Frank Stasio, Jess Clark/Published April 23, 2015 at 12:14 PM EDT

On a Sunday morning in March 1944, most of Durham, North Carolina, was in church. That's the way basketball coach John McLendon wanted it when his all-Black college team from North Carolina Central University (then the North Carolina College for Negroes) faced off against an all-white team from Duke University’s medical school.

The game would be the first interracial college basketball game in the Jim Crow South, and it had to be kept a secret. McLendon even locked the doors behind the teams after they entered the gymnasium.

The story of McLendon and this historic game is the subject of historian Scott Ellsworth's new book, “The Secret Game: A Basketball Story in Black and White”(Little, Brown and Company/ 2015). Ellsworth met Coach McLendon while researching for a book about the 1957 NCAA Final Four. Ellsworth told Frank Stasio of WUNC's The State of Things that he was interviewing McLendon in his Ohio home when the elderly man pulled out a list of racial firsts he had accomplished, including first black basketball coach in the professional leagues, first assistant U.S. Olympic basketball coach and first coach to win a desegregated tournament at the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA).

"McLendon is the most important person in basketball that no one has ever heard of," Ellsworth said.

"McLendon is the most important person in basketball that no one has ever heard of."
When McLendon told Ellsworth about the “secret game,” Ellsworth knew that he had to change his research focus. He set off on a decades-long journey to document the history of basketball, and his research reveals that McLendon's coaching revolutionized the game.

"John McLendon is this genius," Ellsworth said. "College basketball teams in World War II would maybe score 50 points a game; his team is scoring 60, 70 80. They beat St. Augustine's 119-26."

McLendon revved up the fast break, used a full-court press before anyone else and had his players run as part of their training before it was common practice, Ellsworth said. As a result, the North Carolina College Eagles became the highest scoring college basketball team in the world.

"He [McLendon] says, 'I'm going to create a whole new, super-revved-up kind of basketball...and we're going to play basketball like nobody's ever seen before.' And they did," Ellsworth said.

But because they were black, they couldn't play in many college tournaments, such as the NCAA tournament. That meant most of America didn't know about what McLendon was doing on the court, Ellsworth said.

Players from both teams organized the "secret game" when they met at secret interracial prayer meetings at the Durham YMCA. Ellsworth said people who crossed the color lines had to be discreet in the 1940s to avoid becoming targets of violence. That same year in Durham, a black soldier was murdered just for refusing to move to the back of the bus, he said.

"We're going to play basketball like nobody's ever seen before."
The Eagles won the game, but the significance of the game went beyond the final score.

"The word got out that there was a new kind of basketball being played at North Carolina College," Ellsworth said. "All that summer of 1944, carloads of white basketball players for the Tar Heels from UNC drove over from Chapel Hill to try to get a pick-up game with McLendon's black players, and they were blown away by what they saw."

Ellsworth said those white players then took McLendon's game with them when they returned to their hometowns of Boston, Philadelphia and New York. The secret game, Ellsworth concluded, was therefore an important moment in the evolution of basketball, and also in the evolution of civil rights.

"It was a part of this generation...that really started to lay the groundwork that the civil rights movement was going to thrive on," Ellsworth said.
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JIM CROW LOSES; The Secret Game

Published in New York Times Magazine - March 31, 1996
By Scott Ellsworth

Aubrey Stanley double-checked the laces on his sneakers and sneaked a look across the gym floor. The other team's center was a good three or four inches shorter than Big Dog, the center on Stanley's team, the Eagles. A good sign. Stanley and his teammates, dressed in their maroon jerseys, satin shorts, knee pads, striped wool socks and war-issue canvas high-tops, lined up for the tip-off.

It was 1944, a banner year for basketball at the North Carolina College for Negroes, in Durham. The Eagles had lost only one game all season and were making a name for John B. McLendon, their 28-year-old coach. His standouts -- Stanley, Henry (Big Dog) Thomas, Floyd (Cootie) Brown, James (Boogie-Woogie) Hardy -- ran a blistering, high-speed attack. "We could have beaten anyone," says McLendon, now a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. But there was no way to prove it. Neither the National Invitational Tournament nor the N.C.A.A. tournament allowed black colleges to participate.

Across town at Duke University, the Blue Devils had won the Southern Conference championship. But they weren't necessarily the best team on campus. The Army and the Navy had established wartime training programs at Duke, and the intramural teams were stuffed with former college athletes.

The medical school team was perhaps the best. Dick Thistlethwaite, a former star at the University of Richmond, played center. David Hubbell, a forward, had started for the Duke varsity. Homer Sieber had played at Roanoke College, and Dick Symmonds at Central Methodist in Missouri. Jack Burgess, the team's newest member, had played guard at the University of Montana. As much as he liked Duke, Burgess despised the Jim Crow laws. Once, he was chased off a Durham city bus -- at knife point -- when he told the driver what he thought of the seating arrangements.

At a place like Duke, Burgess's opinions were unusual, though not unheard of. In early 1944, the Y.M.C.A. chapters at Duke and North Carolina College had begun to meet, at considerable risk from the police, who vigorously maintained the color line. "It was dangerous," recalls one former Duke student. "We had to lie on the floor of the car going to those meetings."

