Nothing's Gotta Give

American Magazine | Summer 2005

http://www.american.edu/weekly/summer05_wallace.html

Moving History Forward
Washington College of Law professor Perry Wallace was the first African American to play basketball in the Southeastern Conference. His athleticism and intellect changed the face of the nation.
BY mike unger

The annals of history are filled with ordinary people transformed into pioneers by a concurrence of time, place, and circumstance.

Nashville, Tennessee, in the mid-1960s was a city, like all in the South, struggling to shed its Jim Crow roots. Though sweeping social change was on the horizon, the town remained ensnared by the iron grip of segregation.

In the winter of 1966, Perry Wallace Jr. led Pearl High School to victory in Tennessee’s first-ever integrated high school basketball championship tournament. At the culmination of a stunningly successful high school career in which he was named an All-American, Wallace’s dominance on the court and grace off it helped nudge open the door of opportunity. Four years later, when he left Vanderbilt University, where he became the first African American to play basketball in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), Wallace had barreled through that door with dignity, poise, and determination.

But the gentle, soft-spoken Wallace never aspired to Jackie Robinson status; his goals, like his persona, were modest.

“I never had the mentality of a trailblazer,” Wallace says. “In the movies and books you have these people who have this burning vision of what they can do in the future to change the world and that sort of thing, and that’s not really what I had. It sounds like a confession sometimes, and it’s not romantic. I said, ‘Look, what I’d love to do is play some serious ball, get a good education, be able to get out and get a good job, have a good life, be a good citizen.’ What happened was that history kind of worked its way in; there were some opportunities, and I decided to step in.”

Though anything but bitter, 35 years later Wallace remains conflicted about his groundbreaking experience, refusing to view the past through rose-colored glasses alone. Sitting at the desk in his office at AU’s Washington College of Law, where he is a professor of environmental and corporate law, he ponders the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of his landmark journey, the magnitude of it all still clearly evident in his brown eyes.

Would he do it again?

“I’ve answered different ways over the years,” he says. “I know the answer that people want to hear, and I share in that, is that sure I’d do it again. It was a very successful experience. It laid groundwork for improvements and better relations. You can look at the Southeastern Conference and look at their sports teams, and it’s obvious that integration got going and it’s been a success.

“But I also understand the reasons that I have, many times, said no, I wouldn’t do it again,” he says, the tone of his voice measured and calm, as always. “It’s because I am the only person in the world who truly appreciates the danger to my person, the mental peril that I faced. I was able to avoid that peril, but I’m the only one who knows what it looks like at the brink, looking over that cliff. That’s what has made me at times say ‘no, I would never do it again.’”

More than a decade after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education, the civil rights movement was spreading through the South. An aura of inevitability surrounded the end of discriminatory practices in the SEC; the only questions remaining were who would be the first, and at which university the racial barrier would fall.

When Perry Wallace Jr. came of age, half that mystery was solved. In eighth grade he was six-feet two-inches tall, able to dunk a basketball with ease. A gritty natural athlete who also excelled at football and track, Wallace was an intellectual who was valedictorian of his high school class.

“He’s an unusual boy,” Pearl High principal J. C. Hull told the (Nashville) Tennessean in 1968. “In 27 years as a principal, I doubt that I have seen more than one or two students who could come close to matching him as an athlete-scholar. We have had some great athletes and some fine scholars, but it’s rare to find a person who is both.”

College recruiters drooled over Wallace. He was aggressively pursued by more than 80 universities, including SEC behemoths Tennessee and Kentucky.

“He was a straight-A student; he was a very physical player, an excellent rebounder, and I felt like he could help our basketball team,” said Roy Skinner, Wallace’s coach at Vanderbilt. “I didn’t think there would ever be a better opportunity” to break the color barrier.

Wallace had planned to attend college in the north or at a historically black university, but came away from several recruiting trips disillusioned.

“As I visited some of these schools up north that I always dreamed about, of course they were fine academic institutions, but I saw something that was really rather scary to me,” he says. “In many cases I saw the athletes were not getting the benefit of the education. They weren’t particularly integrated; they were ghettoized, both by choice and by social pattern. My description for it came to be ‘new plantations.’ On these campuses basically they were big, strapping, strong guys who got out there on courts and on fields and worked and produced, then they sort of went back into their holes on campus. You didn’t see them in student government or in the math and science classes or in literature or physics.”

It was Skinner’s honesty and gentility that began to sway Wallace toward Vanderbilt.

“When [he] came to recruit me and visit my parents, you had something that people take for granted today that almost never happened then,” Wallace says. “Here was a white person calling my parents Mr. and Mrs. Wallace. The quality of the school academically and athletically was very good, and I wanted my parents, who had worked very, very hard, to get a chance to see me play. You knew you were stepping into a valley of unknowns and some serious ones too. But I thought I could make a contribution and have my parents be treated with the kind of respect they almost never had.”

