Saturday morning, amateur hoopsters from Duke and N.C. Central University will get together on the NCCU campus for a day of basketball.
And a history lesson.
It's the Bull City Showdown, an effort by students at both campuses to hang out together, have a good time, find common ground, etc. They'll do this by drawing inspiration from the first time Duke and NCCU students played basketball together.
It was 1944, and whites and blacks simply did NOT do that sort of thing. Jim Crow laws forbid it.
But, as historian Scott Ellsworth first revealed in a stunning 1996 New York Times Magazine article, a clandestine game between the black team from NCCU - then the N.C. College for Negroes - and the all-white team from Duke's medical school did occur, behind locked doors.
For more, check out today's story in the N&O.
