1951 Duke-Temple Game Broke Color Barriers

DURHAM, N.C. – Sometimes history can catch you by surprise.

That's what happened when Temple visited Duke 59 years ago for what turned out to be a landmark game in the history of North Carolina basketball.

The two traditional powers will meet for the 27th time Wednesday night. It's an important game with both teams ranked in the top 25. But whatever happens in Cameron this week, it won't have the lasting impact of that Dec. 1, 1951 matchup.

The 1951-52 season opener at Duke's Indoor Stadium was broadcast nationally over the Liberty radio network and worldwide over the Armed Forces Services Network. Harry Walker, a renowned photographer from Life Magazine, was on hand to document the much anticipated matchup of the nation's two top scorer's from the previous season – Duke's Dick Groat and Temple's Bill Mlkvy.

But the biggest news that night was provided by unheralded sophomore Sam Sylvester of the Owls, who became the first African-American to play basketball in Duke's Indoor Stadium or on any Big Four court. In fact, it's believed to be the first integrated game to be played in the South.

“That should be a very famous game,” Mlkvy said in a recent interview. “I said that night, 'We just experienced history.' But people didn't absorb it. The people that were there realized it. It was a significant experience for me.”

It's necessary to understand the context of the times to appreciate the importance of Sylvester's breakthrough and the impact of the response from the Duke community to his groundbreaking appearance.

The color line still ruled in most of the South. In several states, blacks and whites were forbidden by law from competing against one another. Just four years earlier, the Brooklyn Dodgers had been forced to cancel a series of exhibition games in Alabama because local authorities wouldn't allow an integrated team to perform in public. Just seven years earlier, a powerful Duke Med School intramural team had to keep its scrimmage with North Carolina Central University a deep secret from the authorities.

College athletics were still ruled through most of the 1940s by the so-called “Gentleman's agreement.” Usually, when segregated Southern teams played integrated teams from the North or Midwest, any African-American players would be held out of action. Duke had already been in the forefront of breaking down that barrier, thanks to football coach Wallace Wade. A teammate of African-American running back Fritz Pollard (the first black to win All-America honors in football) at Brown in the days before World War I, Wade had agreed in 1938 to play against African-American Syracuse star Wilmeth Sidat-Sing – in defiance of the Gentlemen's Agreement.

Wade's stance opened the door for other North Carolina colleges to play against integrated teams – on the road. And in his last year on the Duke sidelines, Wade helped break the color line on campus when he took on an integrated Pitt team in the stadium that would later be named for him.

But basketball was another matter. Playing against integrated teams – even on the road – remained a controversial stance. A decade after the 1951 Duke-Temple game, SEC champion Mississippi State turned down an NCAA Tournament bid because it would have meant playing integrated competition. When the Bulldogs won another bid in 1963, Coach Babe McCarthy accepted the invitation – and had to sneak his team out of town in the dead of night to avoid a court order forbidding the trip. Bill Russell recounts in his autobiography that his integrated San Francisco team was harassed and threatened when they played Loyola in New Orleans in December of 1955. Russell also claims that he was part of the first integrated team to play in the South, which he wasn't – Sylvester had broken that barrier at Duke four years earlier.

Understandably, Sylvester and his Temple teammates didn't know what to expect as they traveled to Durham on the last day of November in 1951.

Mlkvy was the team's star. Famed as “The Owl without a vowel”, the lanky junior big man had earned first-team All-America honors as a junior, when he averaged a nation-leading 29.2 points a game. But he wasn't looking forward to his duel with Duke's Groat, a second-team All-American in 1951 who had led the nation with 831 points scored (a 25.2 ppg. average).

“We went down there for the game and I knew I was going to have a bad year,” Mlkvy said. “I had such an extraordinary junior year … but it was like running a record marathon, then coming back six months later and trying to run another. I knew I could never achieve close to what I had the year before. I had new players around me, plus I was in dental school and I had a very heavy academic load.”

One of the new players around Mlkvy was Sylvester, a muscular 6-foor-2 sophomore from Philadelphia's Southern High School. Yet, there was absolutely no mention of Sylvester or the fact that Temple featured an African-American player on its roster in any pregame coverage of the event.

“I don't know, but I suspect they didn't want to incite anybody,” Mlkvy said of the press blackout. “It was better to keep everything low key. I lived during that time and if they had made a big story about it before the game, who knows what would have happened? There might have been riots in the streets of Durham. This was 1951 – long before Dr. King marched … I guess the thinking was 'Let's low key this thing.'”

However, the news spread across the Duke campus on the afternoon of Nov. 31, when the Temple team tried to check into the Washington Duke Hotel in downtown Durham.

“I remember that like it was yesterday,” Richard Crowder, who would start at center for the Blue Devils that season, said. “The thing I remember most is what happened with the student body before the game.

“When Temple arrived, they went to the Washington Duke Hotel [note: no relation to the current Washington Duke Hotel on campus] downtown and all the players lined up for their rooms. But the guy at the desk told them that it was a segregated hotel and they couldn't accept an African-American.

“They were really upset. They were from Philadelphia and were a little more advanced in those matters. They couldn't find a hotel in Durham that would take him. They had to find an African-American family in Durham to take care of him that night.”

