When Phillip Hoose moved to Speedway as a kid in 1955, he kept hearing about this school in Indianapolis where all the Black kids went. It was a phantom school in some ways because nobody knew much about it. They couldn’t even get the pronunciation right: “Crismus” Attucks.
Of course, that school was Crispus Attucks High School, and some 60 years later, Hoose is helping immortalize the school’s legacy.
Hoose’s new book, “Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City,” is the story of how 10 basketball players and their coach challenged the bigotry and intolerance of a state which wasn’t otherwise branded with that reputation beyond its borders.
Opened in 1927 after a unanimous decision by the school board five years earlier to construct a separate high school for Black students, Crispus Attucks was named in honor of the former slave killed in the 1770 Boston Massacre. Even after Indiana outlawed school segregation in 1949, the student body was almost exclusively Black until busing for racial integration began in the 1970s, according to the U.S. Department of Interior.
Hoose, who is white, didn’t have to endure the cruelty of Jim Crow and segregation, but it was still the reality in which he lived.
“It’s my story too,” said Hoose, who now lives in Portland, Maine. “The whole city suffered. We were kept apart. I didn’t have the benefit of easy friendships with African-Americans because you never saw them.”
In doing research and interviews for the book, Hoose came face to face with his family’s history with the Ku Klux Klan. His grandfather, a coal miner in southwestern Indiana, joined the Klan when he became convinced that Eastern Europeans were going to take his job. His aunt, also from southwestern Indiana, stipulated in her deed that her land could never be sold to Blacks or Jews.
“I don’t know how the Catholics got off,” he quipped.
Hoose, whose other books range in topic from birds to World War II, got the idea to write a book about Crispus Attucks when he was on an assignment from Sports Illustrated in 1985 to figure out why Indiana is so “basketball crazy,” as he put it. As part of the project, Hoose interviewed figures around the Crispus Attucks family, including Robertson.
Hoose wrote a book proposal and gave it to a literary agent, but no one wanted to buy it. He instead wrote a book called “Hoosiers: The Fabulous Basketball Life of Indiana,” which contains a chapter about Crispus Attucks. Hoose finally did get the opportunity to write his book about Crispus Attucks and took it.
“I want people to understand that Jim Crow had an effect that extended far beyond the South, that it was tough in northern places as well,” Hoose said. “I wanted readers to know that young people made a huge contribution to whatever good came out of this sort of civil rights event in Indiana.”
Hoose relied extensively on the Indianapolis Recorder for records of Crispus Attucks basketball and life in Indianapolis. News clippings are a staple of the book and include basketball game stories and photos of the celebration after Crispus Attucks won its second straight state championship in 1956.
Crispus Attucks was well known for its academic rigor, since it hired faculty from traditionally Black colleges in the South, according to the Department of Interior. But by the time Hoose got to the area as a kid, the school was also becoming a basketball powerhouse. Crispus Attucks won three high school state championships in the 1950s, including back-to-back titles in 1955 and 1956. It was the first all-Black team in U.S. history to win a racially open championship tournament. (The Tigers won their fourth and most recent championship in 2017.)
“When Attucks got going, they were able to combine an up-tempo aerial game with some really practiced approaches to fast-break basketball,” Hoose said. “I find the technical stuff that Attucks gave to Indiana to be really fascinating.”
It isn’t uncommon for sports to be the stage that civil rights progress uses (think of Tommie Smith and John Carlos with their fists raised at the 1968 Olympics, or Colin Kaepernick kneeling during the national anthem). But Crispus Attucks in the 1950s was a story of Black teens excelling at basketball, uniquely loved by Hoosiers and especially cherished by whites.
“Indiana is the only place where a story like that could’ve happened,” Hoose said.
Contact staff writer Tyler Fenwick at 317-762-7853 and follow him on Twitter @Ty_Fenwick.
attucks book
