Abstract
In 1950, the City College of New York (CCNY) became the first racially-integrated team to win the national championship of college basketball. Three of the players on that team attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York. At the time Clinton high school was one of the most academically-rigorous public schools in the city and the United States. During this postwar period Clinton annually sent nearly a third of its graduates to college, this at a time when the national average of high school completion stood at twenty percent. The unofficial school motto etched in yearbooks and the student paper was “college or bust.” Needless to say, DeWitt Clinton strongly encouraged its student body to attend college and for those who did not, they were pushed to excel beyond the limits of their chosen professions. This intellectually competitive academic environment was integrated and more than twenty-percent black. Like their contemporaries, black students were encouraged to pursue opportunities that seemed unthinkable in an era of racial stratification. As a result, Clinton produced a number of black students armed with the skills to navigate the terrain of prejudice and circumvent a number of social barriers. DeWitt Clinton high school was a model for interracial brotherhood while also fostering black leadership. Like Jackie Robinson, whom integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the three black athletes who competed on the CCNY team were prepared for the transition of competing on a racially integrated college team, can be partially attributed to their secondary schooling at DeWitt Clinton. This article examines the racial climate of DeWitt Clinton during the postwar years when the three young men were in attendance and how it fostered a culture of Basketball, Books, and Brotherhood.
Highlights
In 1950, the City College of New York (CCNY) became the first racially integrated team to win the national championship of college basketball
Located in the Northwest Bronx, DeWitt Clinton High School was named after the only man who would serve as mayor and governor of New York State and as a Presidential candidate in 1812
As a young man whom graduated from Columbia College at seventeen and law school at twenty-one, Clinton was a staunch supporter of public education who worked tirelessly to ensure that all children has access to a high-quality education (Cornog, 1998: Pelisson, 2009)
Summary
New York State Governor Theodore Roosevelt signed a bill entitled, “ the Consolidated school law,” which barred the use of race or ethnicity as a marker for admission to New York State public schools This superseded a previous bill from 1894, that permitted local school boards to “establish a separate school or separate schools for instruction of children and youth of African descent, resident therein, and over five and under twenty-one years of age; and such school or schools supported therein for White children and they shall be subject to the same rules and regulations and be furnished facilities for instruction equal to those white schools therein.”. The predominately White esteemed faculty cultivated the dreams of their students, which had an especially pronounced effect on African Americans Though he had to overcome challenges before receiving his degree in Architecture from New York University (NYU) in 1943, Percy Ifill, who designed the Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Office State Building in Harlem, credits his experience at Clinton for inspiring him to pursue his dreams. He engaged and initiated discussions about literature, politics, history and religion (Lemming, 1994)
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