Here's an article that discusses some of the history about the integration of WVU basketball. I think you'll find it interesting reading...
Enjoy...

MSNsportsNET Wrote:Five for the Ages
By John Antonik for MSNsportsNET.com
January 17, 2011 08:30 AM



MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Levi Phillips enjoys telling a good story or two, like the time Curt Price got Austin Carr mad by sneaking up from behind and stealing the ball during a game against Notre Dame at the Coliseum in 1971.

While Price was doing his freelancing it was Phillips’ job to stay in front of Notre Dame’s great All-American.

“Once (Carr) got the ball back for about the next five or six minutes I don’t think anybody scored but him,” Phillips laughed. Carr finished the game with a Coliseum record 47 points.

Phillips remembers the first day he arrived on campus as a freshman in 1970. That also happened to be the day WVU students were protesting the Vietnam War outside the MountainLair plaza.

“All these people are outside and I see this naked guy run right past me,” he said. “Then a naked girl runs past me – this was during the time when streaking was popular. I looked at Deacon (WVU teammate Larry Harris) and I said, ‘I don’t know if this is the place for me.’ He said, ‘Man, I’m staying here forever!’”

Another time, Phillips recalled hitchhiking with Harris and Wil Robinson outside the Towers dormitories. Eventually a car pulled up alongside and the driver offered to take them downtown. On the way, the driver decided to stop in Sunnyside to pick up a pack of cigarettes. Meanwhile, Harris and Robinson spent the entire time giggling in the backseat. When the guy went inside, Phillips turned around and asked them what they were laughing at.

“Man, that dude looks just like Barney Fife,” Robinson said.

When the guy returned, Phillips got a better look at him and sure enough, he bore a close resemblance to the famous television cop. Phillips started laughing too. Finally, the guy driving asked them why they were all laughing.

“Anybody ever tell you that you look just like Barney Fife?” Robinson asked.

“No, but they tell me I look just like my brother … Don Knotts!”

Phillips, a Charleston native now living and working in his hometown, says he was a witness to one of the biggest boxing mismatches in WVU locker room history. The late Sam Oglesby, who was 6-6, was known to have a hair-trigger temper and any little thing could set him off. One evening after practice the guys were sitting around in their lockers when Oglesby got into an argument with guard Harold Black, who didn’t weigh 160 pounds soaking wet.

Whatever Black had said got Oglesby mad and he lunged over to take a swing at him, missed, and lost his balance. As he was falling, Black hit him in the back of the head with a glancing blow that sent Oglesby crashing into the side of a bench, knocking him out cold.

For the rest of the time Oglesby played at WVU, whenever anyone had a problem with big Sam, they would just remind him of his first-round KO against Harold Black.

“We’d say, ‘Hey Sam, you don’t want us to call Harold Black to straighten you out now, do you?’” Phillips laughed.

Phillips can also tell you who scored the first-ever basket in the first-ever game at the Coliseum against Colgate. That would be a guy named Levi Phillips. “I’ve still got the ball (athletic director) Red Brown gave me,” he said.

But ask him what was significant about West Virginia’s season-opening game against Pitt on Dec. 1, 1973 and his mind goes blank. Nothing.

Phillips was coming off almost a two-year hiatus after losing his eligibility in 1972, spending a semester at Oklahoma State before realizing things were much worse in Stillwater, Okla. than they were in Morgantown. In ’73-74, he was back in the starting lineup in the backcourt against Pitt along with Eartha Faust, a junior college guard from Inkster, Mich.

The two forwards that evening were state natives Warren Baker and Jerome Anderson, while playing center was 6-8 junior Larry Carr, also from West Virginia. What made this lineup significant was the fact that all five were African-American - the first time an all-black starting five was ever used at WVU.

“I never knew that,” Phillips said. “What is it, 40 years? This is the first time I had ever heard that.”

Baker, one of the school’s all-time greats and now a television analyst for West Virginia women’s basketball games, was surprised to learn that as well.

“I was totally unaware of that,” he said.

And there was not a single word about it in the papers either before or after the game. At a time when race played such a prevalent role in the culture of our country - school desegregation and forced school bussing still fresh on people’s minds in the mid-1970s - the fact that WVU’s first all-black starting five got no play in the press is probably more remarkable than when it occurred.

Years before Donovan McNabb and Michael Vick were tearing up NFL defenses a big topic in football in the 1970s was the question of whether or not blacks were capable of playing quarterback. If Joe Namath threw three interceptions in a game (which happened quite frequently) it was because the wide receiver ran the wrong pattern or the defensive back made a great play. If Joe Gilliam threw three interceptions, well, some said it was because he couldn’t read defenses.

“Those positions of quarterback and other decision-making positions … those careers (often) led them to being coaches and athletic administrators,” explained Dr. Dana Brooks, dean and professor of West Virginia University’s College of Physical Activity and Sports Sciences and co-author of Racism in College Athletics: The African-American Experience and Diversity and Social Justice in College Sports. “Some people might make it an issue today, but I try to get away from that discussion myself. I talk about how do we develop a climate of inclusivity for race, class and gender?”

