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ShareThe Father of Fast Break Beat Segregation
Joanna McLendon
On a crisp fall day in 1933, two black men stepped out of a modest middle-class home on Kansas City’s Haskell street. Both were named John B. McLendon. Fifty-one-year-old railroad mail clerk John, Sr. got behind the wheel of his automobile, and 18-year-old John, Jr. slid into the passenger’s seat. Father and son drove west past the meat-packing plants of the “Rattlebone Hollow” neighborhood, pointing the shiny, new DeSoto toward the town of Lawrence, where John the younger was beginning his studies at the University of Kansas. It was an easy enough forty-mile drive.
Decades later, John McLendon, Jr. told his friend and biographer Milton Katz what his father said as he was packing to leave. “Go up there and do what everybody else does, and try to do it in a...