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.

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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.

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