NPR: Black Players' Struggles Find Voice in 'Black Magic': All Things Considered, March 15, 2008 In March 1944, basketball players from the North Carolina College for Negroes played a secret game against military medical students from Duke University.
Rabid segregation kept the teams from playing together in public, and by the end of the clandestine matchup, the North Carolina players had soundly beaten Duke, 88-44.
The secret game was just one of the historic incidents featured in a new ESPN documentary about early African-American basketball pioneers and the historically black colleges and universities that nurtured them. Black Magic tells the stories of many of the players who gradually broke through the barriers of segregation and racism and set the standard for the basketball stars of today.
John McLendon coached the North Carolina team in 1944. His widow, Joanna, remembers that the experience was unique for students throughout segregated America.
'Some of his players had never had any contact with whites before. Some of them had never touched a white person to shake hands,' she recalls.
Black Magic co-producer Earl Monroe, who was named one of the 50 greatest players in NBA history, says the historic 1944 game wasn't an isolated incident.
