Wednesday, March 8, 2006
When Maurice King and the rest of the 1954 University of Kansas basketball team got off its train in Dallas and checked into the Hilton Hotel, King was turned away because he was black.
Instead, he had to stay in a dormitory with the players from Southern Methodist University, the opposing team.
The KU basketball team is again travelling to Dallas, this time to play in the Big 12 Conference tournament. In contrast to King’s experience 52 years ago, the nine African-American and four white players will all stay under the same roof at the Fairmont Hotel.
Things have changed since 1954. King was only the second African-American basketball player at KU — LeVanness Squires was the first — and the first black starter in KU history. He was repeatedly confronted by segregation in Lawrence and on the road with the team. He proved that black athletes could overcome the oppression and helped pave the way for a young Wilt Chamberlain, who arrived at the University King’s junior year.
King went on to play professional basketball for the Boston Celtics at a time when a rookie’s salary was only $6,500, while the top player on the team, Bill Russell, earned only $17,000 per year. Even though King left the University a few credits short of a degree, he came back to Lawrence and finished after his basketball career ended. He then became a physical education teacher in his hometown of Kansas City and later worked at Hallmark Cards until his retirement. Today, he continues to stress the value of education to his own children and grandchildren.
Former Jayhawk Maurice King stands outside Allen Fieldhouse and its new addition, the Booth Family Hall of Althetics, where he played basketball for Kansas from 1953 to 1957. King was the first black basketball player to letter and travel with the Jayhawks.
King came to the University in 1953, but like all freshman, the 6-foot-2-inch forward couldn’t play until his sophomore year. When he took the court a year later, he faced the same discrimination he would meet in Dallas.
When the team went on to Houston to play Rice University, the hotel there refused to let King stay; he spent the night at the home of a wealthy black businessman who owned a night club in Houston. Most of that first year he couldn’t stay with the rest of the team on the road.
On a trip to Oklahoma for a Big Seven Conference game, the team, including King, stayed in a hotel on campus. But when they got to the train station there, he followed the team into the waiting room, not realizing there was a separate room for “colored people.” He was asked to leave.
The news media paid little attention to the discrimination he faced, he said.
The newspapers “were just as racist” as everyone else, he explained with his thick, baritone voice.
King said his coaches, Phog Allen and Dick Harp, ultimately got fed up with his treatment and “began to make a little noise.”
When the team tried to eat at a restaurant in an airport terminal and King was refused service, the coaches quickly arranged for a private room so the whole team could eat breakfast together, King recalled.
Jerry Waugh, Harp’s assistant coach when he took over as coach in 1956, said Harp was meticulous in planning trips and insisted the team always stay together. Harp even rotated roommates for each trip so that two black players didn’t always end up staying together.
When the Jayhawks went to the NCAA Regionals in 1957 in Dallas, they chose to stay in a Fort Worth-area hotel, which accepted blacks, rather than in the official tournament hotel, which didn’t. No other teams at the tournament had a black player, Waugh said.
Even at home in Lawrence, King said he faced discrimination. On home game days the team ate lunch in the Kansas Union, and then all of the white players took a bus somewhere, King recalled. The coaches always told King to go home and take a nap, and he thought nothing of it. Later he’d meet the team at a small café near campus for Ovaltine and celery right before the game. He said he always thought it was strange that the white players all showed up together on the bus, but he figured the bus just went around and picked them up.
He later learned that the team went to the Eldridge Hotel after lunch to take a nap. Hotel management at that time refused to allow blacks.
Lawrence was a segregated city, King said. “They subscribed to it. They were going along with segregation,” he said, pointing out how hard it was to find restaurants that served blacks. One sandwich shop downtown allowed blacks to order sandwiches to go, but not to sit down in the restaurant, he recalled.
Things were actually better for King than most blacks because he was a celebrity. During Christmas break, he would hang out with teammates at their all-white fraternities, and then they would all go to a movie. He could sit with his teammates, rather than in the black section of the theater, and no one objected.
“Everyone in Lawrence pretty much knew me,” he said. “When you’re the only brown-skinned guy out there, who’s not going to know you?”
In 1955, everything changed quickly. The Eldridge began to accept King as well, and so did everyone else. Wilt Chamberlain came to the University.
Though he was just a freshman, everyone was in awe of the young player. Chamberlain had never experienced segregation on the east coast, King said, and no one wanted to upset him when he got to Kansas. Restaurants, hotels, theaters and other public places desegregated for him. “When Wilt Chamberlain came to that campus, a lot of that foolishness stopped,” King said.
According to King, today’s minority athletes take their acceptance for granted.
“I was busy just trying to survive,” he said. “If I came to this university and failed, that was going to be a setback for other minority athletes. When I came here, I was scared to death of failure.”
He said dealing with segregation only added to the burden of working hard in practice — being physically exhausted and then having to go home and read 1000 pages to be prepared for class the next day.
Road trips were even harder. “School still goes on while you’re out there on the road,” he said.
Chamberlain may have been the most talented player on the team, but King had talent too, a basketball star from grade school on.
King was born to a working class family and raised in Kansas City, Mo. His parents, Maurice King and Lillian Walker, divorced when he was five years old, and his father moved to New York City. King said his mother worked hard as a waitress and tried to find other ways to make a little extra money, but the family also relied on welfare checks.
