On Sunday morning March 12, 1944, the men’s basketball team from the North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina Central University) competed against a squad from the Duke School of Medicine on the campus of NCCU. Only the teams, the coaches, and the referee were allowed inside the gymnasium. A few students watched through a window. It was the first racially integrated college-level basketball game in the South.
Historian and Duke alumnus Scott Ellsworth wrote about the historic game in a New York Times Magazine article published on March 31, 1996. Read it here.
