And...Indiana was very racist in the 1920s, and by the 1950s it hadn't changed much.
Oscar Robertson, the Hall of Fame basketball player, attended segregated Crispus Attucks High School in Indiana. In 1955 his team became the first all-black squad to win the state tournament. He said that white basketball officials addressed the team prior to the championship game to warn them to celebrate peacefully if they won, as if it was a given that blacks would riot. He never heard of a white team receiving the same warning.
I lived in Indiana in the 1970s, and I knew people who were convinced that blacks would become violent if given the slightest pretext.
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ldlamb74
8 years ago
But the fact that a private racist organization existed, has nothing to do with whether the state had state mandated segregation.
The actual team that Milan High beat was Muncie Central, there is video of the game on the Internet. Muncie was a fully integrated school that had both white and black players on the team.
Whatever people's internal attitudes, the movie was accurate in the depiction of what that game looked like.
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