The AP poll had a simple mandate to pick the best teams in the country each week. Yet, the publisher, not bound by segregation laws, omitted the “college division,” to which Black colleges belonged.
The men’s basketball teams at Tennessee State in a three-season span from 1956 through 1959 were nearly unbeatable and somehow largely unnoticed.
They had a coach in John McLendon who would be enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as a coach and contributor. They had five players who would play in the NBA, one of them a future All-Star. They won three consecutive national titles in the NAIA, the governing body for small colleges. TSU won 94 of 102 games during that stretch.
And they never spent a day in The Associated Press men’s basketball poll.
A couple decades later, Dandridge and his Norfolk State teams would play similar games against Old Dominion – and while some in the world might have not wanted those games to take place, the players always enjoyed the matchups.
“When I played, although we may not have played against each other in any organized setting, we were always looking to test our skills, the Black guys against the white guys,” Dandridge said. “I don’t think the players had any problem playing against each other. It was the racism, the segregation that was in this country at that time that kept it from happening.”
Also never ranked: the Winston-Salem teams coached by another Hall of Famer, Clarence “Big House” Gaines. He coached Monroe in college, coached Cleo Hill — one of the first five Black players to become a first-round draft pick in the NBA — and a year after Texas Western famously started five Black players on the way to beating Kentucky in the 1966 NCAA Division I championship game, Gaines’ team won the Division II national title.
“When you grow up Black in the south and you grow up in a segregated environment, you’re not surprised by anything in terms of recognition,” Clarence Gaines Jr. said.
There are two Division I conferences comprised of HBCUs — the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference, which began competing in 1971 and was classified as D-I conference in 1978; and the Southwestern Athletic Conference, founded in 1920 and 1977-78 was its first season a D-I basketball conference.
The majority of the most talented Black basketball players now attend predominately white institutions. Among the current MEAC and SWAC members, only one school has been ranked in the AP poll. That was Maryland-Eastern Shore, which was ranked No. 20 for one week in 1974.
Earl Monroe of Winston-Salem College, poses May 3, 1967, at the school in Winston-Salem, N.C. Willis Reed played at Grambling, Sam Jones at North Carolina Central, Earl Monroe at Winston-Salem, and they’re just a handful of players who took the path from HBCUs to the Hall of Fame. (AP Photo/AC, File)
Basketball savants want to ensure the greatness of those HBCUs is not overlooked when debating the best teams ever.
“Obviously, the level of play in the College Division was far superior to the level of play in Division II basketball today,” Gaines Jr. wrote in a blog post in 2013. “Top teams in the College Division during the 1960’s could easily compete with University Division teams. The landscape of college sports and basketball was much different.”
Gaines Jr. went to grad school at North Carolina from 1980 to 1982. The second of those years was Michael Jordan’s freshman year at North Carolina, when the Tar Heels won the national championship. Gaines Jr. lived in Granville Towers, alongside some basketball players. They knew of his father and his 47-year career.
Not everyone did.
“There was a kid, a regular student at North Carolina who claims he knew basketball,” Gaines Jr. said. “They didn’t even know about a school an hour and a half away that had a legendary coach. And I said, ‘if you don’t know who my dad is, you don’t know basketball.’”