Perry Sr. and Hattie Wallace had little money, but they were rich nonetheless. They came to Nashville from the country in search of economic opportunity. Perry Sr., a laborer, and Hattie, a housewife and maid, never failed to impart the importance of education to their six children. Perry Jr.’s brother joined the military, but the others all went on to earn college and graduate professional school degrees.

“Perry Wallace Jr., the sensational student-athlete, has chosen Vanderbilt University,” read the lead to an article in the May 5, 1966, edition of the Tennessean. “Young Wallace is the first Negro ever to sign a Southeastern Conference basketball grant-in-aid, and the first of his race to play varsity athletics at Vanderbilt.”

The challenges awaiting Wallace during the next four years were unknowable. No one had come before him. But even before he encountered the vitriolic catcalls of fans in opposing gyms, he had to endure the simmering bigotry present on his own campus.

“Perry came to Vanderbilt not long after I did, and there was still a surprising number of unreflectively racist people both in the student body and on the faculty,” says Vereen Bell, an English professor who befriended Wallace. “By the time he left, this atmosphere had changed remarkably, part of this the result of normal historical change, but a good bit of it was attributable to Perry and his friends and to the influence of their patient and resourceful activism.

“In the meantime though, they all, and especially Perry because of his conspicuous status and notoriety as a groundbreaker in the previously segregated SEC, had to experience a lot of stupid and childish verbal harassment in their dorms and elsewhere,” Bell recalls. “Perry’s dignity throughout all of this was just amazing. He was harassed horribly at out-of-town games, and ‘nigger’ was the routine term of abuse everywhere [he] went.”

Particularly in Mississippi and Alabama, Wallace was subjected to brutal invectives.

“These places were just awful,” Wallace says. “You had people screaming racial epithets, threatening death and castration, spitting on you. You had cheerleaders leading racist cheers. The whole deal.”

Rather than take the bait, Wallace channeled his anger, using it to fuel his unyielding energy on the court.

“He was just a kid trying to play a game,” Skinner says. “One of the worst times was when some of the [opposing] players were being extremely rough with him. He started going after rebounds with a vengeance and he dominated the boards. I have never seen anybody play with such a vengeance.”

Wallace was immensely popular on campus, even being elected “Bachelor of Ugliness,” believe it or not, a social honor at Vanderbilt. But underneath the surface, things were not so copacetic.

“You had kind of a duality,” Wallace says. “On the one hand it looked very good, the university had integrated, they had a student-athlete in the engineering school, making good grades and playing pretty good basketball. It just looked like a nice dream. On the other hand, on a daily basis on campus I was to a very great degree an ‘Invisible Man.’

“That was the larger reality,” he says. “You can be treated three different ways: You could be treated well; you could be treated badly; and you also can not be treated at all. A lot of what I experienced was just not being treated at all. I was looked over and looked past.”

The NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers drafted Wallace after he graduated, but he played just one season of minor league ball before calling it a career.

“I didn’t want to spend time in my early 20s trying to find out whether I could play,” he says. “I knew at best I could be a journeyman, not any great star.”

Intrigued more by civil rights than engineering, his major at Vanderbilt, Wallace moved to Washington to work for the National Urban League. He later earned his law degree from Columbia before working for the Justice Department and embarking on a teaching career, arriving at AU in 1991.

“Education had always been very big in our family, and I always liked working with young people,” he says. “It made teaching sort of a natural for me. I wanted to have a bigger impact than just what you would have being a practicing attorney. I wanted to be part of public service, kind of a larger mission.”

Last year, Wallace returned to Vanderbilt for a ceremony in which his No. 25 jersey was retired. Despite playing only three years of varsity basketball (freshmen were ineligible in those days), Wallace is Vanderbilt’s second all-time leading rebounder and 35th-leading scorer.

It was an honor long overdue. A confluence of occurrences catapulted Wallace into history, enabling him to change the landscape of America. Despite obstacles and hardships along the way so great they would have swallowed many a weaker man, he crafted a life that now allows him to shape others.

“If there’s anything that what I did at Vanderbilt reflected, it was history creating a moment where someone who is basically pretty ordinary was swept up the way a lot of people were who were involved in civil rights,” Wallace says. “It was a very large moment in history, and you become a part of that and it affects your approach and your vision from then on. It swept me into thinking about politics and government and justice and people and society, those larger topics, and always having a desire to be involved in that. Teaching became sort of a base for my doing that.

“What I want [my WCL students] to have is a sense of inquiry and openness to learning and a sense that no matter what speciality they may take on, there always is the larger cause of justice and the well-being of American society,” he says. “They ought to always try to grow and expand their horizons and inquire. In their work, they ought to try all the time to promote justice and well-being in society.”