Every March, we fill out brackets, argue over which team will make the Final Four, and watch Black players as they are cheered on by mostly white fan bases. But there is one thing you will not see during the NCAA’s Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament: the schools that were once home to Black basketball talent.
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There was a time when an elite player like Earl Monroe chose Winston-Salem State over Duke. Or when an intimidating center like Willis Reed picked Grambling State over Kansas. HBCUs were not footnotes in March. They were the stage.
Sure, Howard University, Prairie View A&M and Tennessee State are in this year’s field of 68 teams that made the big dance. But now the tournament is full of Black bodies, just not many Black institutions.
What happened? Something our ancestors fought for: integration. It allowed us to attend schools we were once unable to attend. But it destroyed HBCUs’ ability to compete on the highest level.
March Madness did not integrate all at once. It happened slowly over many years, but 1966 was the tipping point. That was the year the Texas Western Miners, now UTEP, started five Black players and beat the Kentucky Wildcats, coached by Adolph Rupp, for the national title.
Rupp was a legendary coach in college basketball, but was resistant to including Black players on his team. That loss became a defining moment in both his legacy and the integration of the sport. (If you want to see it play out, watch Glory Road, an underappreciated film that dramatizes the story.)
After predominantly white programs saw that Black players could help them win at the highest level, they did not just invite them to try out. They recruited them aggressively and reshaped the talent pipeline. By the early 1970s, integration was not just symbolic. It was structural.
By the end of the decade, Black players were not just in March Madness. They were central to who won it.
As Black talent left, so did everything that made HBCU athletic programs viable at the highest level. The very schools that built their reputations on developing elite players were locked out of the ecosystem they helped create.
Television deals followed the bigger, whiter institutions. Money followed television. And HBCUs, once destinations, became afterthoughts, reduced to early round exits or paycheck games that helped fund their athletic departments but were not enough to build them big enough to make them competitive.
Now, in the age of NIL and pseudo-professional student athletes, HBCUs cannot compete for the best talent. Not unless an athlete makes a conscious decision to choose a historically Black college.
March Madness is full of Black excellence. It’s just not rooted in Black institutions anymore. That was not an accident. It was the cost of access.
Straight From 
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