Doc: Justice for Oscar Robertson, 60 years removed

The 76-year-old man and his high school teammates will board a parade float Saturday and travel back in time. Justice delayed doesn't have to be justice denied, even if the delay amounts to 60 years.

In 1955, Oscar Robertson led Crispus Attucks High of Indianapolis to a state basketball championship, the first ever by an all-black school in Indiana. Tradition mandated the champs be honored with a parade, starting at Hinkle Fieldhouse on the Butler University campus, pausing at Monument Circle downtown, where players would hop off the float long enough to mingle with fans and take pictures.

Tradition didn't account for an all-black team winning it all. The Attucks team circled Monument once and was not allowed off the float, which after that headed to Indiana Avenue and the black area of town.

"There was this fear that if the truck stopped and we got out, we were going to tear up the city,'' Robertson's teammate Willie Merriweather explained several years ago, in a story for ESPN.com. "They wanted to get us back to our own neighborhood as soon as possible. No one has forgotten that.''

Oscar Robertson says he has. Sort of. Or maybe he has simply decided to forgive. Sixty years is a long time to stay mad about anything. The city has named him and his surviving Attucks teammates grand marshals of the Indy 500 Parade. They can get off the float at Monument Circle. Or anywhere they want. Robertson reacts to that with a smile and a shrug.

What will it mean to you, I wonder.

"Now? Not a lot. I'm doing this for other guys on the team. If they'd have asked me by myself, I don't know if I'd do it.

"They didn't treat us the way champions should be treated. They cut a deal with the high school. I didn't realize it. I was 16 years old. I was naïve.''

In '56, Attucks went undefeated and won the state title again. Faced with the same parade restriction, Robertson opted simply to go home. "I knew what they were doing. I didn't want to take part in it. They didn't care to have us celebrate like everyone else, fine,'' he recalls.

Playing at UC was much the same. The difference between staying on the parade float and being barred from a hotel in Houston was only a matter of degree. Robertson slept in a dorm room at Texas Southern that night, and the next day blew off warmups, for the only time in his career. He pondered not playing in the game, too.

"I was taken by surprise, when I didn't stay at that hotel. I thought the coach was joking. I thought the whole team had to leave. Then they said, No, we don't want you'.''

When the Bearcats played at North Texas State, someone tossed a black cat into their locker room. The Big Naïve O thought the cat was there to keep away rats. "That's why people had cats in my neighborhood,'' he says.

And so on. Robertson could eat here, but not there. He could go to this theatre, but not that one. The indignities then are unfathomable now, for all but those who lived with them. Oscar Robertson has never been a man to make peace with indignities. Only now, on this gray day at the Montgomery Inn Boathouse, maybe he has.

"I didn't know any whites in high school,'' he says. "I went to school and church, and in the summers I went to my grandparents farm'' north of Nashville. "Everyone was black.

"You grow up in the South, you ride in the back of the bus, the back of the train. You couldn't go into any of the restaurants on the way down to Nashville. Couldn't go into any restaurants in Nashville. I couldn't go inside the bus station in Nashville. When I got off the bus, my relatives were there to pick me up.''

None of it bothered him. Robertson was a kid, living in the kid cocoon of family, friends and community. "I was happy and naïve,'' he says. "You're playing ball. You're with your team. You're happy. A lot of these racial things you don't find out about until later. Then you start asking questions.''

You don't always get the answers you'd like, because there is no justifying what occurred half a century ago. Not allowing kids to get off a parade float to celebrate a title?

"It's life. Things happen. You can't stop,'' Robertson says.

Saturday will be nice, he agrees. He will see six or seven of his teammates from 1955, three from '56. He stays in touch with them "quite a bit.'' He still has his letter jacket and his championship rings.

And of course, his memories. Oscar Robertson will re-live one Saturday. This one will be better. It only took 60 years.