In light of the recent protests and boycotts by some of the professional sports leagues, it seems appropriate - and relevant - to take a look back at the boycott of the Marquette basketball team in 1968, how it affected the campus and how the university administration reacted in deciding to start an Educational Opportunity Program for minorities on campus, one of the first in the country. The excerpt below is taken from the Centennial Edition of "You Can Call Me Al: The Colorful Journey of College Basketball's Original Flower Child, Al McGuire," by 1980 Marquette graduate Joseph Declan Moran, published by JDM Press 2019, Arlington Heights, IL.
The book is available at the Marquette Spirit Shop on campus and via Moran's website (
www.jdmpress.net). When accessing the site, click on Contact Us to send an email with your pertinent information, number of books you want to purchase and whether you want it signed. This excerpt is taken from the book's chapter "Goin' Uptown."
In the late 1960s, race relations, or the "checkerboard," as McGuire called it, was a dicey proposition, especially at a school like Marquette which had a very small minority enrollment. "There were fewer than forty blacks at Marquette at that time," estimated [Milwaukee] Sentinel reporter Mike Christopulos.
As the high profile leader of the Warriors, Thompson was approached by some of the activists on campus about boycotting the basketball team to protest what they called the "institutional racism" at the university. "Many of the minority students on campus believed that Marquette University was giving lip service to us," noted Thompson. One of the spokesmen for the activists was Gus Moye, who played just one year at Marquette, his freshman year (1964-65).
"Auguste Gus Moye was a smart, well-rounded individual," recalled [Blanton] Simmons. "He was a 6'4" forward from Aliquippa, Pennsylvania. He was a most engaging guy. He was 28 at the time. Gus was a role model to all of us. He never did get to the varsity level.
"George was more socially adept. Pat [Smith] had a brother who had been murdered. We'd never been around white people. Who we were, many people thought we were inferior," explained Simmons.
"In the spring of 1968, the revolution, or the insurrection, as it was called, was led by Gus and George," recalled [Dean] Meminger. "It was during that time that blacks were taking a stand. George was the captain. They [activists] said if we do things without your support, we're gone. You guys [basketball players] have the clout. Are you down?
"I was into my nation-building at the time. The Black Power Movement, a term coined by Stokely Carmichael. How the institution was using us. It's still an old-boys network. I stepped across the tracks to live with you guys [white establishment] to be a good black guy. When do you step over to this side? It eats at your core," stated Meminger.
"The players were being pressured to boycott the team," recalled Smith. "Minorities were looking for concessions from the university. Marquette was being hard-nosed. There were pressures on the players to do something."
"There was a group on campus called RESPOND [a coalition of black and nonblack students]. They were trying to court more black students and get more minority faculty members at Marquette," recalled [David] Foran. "It happened after the shooting of Martin Luther King. Stuff had been going on on campus.
"They signed a statement saying that they would no longer play basketball at Marquette. Jim Foley had called Al to let him know what was going on," continued Foran.
McGuire had left earlier that afternoon for a speaking engagement in Montello, Wisconsin. But he had a feeling something was up when he left Milwaukee. Thompson, Meminger, Simmons, Smith, Thomas, and Keith Edwards all signed the statement. Late that afternoon, the local headlines blared: "Six Cagers Quit MU."
"George Thompson, Blanton Simmons, Gus Moye, and all the players came out to where I was working in West Allis, Wisconsin, as a [security] guard," said Smith. "We decided that if Marquette didn't give us concessions, we would leave the team. Al said to us, 'Make sure you know what you're doin'.' We let the black campus organizations know."
"George came into my office," recalled [Hank] Raymonds. "Al was not in town at the time. I asked him, 'What do you want to do, George?' So, I sent him to Father [Raymond] McAuley. And then I got a hold of McAuley and I told him that George was coming over. I said, 'If you lie to him, father, Al and I are gone.' Al comes back later and met with the players in the early morning hours."
Recalled Thompson, "We wanted the word of somebody who was respected. It couldn't get any better than Father [John] Raynor. If, in fact, he said anything, I had no need to doubt his word. He was a wonderful person."
"The university wasn't going to let us go, so they would have to negotiate," declared Meminger.
"We left school," said Thompson, "and there was a black boycott. We dropped out of school for a couple of days. Gus and a few others were heavily involved. They recognized that we had a profile on campus and came to us. 'We need you guys so that people on campus will sit up and take notice.' There had been some real civil and earnest discussion, but as it turned out that wasn't the case," Thompson said.
RESPOND presented an ultimatum to the administration. It wanted a black hired full-time immediately as staff coordinator and scholarship coordinator. The students wanted a Minority Equal Opportunity program at the university. As part of that, they called for an increase in the number of minority students and faculty members at Marquette.
