A moving screen

Basketball film scores as civil rights history lesson

On `Black Magic'

Klores said it's a "curse of progress that people forget," but it's not just progress. We're talking about a natural byproduct of the passage of time. Think about it: Today's college freshmen were 1 or 2 when Michigan's Fab Five was taking on Duke. A 30-year-old basketball nut would have been in diapers when Monroe retired. And anyone under the age of 45 has learned about the civil rights movement mostly from books and television. As evidenced by the anecdotes and interviews in Black Magic, though, it's clear the education we received has been massaged and edited many times over.

In the film, we learn of Cleo Hill, who could have been one of the greatest had he not been blackballed out of the game.

And we learn about Vanderbilt's Perry Wallace, the first black player in the Southeastern Conference. He had to compete while university-sanctioned, pompom-waving, skirt-wearing cheerleaders chanted the most vile of racial epithets during games, followed by "Rah! Rah! Rah!" Of course, that's when the games were actually held. Once, Vanderbilt's game against Mississippi State was canceled. The official reason, as reported by Sports Illustrated at the time, was so players could "concentrate on their schoolwork." Can you imagine a school canceling a game for that reason today?

We learn about the Orangeburg Massacre, in which police killed three South Carolina State students protesting segregation at an all-white bowling alley. It was Kent State minus the media coverage -- and the white victims.

We learn about the culture of the black school, the special relationship it enjoyed with its students and the temperamental relationship its athletes sometimes shared with much of the world.

In an interview last week, Monroe talked about his Winston-Salem State team scrimmaging against Billy Packer's Wake Forest squad more than 40 years ago. But the teams had to play in secret in the middle of the night. "Obviously, we used to win those," Monroe said with a laugh.

Monroe went from Winston-Salem to Baltimore right in the middle of the civil rights movement. Since I arrived in town, it has always struck me as curious that Baltimore so proudly reveres some of its athletic forefathers, but others, like Monroe, seem like an afterthought.

"Your horizon is wherever you choose to focus it," Monroe said of how he was embraced during such a tempestuous chapter of Baltimore's history. "My horizon wasn't Towson or those places out there. It was Baltimore. The city. That was my horizon and my existence."