Mlkvy also has a stark memory of that moment.

“We checked into the hotel and Coach [Josh Cody] called us all up all of a sudden and said to meet in the lobby,” the former Temple star recalled. “Here Sam comes in with a black family. He had to sleep with the family – not in the hotel. Sam was shocked. They were a wonderful family, but still, the experience came into focus. That memory will never leave me of what it was like for blacks in the South.”

The Temple players were not the only ones outraged at the incident.

“Somehow, and I'm not sure how, some students found out what had happened and went down and chanted against the hotel's policies,” Crowder said. “The next day, about 200 students marched around the statue [of Washington Duke on East Campus] to protest that he was not allowed to register.”

Temple's Cody, perhaps spurred by Sylvester's snub, surprised Mlkvy and the rest of the Temple team when he named the sophomore to start against the Blue Devils.

“Sam had just made the team,” Mlkvy said. “He was like the seventh or eighth man.”

But he was introduced to the crowd at the Indoor Stadium as a Temple starter.

The reaction was not what the Owls expected.

“They had this announcement before the game – that Sam was the first black to play in that stadium,” Mlkvy recalled. “He ran out alone and got a standing ovation. Everybody was clapping and cheering. It lasted more than a minute. He was overwhelmed. It was a heart-warming experience.”

Mlkvy followed Sylvester in the pregame introductions and was greeted with a chorus of boos. As the game wore on, he joked with his teammate about the fact that he was being treated as a villain, while Sylvester was embraced as a hero.

“When Sam made a shot, they were so courteous,” Mlkvy said. “He'd make a layup and they cheered. Sam could do no wrong.”

Sylvester drew the unenviable task of guarding Groat. He picked up his fourth foul with seven minutes left in the game and went to the bench as Duke pulled away. As he left, Sylvester was given another ovation by the crowd.

“He took it in stride,” Mlkvy said. “I think his reaction was 'Wow, wasn't that something? There was no abuse. The people at Duke were exemplary. They should be commended.”

As the Temple star feared, he endured a tough night, which proved to be the start of a rough senior season. Mlkvy finished with 17 points on 6 of 14 shooting as Duke rolled to an 85-48 victory.

“I don't know what was wrong,” he told reporters in the locker room afterwards. “Tell the people I'm sorry. I wish I could have done better. I guess I'm just jinxed in North Carolina [his worst game in 1951 was an 18-point effort against N.C. State in Raleigh, although he did score 33 in an upset victory over UNC that season]. I'm glad I don't have to come back down here and play again.

“I'm only kidding about North Carolina. They're nice people. I was glad to see them give Sylvester that wonderful reception. Sam cried in the dressing room at the half.”

Sylvester was not interviewed, although Jack Horner of the Durham Morning Herald wrote: “He was one of the key Temple players. He made five points and impressed with his all-around ballhandling.”

The star of the night was Groat, who finished with 33 points, 10 assists and eight rebounds. The performance kicked off a brilliant senior season that would win him consensus national player of the year honors and spark Duke to a 24-win season.

Unfortunately, he so thoroughly outclassed Mlkvy in the opener that Life Magazine scrapped its plans to do a photo spread comparing the styles of the two collegiate stars. Even more unfortunately, the magazine failed to document Sylvester's historic appearance or the Duke reaction to it.

“I spoke to the Life photographer,” Mlkvy said. “They never did a story on Sam.”

But the Temple star said that he learned a lesson that day.

“The whole experience changed a lot of lives on our team,” he said.

Mlkvy had a chance to put into practice the lessons he learned in Durham a couple of years later, when he was drafted as a dentist to serve in the U.S. Army.

“As it turned out, my general loved basketball and I spent my time at Fort Sam Houston [Texas] coaching basketball,” he said. “I had two or three black players. Now I was more aware of race issues ... of segregation. During one leave, I drove home to New Jersey with Jim Horn, one of my black players. The first place we stopped was a restaurant where they told him he'd have to eat out back … my wife and I got back in the car with him and we drove 24 straight hours until we got out of the South.”

Sylvester's appearance – and his experience at the Washington Duke Hotel – had an impact on the Duke community too.

“In the student government the next year, we addressed that issue,” Crowder said. “Duke became known in that era as a 'liberal' institution in North Carolina because of that.”

The barriers were falling. In March of 1952, N.C. State faced Frank McGuire's integrated St. John's team in an NCAA Sweet 16 game in Reynolds Coliseum. In the fall of 1965, Virginia's C.B. Claiborne enrolled at Duke and became the first African-American player at a Big Four school. Two years later, UNC landed Charles Scott, the ACC's first black superstar.

Sylvester lived to see the color barrier washed away by the flood of African-American players who have since played the game at the highest level. He became a solid, if unspectacular player during his three varsity seasons at Temple. He earned a PhD in Economics and taught for more than 20 years at the University of Pennsylvania before his untimely death in the spring of 1994.

As a professor at an Ivy League institution, Sylvester touched a lot of lives. But it's unlikely that he ever touched more at one time that he did the night he started for Temple against Duke.

1951 Duke-Temple Game Broke Color Barriers

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