Every Monday and Wednesday morning, 28 Duke students filter into a classroom on East Campus. Their professor, Dr. Javier Wallace, says hello to each one. He asks about their weekends, their semesters, their lives. Their upcoming trips and their job interviews. When the clock hits 10:05, they dive in with a discussion that centers around the lives of the six freshmen boys who sit together at one end of the room.
Men’s basketball academic coordinator Monty Montgomery was the guest of honor last week. But on this particular Monday, Duke Athletic Director Nina King is with the class for a Q&A. Wallace sits at the front with her, but she calls on students. They ask her about conference realignment, the unexpected consequences of NIL, athletes’ academic experience and the commodification of college athletes. She answers every question.
Wallace teaches a unique education elective called “Race, Sport & Education: Duke men’s basketball.” It’s the second time he’s running it.
“How can we use Duke men’s basketball history and present to look at society, and specifically race in society and education?” Wallace said of the course in an interview with The Chronicle. It serves to contextualize the racial history of the men’s basketball program and discuss common stereotypes in sports and at Duke.
The secrets of a storied program
Each summer, Duke offers numerous “plus” programs: paid research experiences in a specific subject. Story+ is focused on “arts & humanities research & storytelling.” In 2022, Wallace, in his first months at Duke, led a Story+ team on the racial history of the Duke men’s basketball program. This was Wallace’s introduction to the Bull City and the history of Tobacco Road. While he was slated to teach a course that fall titled “Deporte Negrx: AfroLatinx Sport Experience,” he couldn’t stop thinking about the men’s basketball program.
A Google search on Duke men’s basketball history will teach you about its five national championships and its historic coaches. You will see its first game, a 1906 24-10 loss to Wake Forest, and the first Duke-North Carolina game in January 1920. It stretches to current head coach Jon Scheyer and the preseason All-American-sized expectations of current freshman Cooper Flagg.
Missing, however, are the connections — the nitty-gritty, sometimes ugly stories and facts that assisted the evolution of perhaps the most storied college basketball program in the country.
“What I gravitate to is to not shy away from these different conversations about race and what happened here for it to become Duke men’s basketball, with more than only white people playing here,” Wallace said. “Which is a difficult history.”
C.B. Claiborne, the first Black player for Duke men’s basketball, joined Wallace’s AfroLatinx Sport Experience course in fall 2022 and spoke to the students.
“I had this whole Black, Latin American syllabus,” Wallace said. “But then, because nobody in the class knew who C.B. Claiborne was, and because we had so many basketball players, I’m like, ‘You know what? Forget this. I want to invite him to come into our class.’”
Claiborne enrolled in 1965 — Duke was decades behind its counterparts.
Relaying an interview with former assistant coach Bucky Waters in 1965, a Chronicle columnist wrote, “The problem seems to be finding academically qualified Negro athletes who meet all the requirements of the Duke admissions office and who want to go to school in the South.”
Claiborne’s name, gaining recognition in the Duke community, is now celebrated as a sign of progress by the University. He received an honorary doctorate at the 2024 Commencement ceremony. What still goes largely unrecognized, however, is Claiborne’s experience while at Duke, and why integration happened so late.
In Wallace’s class last year, Claiborne spoke candidly about his undergraduate experience. He was ordered to cut his hair by then-head coach Vic Bubas. He was a part of the Allen Building takeover. He was the target of abuse at away games and was kept from events within the program because they were held at segregated locations.
A course is born
Wallace’s interest — and Duke’s investment — snowballed from that Story+ project. The group was permitted to hang banners in Cameron Indoor Stadium detailing Claiborne’s experience and the context around the program’s integration. Wallace received funding for a Bass Connections research team to create a documentary about Claiborne and the program’s history.
Faculty started the “Black in Blue” project, an initiative with three pillars about race in sports at Duke: commission public informational events, add undergraduate courses and hold workshops for student athletes at Duke and nationwide to participate in these discussions.
Wallace also began developing the curriculum for an education class, “Race, Sport & Education: Duke men’s basketball,” which debuted in fall 2023. All 18 seats were filled, and Claiborne joined once again.
“I think that in this time of the Duke Centennial, it can be really easy to be self-congratulatory about what this basketball program looks like, especially in comparison to what it looked like 60 years ago,” said current senior Eleanor Mackey, a member of last fall’s cohort. “It’s also really important to consider the harm that Duke fans and Duke as an [institution] did to these early Black basketball players.”
“A lot of the rhetoric that was happening around allowing non-white students to play collegiate sports is really fascinating,” Aaron Price, T’24 and Mackey’s classmate, said. “From an incentive spot, a lot of the internal discussions in different athletic departments were like, ‘We need to integrate, because we’re going to lose to schools that have integrated if we don’t choose to.’”
The course moves forward through history to the stereotypes of the prime Mike Krzyzewski years, to Christian Laettner and the “white villain” narrative. These discussions are deepened by the diverse perspectives in the class, from non-athlete casual sports observers, the diehard fans, olympic sport athletes and members of the men’s basketball team. There are students accustomed to speaking about race in an academic setting and those who are engaging in these conversations in a classroom for the first time.
“The racial component of sports, I’d never really considered,” said Emily Zhen, a senior currently in the course.
A changed perspective
Wallace pushes all of his students, but especially the men’s basketball players.
“Well, this class is about you, so you’re gonna be here in this class. We’re talking about you. You need to say something here,” he said.
As the course gets deeper into the semester, focus shifts to the current student-athlete experience, though “student athlete,” is a term Wallace won’t use. The 2023 iteration last fall discussed the news of Dartmouth men’s basketball’s unionization, the concept of athletes as employees and their labor rights. The House settlement and NCAA pay-for-play legality has led the current class down that road.
“I want them to be able to articulate themselves on complex topics, because we often look for athletes to have opinions on issues going on in society,” Wallace said of the players. “So I want them, whether they know it or not, to be able to articulate themselves and what they believe outside of the constraints of media relations, and have everybody in the classroom know we’re sharing this thing together.”
Being a Duke sports fan, especially a Cameron Crazie, is more than a passion for some. For tenters, maybe obsession is a better descriptor. But the context in which most Duke students understand the program is limited.
One day, Mackey’s class went around the room sharing their previous tent names. Undergraduates who are camping out for the Duke-North Carolina game must name their group, and the themes tend to be puns on current players’ names.
“When we’re all going around the room and half of the table is filled with men’s basketball players who these names are about, or maybe for, it can feel very different to say those like funny things,” Mackey said. “And that’s like not to say that anyone has problematic tent names. I think it’s more that oftentimes these players can become like characters or like celebrities.”
The assignments in Wallace’s class vary from NIL research, to a stereotype and implicit bias survey of the students’ peers, to an “audit” of Duke athletics facilities to identify what pieces of its history are missing from public view. The absence of information on Claiborne and his Duke experience as a whole was one such void that the Story+ team attempted to fill. The class’s final project is a proposal for the men’s basketball program and athletics as a whole to increase awareness of historical context and recognize silenced voices. Similar projects were featured by the Black in Blue initiative from a course titled “Race and the Business of College Sports,” including an analysis of the white villain narrative and a history of Black female athletes at Duke.
“There’s a space for us to talk about these histories that have happened, these histories that are being made, and being able to share those with a broader public, with [Duke] fans,” Wallace said. “Educating [Duke] fans around the world that this thing isn’t just Xs and Os, but it impacts people’s lives, and people who have participated in this program have impacted the lives of many and changed society.”
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Rachael Kaplan is a Trinity senior and a senior editor of The Chronicle's 120th volume.