Baseball wasn't Sweet Lou's first love. Like most every boy raised in Lexington, Kentucky, he dreamed of playing basketball for Adolph Rupp at UK. The oldest of five children, four boys and one girl, Louis Brown Johnson graduated from Dunbar High in 1951—three years before the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in Brown v. the Board of Education. His father was a laborer, a custodian at the university. His mother earned what she could as a cook in the fraternity houses near campus and in a local high school. "We didn't starve," said Johnson in the March 1966 issue of Sport magazine, "but there wasn't any caviar or silver spoons either."
The Lexington of his youth had a community of black merchants, doctors, lawyers and insurance salesmen. It had a black-owned baseball team—the Lexington Hustlers—that fielded a few white players. But Sweet Lou was acutely aware of the boundaries of his world. "You learned Yes and No. Weren't no Maybes," he said.* "Yes, you can. No, you can't."
As a child, Sweet Lou idolized Alex Groza and Wallace "Wah Wah" Jones of the Kentucky's back-to-back championship teams of 1948 and '49. But the lavish perks that Adolph Rupp, the Baron of the Bluegrass, dangled in front of star athletes—the education, the future, the glory—were not open to young guards from Lexington's Pralltown neighborhood. Boys like Johnson were not permitted to freely walk the campus much less set foot in the arena. Rupp paid plenty of lip service to the ideals of integration, but he refused to do anything that might upset the South's precious status quo. He walked Pralltown's streets, handing out tickets to the circus, but refused to part with a single basketball scholarship. Long after his peers in the Southeastern Conference had advised him to integrate the team, after the president of the university had pressured him to do it, he did not have the courage to do so—not even for a once-in-a-lifetime recruit like Connie Hawkins. "I'm sorry he didn't see fit to open the door to blacks," Johnson's high school coach S.T. Roach said.** "With his stature, he could have made all the difference in the world."
No, to set foot inside Rupp's famous arena, Sweet Lou Johnson had to dress himself up as a janitor. In his early teens, he donned a white jacket, grabbed a latrine brush and made his way across campus to the Coliseum. "I got to the floor of that arena," he said.* "Got to the floor with that white jacket. But I had no voice. I cheered silently."
In 1950, Johnson piloted Dunbar High's basketball team to a state championship. The all-white squad from nearby Lafayette High won a state title, too, the very same year. Johnson and his Bearcat teammates tailed them all over town, pleading for a showdown. The state's true champ was ultimately decided on a playground. "We beat their asses," Johnson said.
Source List:
*After Jackie: Pride, Prejudice, and Baseball's Forgotten Heroes: An Oral History
by Cal Fussman**And the Walls Came Tumbling Down: The Basketball Game That Changed American Sports
by Frank Fitzpatrick
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