Some eight hundred students began demonstrating on campus. Seven were arrested, including a priest. The Theology Department's faculty, expressing disgust with the failure of the administration to take steps to end institutional racism, threatened to resign from the university.
President Raynor promptly issued a rebuke of the demands, stating unequivocally, "This university will not be governed by coercion, nor will it respond to rash and loosely conceived program demands of such groups." Raynor did promise to form a broadly representative committee to work toward meeting demands.
"I knew where to get a hold of Al," remembered [Jim] Foley. "He told me that he was going to wait until everything cooled down. When he came in, he picked the right time."
"Sometime after midnight [1:30 A.M.] we were there with Al and his players at the Holiday Inn Central. He invited us," noted Christopulos. "Al first asked Thompson, 'What are these guys doin' for you? They're just usin' you.'" McGuire went on to tell the players that they had God-given talents and should use those to better themselves. He added that quitting school was like cutting off their hands.
McGuire then met with Moye and the other activists at a nearby apartment. According to published reports, the shouting match between Moye and McGuire could be heard blocks away. "What Al didn't realize," explained Thompson, "was that there was and are some legitimate concerns that minority people had in their day. We had less hassles because we were ballplayers. But that didn't change the fact that we were minorities in a majority society. What Al was saying was his opinion. He was looking at it as a coach."
McGuire lashed out at the activists, priests, and others who tried to co-opt his players to their cause, according to Frank Deford's account in his chapter on McGuire, "Depression Baby," from his book The World's Tallest Midget. The account was later excerpted in Sports Illustrated as "Welcome to my World," on November 29, 1976.
"The smooth-talking theorists he screamed at. The tough guys he ridiculed. He suggested to an idealistic coed that she should take one of the black players home to her suburb for Thanksgiving. To a priest, he snarled, 'Don't come after these kids from the Jesuit house. You never bought a pound of butter in your life, and you're asking them to be kamikaze pilots.'"
McGuire defused the situation early that morning. At 5:45 A.M. Thompson released a statement saying that the players were going back to school. "We have met with Father McAuley and he has our best interests at heart."
"I think it was a couple or three days," said Thompson. "There was enough time to have passed that it got the attention of the city and Marquette administration. The administration then decided to make changes. Now they knew we were serious and they seemed to know the seriousness of the situation."
"Teams in the South had no black players in the 1960s," explained Foran. "With Al, who he perceived to be the guys who could do the job would be the ones on the floor."
"Al came along in an era when the black athlete was trying to find himself, and be accepted as far as society is concerned," said Raymonds. "There weren't any black athletes playing basketball down South. He came along at the right time. We would get calls from coaches in the South asking us, 'How do you handle the black player?' We said you treat them like everyone else. These people played for Al because they knew he was doing something for them."
"Then Marquette made concessions to the organization," said Smith. "When it hit the papers, what came out of it was a minority advancement program. We were serious about it. There was a lot of pressure on us."
"As a result of that stand, the university started the Minority Equal Opportunity Program, from which my wife was the first graduate," noted Meminger proudly. "The politically correct thing at the time was 'Let's do a minority program. We gotta give 'em a bone.' But what about the two hundred years when you built the country on our backs?"
"It became the Educational Opportunity Program [EOP]," recalled Dr. James Scott, who was later named university vice president of student affairs. "Arnold Mitchem was named the first director of the program. He was taking his Ph.D. at Marquette. He did a good job."
Marquette was one of the first schools in the country to have a full-fledged EOP, according to James Sankovitz, a university vice president. He noted that Mitchem served as national director until 1986. (Dr. Mitchem is president emeritus of the Council for Opportunity in Education and was elected to the Marquette Board of Trustees in 2008.)
But that was not the end of it. According to Foran, "The night of the Pere Marquette Dinner, students blocked the door to the entrance. It was May 5, 1968. It was civil disobedience. A month later, Bobby Kennedy was killed."
Later that summer Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in the Black Power salute at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, a gesture that would be repeated during the upcoming college basketball season. And in Chicago, while the whole world was watching, what began as civil disobedience outside the Democratic National Convention turned into an uncivil disturbance as police battled - and battered - young demonstrators in the streets of Chicago, while inside the International Amphitheater the beleaguered Democratic Party, still reeling from the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey to be the standard-bearer in the election for the presidency.
What took place at Marquette was a microcosm of what was happening around the country. It was the beginning of consciousness-raising for players like Thompson, Simmons, Smith, and Meminger in determining who they were and where they fit into American society. For Meminger, it was all about the importance of self-image.
"It [progress] doesn't happen in fifty, sixty, seventy years. Anything that was black, you hated. Self-hatred. There was not a healthy self-image for blacks." But McGuire was determined that the era he described as "hand grenades in their hands" would not impact his team. "Al said, 'Hey, we're not gonna have a checkerboard problem on my team.' We never had a problem in terms of race," noted [team manager Goran] Raspudic.
Go Warriors!