King figured he would end up working at a blue-collar job after graduating high school, if he graduated at all. Not only did he graduate, King ended up being the first in his family to earn a college degree.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” he said. “In my family, we didn’t talk about stuff like that. We talked about what we would eat that night,” King said.
King discovered basketball on the playground in sixth grade. People watched him play there, and soon he was invited to play on church teams at the YMCA.
Joe King, his brother, recalled seeing Maurice play in Paseo Park with other kids. He played a game called “goal high,” which was like basketball, only the goal had no backboard. Joe credits this game with giving Maurice his most valuable basketball skills.
The goal was made of a metal pole and a rim about three feet in circumference, Joe said. Kids would play three-on-three. Not having a backboard required more accuracy than regular basketball.
He went on to become a high school star. “Playing against other people, I found out I was pretty doggone good at it,” he said.
King attended all-black R.T. Coles Vocational High School in Kansas City, Mo. There he excelled at basketball and received attention from several colleges and The Call, a local newspaper that wrote about black America, especially with regard to sports.
“It was a really big thing for a kid to have his name written up in The Call,” King said.
In high school he dated many girls, including his future wife, and another girl with whom he fathered his oldest daughter, Yasmin. Though the couple never married, Yasmin did live with King later in his life.
King lived during an era when African-Americans “had to be super” to even get noticed, and King was, said Jack Bush, King’s high school assistant coach,
He was thinking about attending a black college like Lincoln University or Tennessee State University, but KU assistant coach Dick Harpwent to watch King play during his junior year in high school.
Jerry Waugh, KU assistant coach, said “Reece,” as his teammates called King, was a “sweet-like-candy player” and a quiet guy with a great sense of humor.
“If you were going to choose up a team, you’d want Maurice on your team,” Waugh said.
Harp made him feel wanted, and his high school coach pushed King to attend KU, so that’s where he ended up.
The University was the first integrated school King ever attended. While basketball came easy, he didn’t think he would have made it through the University without the help of Jesse Milan, a graduate student in education, and a member and advisor for King’s black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi. Milan said he helped “Pauncho,” as he called King, develop good study habits.
After four years of playing for Kansas, the Celtics drafted King in after the 1957 season. He was Kansas’ second-leading scorer in 1956, averaging of 14 points per game, and the third-leading scorer in 1957 averaging 9.7 points per game. A few credits shy of graduation, he elected to go to the Celtics because of their prestige. The NBA had only eight teams at the time, and he felt fortunate to be offered a position.
While playing for the Celtics he was drafted into the Army, where he served a mandatory two years and played basketball for the Fifth Army team at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. He joined several other All-Americans on that team.
While at Fort Leonard Wood he reconnected with Jelena Nicholson, whom he’d dated in high school, when King played a game against Lincoln University. Jelena, a student at Lincoln, said she’d always had a crush on King and even tried out for cheerleading in high school to be closer to him. The two married in 1958. After his time in the Army, he went back to the Celtics but Jelena stayed home in Kansas City. The long distance relationship didn’t last. The pay in the NBA at the time wasn’t enough for him to support her coming to live with him in Boston. They divorced.
“Life in professional wasn’t all that glamorous in those days,” he said.
The Celtics traded him to the Chicago Zephyrs, where he earned his highest pay in the N.B.A. — $10,000. When the Zephyrs moved to Baltimore, King stayed in Kansas City and played for the Steers of the old American Basketball League before it folded.
When he moved back to Kansas City after completing his degree at the University in 1964,, he taught physical education at Northwest Junior High for four years, and he and Jelena remarried.
In 1966, he took a part time job at Hallmark Cards and ended up leaving his teaching job two years later to be a Hallmark human resources representative. He retired in 1991.
In his retirement, King, still looking lean and athletic, has stayed active in sports. He and a group of friends have gone to Florida for a week of golf each February for the past 25 years.
He and Jelena like to spend time with their grandchildren, and he listens to jazz and “yesterday’s rock and roll,” plays cards, drinks coffee, and chats with golf friends, one of whom was his high school coach, Jack Bush.
“You don’t find too many former high school students 40 years later being a close friend of a former teacher,” Bush said.
Although retired, King worked with the Kansas City Board of Education to start an alternative school program, and as a small-business consultant until 2000.
He is a trustee and sings in the male choir at Concord Fortress of Hope Baptist Church. He always dresses with class: a long leather jacket cinched along the waistline, a turtleneck sweater and dress pants.
His family is close-knit and close by. His daughter, Kimberly, and her two kids see King several times a week. She said he wanted to make sure his grandchildren did well in school and keep the family tradition of attending KU
“I went to KU too,” Kimberly said. “It was the only school he allowed me to apply to. Thank goodness I got in because he would have been heartbroken.”
Her eldest daughter, Danielle, 11, is tall like King and loves to play basketball in the driveway with her grandpa. She wants to go to Kansas and be just like him.
Danielle wrote a paper in school about the most important person in her life and chose King, or “Papa” as she calls him. At grandparents’ night at the school, Jelena said, King was flattered but embarrassed to find out he was the subject of her paper.
If she ends up as a KU student, she will learn that her grandfather, Maurice King, won more than basketball games. Off the court, he was instrumental in winning civil rights for her and many others.
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