Roosevelt basketball team won one of South Carolina’s last segregated state championships
After his mother Nannie passed away in 1990, Charles Bryson was rummaging through the contents of her trunk.
He pulled out a folded newspaper article, stopping when he unfurled it to read the headline:
“Roosevelt’s Mighty Tigers”
Bryson beamed, his mind warping back to 1970.
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Like the yellowed newspaper article, the Roosevelt Tigers’ 1970 basketball state championship has largely been forgotten. It was the last state title claimed by a 1A black school; all of South Carolina’s schools integrated the following school year.
The 1970 championship run was a final chapter in the Roosevelt School’s history.
The school building was constructed in 1955 and enrolled students from first to 12th grade. But by 1969, black students in ninth and 10th grade were already attending Clover High School and Roosevelt’s successful basketball coach, Donald McNalley, took a job at Clover before the school year started.
“We wanted our basketball season to be at Roosevelt, since it was gonna be the last one,” Bryson said a few weeks ago. “(Clover coaches) had told us that if we came over there, they couldn’t start but maybe one or two of us.”
Integration slowly gathered speed, but it wasn’t without resistance on both sides. In 1968-69, Roosevelt students could only play baseball and football at Clover High. The Tigers weren’t allowed to have a football or baseball team, and the following year, black students could only play baseball and football at Clover High if they enrolled at the school.
“That’s another reason that made the basketball team so special,” said Bill Dulin, the team’s star center. “The only varsity sport we had that year.”
By 1970, Roosevelt had become Clover Middle School. The building was torn down in the 1990s, the open space left behind turned into a park bearing the former school’s name.
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The final basketball season at Roosevelt almost didn’t last beyond the first couple of games.
Bryson remembers the 1970 team losing its first three games. The principal called the players into the auditorium - “I was glad to go because I was in algebra class,” Bryson joked - and told them that if they lost the fourth game, the team would be disbanded and the remainder of the season forfeited.
“I don’t know if it was to scare the heck out of us or if he meant what he was saying,” said Bryson, who was a senior.
Dulin didn’t remember the exact reasons behind the principal’s meeting with the team, but he did remember there being resentment to McNalley leaving.
We had been through the trenches with coach McNalley. Then we were told in 69-70 that coach McNalley wouldn’t be the coach and that was a little bit of a setback.
Roosevelt Tiger Bill Dulin
The team captains - Bryson, Dulin and Jackie Tate - tried to rally the team around first-year coach James Carroll. He told them if they played the way McNalley taught them, they’d be winners. Carroll couldn’t offer much more than that; he didn’t have any basketball coaching experience and - only two years removed from his own college graduation - was barely older than his players.
The team took Carroll’s message to heart, ripping off 10 straight wins to reach the state final against Hardeeville’s Matthews E. West High School. The Tigers played an impenetrable 2-3 zone, learned the previous seasons from McNalley, and also switched defenses effortlessly mid-game to confuse opponents.
“We caught fire and just kind of came together,” said Dulin, who lived right on the edge of the Roosevelt school property. “All the sudden stuff just started clicking.”
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Befitting the season, the state championship - played at South Carolina State’s brand new gym, the Smith, Hammond, Middleton Memorial Center, named after the three victims of the 1968 riots in Orangeburg - was full of drama too. Roosevelt led at halftime, but West took the lead headed into the fourth quarter. Things got tricky when Dulin fouled out early in the fourth.
When the 6-foot-5 senior made his way to the bench, Carroll asked him to take a seat beside him and help coach. Did Dulin - with his innate understanding of his teammates and McNalley’s system - fouling out actually help the team win in a way?
“Oh yeah,” said Bryson, laughing.
The Tigers reshuffled their lineup, moving the 6-foot-3 Bryson to center. Trailing 72-67 with two minutes to play, Tate converted a three-point play and then added a technical foul free throw, before Marshall Sanders scored his only bucket of the game to put Roosevelt in front for good en route to a 78-75 win.
Nobody gave us a chance. I don’t think our own school gave us a chance. It was just determination.
Roosevelt Tiger Charles Bryson
reflecting on his team’s 1970 state championship--------------
Nannie Bryson only saw her son play in one basketball game. She had too much to do on the family farm, which grew pretty much everything that’s found in a grocery store’s produce section. But she kept the newspaper clippings, knowing something special when she saw it.
“Man, I don’t believe this,” Bryson said when he found the newspaper clipping. “I never even thought she had a picture, because I didn’t have one.”
Asked if Roosevelt’s accomplishments have been forgotten, Dulin said “It has been. I don’t even know whether they display the trophy or not in the trophy case.”
He was happy to learn that they do. Clover High employees pulled a couple of Roosevelt trophies out of a storage closet last winter, along with a number of other Clover sports artifacts dating back as far as the 1920s, to fill the school’s trophy cabinet in the foyer of its gym.
The bigger of the two Roosevelt trophies is actually for the 1968-69 team that went undefeated in district play and that most folks agree was the better of the two. But only the 1970 squad brought home a state championship.
It’s there in plain sight, visible to anyone curious enough to sidle up to the trophy case and take a look.
“My daughter, when we go to Clover, it would give her something to look at and see what her dad was doing in high school, and my son,” said Dulin. “It would mean a lot to the black community of Clover just to be able to reflect back on that.”
Roosevelt’s 1970 triumph still isn’t widely known. But the memories are no longer confined to a mother’s trunk or a dusty mop closet.
This story was originally published March 1, 2016 at 11:02 AM with the headline "Roosevelt basketball team won one of South Carolina’s last segregated state championships."