Phillips and Baker, both lifelong state natives, say they believe many West Virginians are color blind because the two races have always shared similar economic hardships while living in the state. Also, teamwork, cooperation and understanding are needed in the coal mines, where a good number of the state’s inhabitants worked in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s when many other parts of the country were dealing with complicated racial problems.

“We’re such a small state and if you look at the evolution of Brown vs. Board of Education and our transition (as a university) it was not as traumatic and controversial as the rest of the country, and that spoke loudly about the people of West Virginia,” said Brooks.

Garrett Ford, West Virginia’s associate athletic director for student services, came to WVU from Washington, D.C. in the mid-1960s to play football for the Mountaineers. Ford once said that he had never seen a white garbage collector until he came to Morgantown; all of the whites he had contact with while growing up in D.C. were figures of authority - insurance men, bill collectors or police officers.

According to Phillips, it’s almost impossible to separate social classes in West Virginia.

“Because of our economic circumstances, the rich people have to shop at the same places as everybody,” he explained. “If you go to New York, if you are well off financially, you can separate yourself from the people who are not. You can’t do that in West Virginia.”

Baker, who grew up in White Sulphur Springs, recalled his first racial incident during a recruiting trip to a school in the south in the early 1970s. Visiting at the same time with Baker was John Lucas, who became a star player at Maryland and later excelled in the pros.

The two were sitting behind the team bench to watch a basketball game, and when the national anthem came on over the loudspeaker they stood up. Immediately, both were booed by the black students in attendance.

“This was right after John Carlos and (Tommie Smith) made their demonstration at the Olympics, so blacks at one point in time were not recognizing the national anthem,” Baker recalled. “Of course me being a country boy, and John not being aware of it either, we stood up and there was a chorus of boos.”

By the time Phillips, Baker, Anderson, Carr and Faust were playing at West Virginia, the Mountaineer program had been integrated for almost 10 years. All-American guard Fritz Williams was West Virginia’s Jackie Robinson, both by the way he played on the court and by the way he conducted himself off it.

The African-American basketball players who played in the 1970s all agree that Williams was one of the reasons why they chose to attend West Virginia University at a time when the school had fewer than 250 minority students on its campus.

“I came up there with my brother and I thought about going to Purdue (the Boilermakers then were coached by George King, who integrated WVU basketball in the mid-1960s) and Fritz told me, ‘there aren’t many black people here, but you are not going to run into any problems.’ He was one of the people who convinced me to go to WVU,” Phillips said.

There may not have been many problems in Morgantown, but that was not always the case when the Mountaineers played in the south. Phillips remembers a now-humorous incident at one southern school where fans in unison began chanting a racial slur at them.

“We’re coming off the floor and they kept chanting a phrase that none of us had recognized,” Phillips said. “We get in at halftime and (West Virginia coach) Sonny Moran says, ‘Don’t let all of that racial stuff bother you.’ Curt Price gets up and says, ‘Coach, what racial stuff are you talking about?’"

“We had never heard whatever it was they were calling us,” Phillips laughed.

Moran was more aware than others of the racial attitudes of the south in the early 1970s, having already gone through it once before with Williams, Ed Harvard, Jim Lewis, Norman Holmes and Carl Head when he was an assistant coach on Bucky Waters’ staff in the late 1960s.

It was Moran who integrated the Morris Harvey College basketball program in the early 1960s.

“Our president came in and told me he thought it was time for us to recruit black athletes,” Moran recalled in 2010. “He said, ‘I don’t necessarily want a great basketball player, but I want a good person so I got Gerald Martin out of Huntington and he turned out to be one of the few guys that made the all-tournament (WVIAC) team four years in a row.”

Years later, Phillips could see that Moran was trying to shield his young players from some of the ugliness that they were not used to experiencing while growing up in West Virginia.

“He was very meticulous in keeping us away from that,” Phillips said. “When we went up to New York to play St. John’s, he’d let us go out and eat and do stuff on our own, but when we were down south we would always eat at the hotel. I talked to Wil about it and we had no idea that was what he was doing at the time, but I’m glad that he did it.”

“Those are stories that unless you were in the minority, you would not know to ask those questions or (realize) those experiences,” Brooks pointed out.

Baker thought being from the state may also have been beneficial to some of the black players on the team.

“The majority of the black guys when I first played here were from West Virginia, and Wil was right across the state line,” said Baker. “Whether it’s right or wrong, there may have been a little more of an acceptance for us because we were players that stayed in the state.”

By the time Baker was a senior in 1976, the Mountaineers were playing more northeastern schools, plus, most, if not all of the southern schools had integrated their athletic programs by then as well. Moran, the man responsible for this historical footnote, had a simple reason for playing those five guys against Pitt.

“I was going to start my five best players, and I hoped the people would understand that,” said Moran.

They did.

By the way, all five players performed magnificently, beating an outstanding Pitt team 82-78.

To learn more about the integration of WVU athletics and the school's pioneering athletes visit A History of Integration of Sports at West Virginia University website.

I remember a lot of Levi's stories, especially that one about Austin Carr. That SOB torched the Mountaineers that year, helping the Irish kick our butts on national TV...

Austin Carr was a terrific talent.

He was my favorite college basketball player back in the day.[/align]

He destroyed WVU when we played. And to think it was all because Curt Price p!ssed him off by stealing the ball...

Those Afros are Fly