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William Leon Garrett (April 4, 1929 - August 7, 1974) was the first African-American
basketball player in the Big Ten athletic conference.
Born in Shelbyville, Indiana, he was Indiana Mr. Basketball in 1947, the year he graduated
from Shelbyville High School, following Shelbyville's victory in the state tournament
that year. At Indiana University, he became the first African-American to play on the
school's varsity men's basketball team and also the first African-American to
regularly start on a Big Ten team. He was All-American when he graduated in 1951. He was
drafted by the Boston Celtics in the second round of the draft, becoming the third black
player ever drafted by an NBA team.
Shortly thereafter, Garrett was called into military duty. After two years in the U.S.
Army, Garrett returned home to find that he had been cut from the Celtics and began
playing with the Harlem Globetrotters. Following his stint with the Globetrotters, he
began teaching and coaching basketball at Wood High School in Indianapolis, Indiana,
before becoming Head Coach at Crispus Attucks, which had previously won state
championship's in 1955 and 1956 with Oscar Robertson as its star player.
He was assistant dean for student services at Indiana University-Purdue University
Indianapolis at the time of his death from a heart attack, aged 45.
He is buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.
Garrett was inducted into the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame in 1974
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Getting Open: The Unknown Story of Bill Garrett and the Integration of College Basketball
by Tom Graham, Rachel Graham Cody
Bill Garrett was the Jackie Robinson of college basketball. In 1947, the same year
Robinson broke the color line in major league baseball, Garrett integrated big-time
college basketball. By joining the basketball program at Indiana University, he broke the
gentleman's agreement that had barred black players from the Big Ten, college
basketball's most important conference. While enduring taunts from opponents and
pervasive segregation at home and on the road, Garrett became the best player Indiana had
ever had, an all-American, and, in 1951, the third African American drafted in the NBA. In
basketball, as Indiana went so went the country. Within a year of his graduation from IU,
there were six African American basketball players on Big Ten teams. Soon tens, then
hundreds, and finally thousands walked through the door Garrett opened to create modern
college and professional basketball. Unlike Robinson, however, Garrett is unknown today.
Getting Open is more than "just" a basketball book. In the years immediately
following World War II, sports were at the heart of America's common culture. And in
the fledgling civil rights efforts of African Americans across the country, which would
coalesce two decades later into the Movement, the playing field was where progress
occurred publicly and symbolically.
Indiana was an unlikely place for a civil rights breakthrough. It was stone-cold
isolationist, widely segregated, and hostile to change. But in the late 1940s, Indiana had
a leader of the largest black YMCA in the world, who viewed sports as a wedge for broader
integration; a visionary university president, who believed his institution belonged to
all citizens of the state; a passion for high school and college basketball; and a
teenager who was, as nearly as any civil rights pioneer has ever been, the perfect person
for his time and role. This is the story of how they came together to move the country
toward getting open.
Father-daughter authors Tom Graham and Rachel Graham Cody spent seven years reconstructing
a full portrait of how these elements came together; interviewing Garrett's family,
friends, teammates, and coaches, and digging through archives and dusty closets to tell
this compelling, long-forgotten story.
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