At one meeting, a North Carolina College student overheard an idle boast about the Duke medical school basketball team. A challenge was issued: let's see who has the best team in town. It was an absurd notion. Convening a secret Y meeting was bad enough, but holding an illegal, racially mixed basketball game was courting disaster. That same year, a black G.I. had been killed by a white bus driver for not moving quickly enough to the rear of a Durham bus.

Coach McLendon, however, endorsed the idea: denied a postseason championship game, he would create his own. The game, he decided, would be held in the North Carolina College gym, a legitimate contest with a referee and a game clock.

At Duke, the proposal fell on stunned ears. Jack Burgess wanted to play, but some of the others were hesitant. In the end, pride won out. "We thought we could whup 'em," David Hubbell says. "So we decided to find out."

Sunday, March 12, dawned blustery. McLendon had scheduled the game when most of Durham, including its police force, would be in church. He hadn't told the school administration about the game; when a reporter for The Carolina Times, Durham's black weekly, found out, he agreed not to write anything. No spectators would be allowed.

Just before 11 A.M., the Duke team piled into a couple of borrowed cars. "To keep from being followed, we took this winding route through town," Hubbell recalls. They pulled their jackets over their heads as they walked into the small brick gym.

Inside, stomachs had been churning all morning. "I had never played basketball against a white person before, and I was a little shaky," Stanley says. "You did not know what might happen if there was a hard foul, or if a fight broke out. I kept looking over at Big Dog and Boogie to see what to do. They were both from up North."

The game began with a sputter. Both teams botched routine plays, and shots caromed off the rims. One of the Duke players made a gorgeous pass -- right into the hands of a North Carolina College player. "On that particular morning, you didn't exactly need to play skins and shirts," Hubbell says with a laugh.

As the nervousness subsided, the Duke team found its game: give-and-gos and three-man weaves, two-handed set shots off screens. Burgess fed Thistlethwaite the ball inside and Hubbell shot from the wings. But the Eagles warmed up, too. Big Dog knocked down four-footers, while George Parks, a towering Kentuckian, swept the boards. Boogie and Cootie ran cutaways and reverse pivots, whipping down-court passes after crisp steals.

Stanley was only 16, the Eagles' youngest player, and had grown up under Jim Crow. "About midway through the first half," Stanley says, "I suddenly realized: 'Hey, we can beat these guys. They aren't supermen. They're just men like us.' "

By the second half, the Eagles were scoring on nearly every possession. Running one fast break after the next, they were skirting a wide-open style of play that wouldn't flourish for another two decades.

The Duke players had never seen anything like it. By the end of the game, the scoreboard told the story: Eagles 88, Visitors 44.
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Secret Game - New York Times
Then came the day's second unlikely event. After a short break, the two teams mixed their squads and played another game, an even more egregious violation of Jim Crow. This time, it was skins and shirts. "Just God's children, horsing around with a basketball," says George Parks.

Word had spread, meanwhile, that something was afoot in the gym. McLendon had bolted the doors, but a few students climbed up to the window ledges. Pressing their faces to the glass, they saw this second game -- a segregationist's nightmare and a scene that college basketball in the South would not know for years to come. Afterward, the two teams adjourned to the men's residence hall for a bull session. A few hours later, the Duke students drove home.

The Durham police never found out what happened. Nor did the city's two daily newspapers, and the black reporter kept his word. No scorecard exists, and as far as official basketball recordkeeping is concerned, the game never took place.

"Oh, I wonder if I told you that we played basketball against a Negro college team," Jack Burgess wrote to his family in Montana a few days later. "Well, we did and we sure had fun and I especially had a good time, for most of the fellows playing with me were Southerners. . . . And when the evening was over, most of them had changed their views quite a lot."

(Published in New York Times Magazine on March 31, 1996 / Written by Scott Ellsworth)

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On Sunday morning March 12, 1944, during a time of heated racial segregation, the men's basketball team from the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) competed against a squad from the Duke School of Medicine on the campus of NCCU in the first racially integrated college-level basketball game in the South.
Due to the illegal nature of this contest, the participants were sworn to secrecy, the gym doors were locked to keep spectators out, and there were no reports published in the local newspapers. While there was a referee and an official scorer, according to the official records, the game never happened.

The meeting remained publicly unknown for more than 52 years, until Scott Ellsworth, a Duke University graduate and historian, wrote an article about the historical event that appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, March 31, 1996. "The Secret Game" was born.

An internet search of "Secret Game" and Ellsworth will result in several detailed accounts of the milestone, including an online version of Ellsworth's original article from The New York Times. (see PDF file links below)

For the record, the Eagles, utilizing Hall of Fame coach John McLendon's up-tempo style of play that two decades later revolutionized the game of basketball, defeated the team from Duke by a score of 88-44.


Original New York Times article by Scott Ellsworth in PDF Format

Duke University Alumni Magazine article by Scott Ellsworth in PDF Format

The Hartford Courant article by Dom Amore in PDF Format

BOOK: "The Secret Game" by Scott Ellsworth