Strong Inside: The True Story of How Perry Wallace Broke College Basketball’s Color Line

Dear Dear Readers: To accurately and vividly convey the racism that Perry Wallace and others encountered during certain scenes described in this book, the derogatory language they heard at the time is included here without edits. It would be a disservice to the reader and the heroes of this story to whitewash history by sanitizing these epithets.

Chapter 1 A Dangerous Place

IF YOU TAKE A LOOK at the Vanderbilt University basketball schedule for the 1966-67 season and search for the game dated February 27, you’ll see it was the day the Vanderbilt Commodores traveled to Starkville, Mississippi, to play the Mississippi State Bulldogs. But that day meant something much different to one member of the Vanderbilt basketball team.
For Perry Wallace, February 27, 1967, will always be remembered as the day he visited hell on earth.
From the very moment Vanderbilt’s flight from Nashville landed in Mississippi, a dangerous place for African Americans ever since the days of slavery, it was obvious the plane had delivered Wallace and his only other black teammate, Godfrey Dillard, straight into the heart of intolerance.
When the small propeller plane landed on a gravel runway surrounded by tall trees, Dillard thought, This place is backwoods. From the airport, a bus delivered the Commodores to their hotel, where a group of white students milled around, yelling at Wallace and Dillard and banging on the bus. As the Vanderbilt players walked into the Holiday Inn, all the white folks in the lobby turned around and stared at the two black players. They could not have felt more unwelcome.
Sleep did not come easily for Wallace and Dillard that night. As members of Vanderbilt’s freshman basketball team (in those days, freshmen couldn’t play on the varsity), they were about to become the first African American basketball players ever to play a Southeastern Conference game in the state of Mississippi.
Prior to the trip, Wallace told a Nashville sportswriter that he hadn’t thought much about what might lay ahead in Starkville. “Schoolwork and basketball practice keep a man’s mind on other things,” he said. “However, I certainly do wonder just what sort of reception we’ll get.”
In truth, Wallace had thought quite a bit about the trip, bracing himself for the hatred he suspected he and Dillard would encounter. “You knew you were going to get hit in some way,” he recalled years later. “It was just a question of how bad was it going to be.”

Chapter 2
Short 26th

BEFORE THAT UGLY DAY IN Starkville, before Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. even came into this world, there was Short 26th, just a stub of a road in Nashville, Tennessee. Perry’s story begins in a little house on a dead-end street on the other side of the tracks.
His parents, Perry Wallace Sr. and Hattie Haynes Wallace, had come to Nashville from rural Rutherford County, Tennessee, not long after their marriage in 1928.
The Wallaces lived in North Nashville, the city’s center of black life, and one road-Jefferson Street-was the place where everything happened. In a segregated society where whites treated blacks as second-class citizens, this was where Black Power, a movement that emphasized self-empowerment for African Americans, flourished long before the slogan was invented. Living in the “black cocoon,” as Perry Wallace described it, meant buying from black-owned businesses, entering the front doors of black movie theaters, eating in black restaurants. Inside the cocoon, poor as it was, there were no whites-only lunch counters or back-alley entrances. Rather, there were black institutions like Isom’s Beauty Shop, Frank White’s Cleaners, and the Ritz Theater. The leading black entertainers of the mid-twentieth century, from Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Nat King Cole to Little Richard and Ella Fitzgerald, included Nashville on their tours.
Perry Sr. and Hattie made a life in this cocoon. It was humble-this was Short 26th after all. Their house was small-living room, bedroom, kitchen, bedroom, porch-but soon enough it filled up with kids. First there was Annie, who became known simply as Sister, and then along came James, known as Brother, and Bessie, Jessie, and Ruby Jean.
Perry Sr. and Hattie lived a wholesome life, and they were determined, despite the temptations of the city, that their children would do the same. Of all the traditions and values in the Wallace home, the two most important were religion and education. The children went to Sunday school, read the Bible, and attended services with their mother. The Wallaces believed that a strong education was a necessary ingredient if their children were to succeed in a society that not only was becoming more fast-paced but also was engineered to restrict opportunities for black people. The Wallace kids were smart, so smart that they encountered more than a few strange looks from some neighbors. Were those really French-, Spanish-, and German-language records you could hear Annie practicing with when you walked past the little house on Short 26th? What was that all about? That family was different.
On February 19, 1948, this straitlaced family of seven got quite a surprise: Perry Eugene Wallace Jr. was born at Meharry Hospital.
Can a birth really be that much of a surprise?
For some, it was quite unexpected, given that the eldest Wallace child, Annie, was a sophomore in college and the youngest, Ruby Jean, had been born ten years earlier.
As his older brother and sisters eventually all moved out of the house, Perry became extremely close to his parents; the love and values Hattie passed along to her son began to shape his behavior. In a world of chaos, much of it soon to be directed at him, he would remain above the fray. Some observers would later remark on Perry’s unflappable character when they saw him remain cool under pressure in hostile places like Oxford, Mississippi, and Auburn, Alabama.
They should have seen him in kindergarten.