Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:4 (Fall 2011).
Abstract
During the school year of 1967-68, African American basketball sensations John Biddle, Willie Frazier, Dwaine Dillard, Roy Hunter, and Phil Griffin electrified the predominantly white student body, coaches, and administrators of Omaha Central High School. These five "Rhythm Boys" and the racially tense times they lived through inspired Steve Marantz, a 1966 Omaha Central graduate, to write an examination of the first-string basketball players and the surrounding discrimination and racism they faced on and off the court. It was a year in which their high-school principal, J. Arthur Nelson, privately referred to black students as "Smoky Swedes" and employed only one black teacher, Wilda Stephenson, who taught typing and business classes as part of the school's college-prep curriculum. Marantz's study effectively uses the ratio of the sole black instructor to the rest of the white teachers as an example of imbalance of opportunity and the rampant inequality in Omaha, a typical segregated city in 1960s America.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.