Randall High didn’t understand segregation when he was 5 years old. His family may have been Black and his next-door neighbors white, but everyone got along all the time.
“They had a fenced-in backyard,” recalled the man who later became the first Black player for the Tennessee Temple University basketball program. “I’d go over there almost every day and play in the backyard. If my friend’s mom bought him something to eat, she’d buy me something, too. I never thought about Black and white. It never came up. It just happened that my best friend was a white guy.”
As most of the world knows, February is Black History Month. It has been nationally recognized as such in the United States on an official basis since 1976, five years after High was discharged from the military six months early to play hoops for the Crusaders and coach Bruce Foster. Eventual Temple coaching legend Ron Bishop was Foster’s assistant at the time.
“I enrolled in December of ’71,” High recalled earlier this week. “First game I’m on the team, Coach Foster puts me in. I didn’t even know the plays. He pulled me aside and said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you the ball.'”
It sounds like a dream come true. Especially for High, who was a prep star on the first Howard team to play a schedule against fully integrated schools in the winter of 1967.