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Kente Cloth Jerseys, Street Hoops and ‘Blackness’ at an Elite

But the fear, back then, had as much to do with race as hoops. Georgetown basketball under John Thompson was always intertwined with racial politics. That was inevitable when an elite Eastern university, then as now overwhelmingly white, started fielding teams made up almost exclusively of black players. When Thompson came to Georgetown in 1972, he wasn’t plucked from some other sideline legend’s “coaching tree.” Rather, he had been plying his trade at a tiny Catholic high school in northeast Washington, D.C., at a time when the only notable black coaches were Lenny Wilkens and Bill Russell—both player/coaches for NBA teams.

Mediocre Georgetown teams composed of white parochial-school graduates soon became a relic. Thompson recruited inner-city black players, often well after they’d graduated high school. (He had to wait for one of his first recruits, Mike Riley, to finish a hitch in the Navy.) The Hoyas’ rise came shortly after the founding of the Big East Conference in 1979. Before the Big East, Georgetown was part of the sprawling Eastern College Athletic Conference, which represented more than 200 schools. As part of the Big East, Georgetown played regularly against the finest black players from New York and Philadelphia, helping to market the Hoyas to both recruits and East Coast hoops fans. By the late ’70s, the Hoyas were starting an all-black five. Soon, African-American basketball players—Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd, Fred Brown, Reggie Williams—became the university’s most visible symbol. Perhaps most visible was Michael Graham, a substitute on the 1984 team, who was the spitting image of every Angry Black Man stereotype: He was the bald-headed, bruising spark plug on a championship squad before academic troubles forced him to transfer away.

Around the time Georgetown won the 1984 national championship, the university trademarked the Hoyas name and snarling-bulldog logo. This was the first college sports team to become a brand—and it was a tremendously lucrative one. By the early ’90s, Georgetown apparel outsold even schools with powerhouse football programs. Georgetown Starter jackets sold well across the country, but the team’s image was especially resonant in black America. Not only was this an all-black team with a black coach, the Hoyas also played in a majority-black city run by a black mayor. Thompson took a well-publicized stand against Proposition 42 , an NCAA rule change that he believed would threaten black athletes by imposing higher academic standards. Eventually the racial cues became more overt, most famously in the kente-cloth-trimmed uniforms of the Iverson era.

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