National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament for Black Schools

From Hoopedia

National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament for Black High Schools

1 1929-1942
2 Tournament Champions
3 See Also
4 External Links

1929-1942

The National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament for Black High Schools (NIBT) was founded in 1929 by Charles E. Williams, physical education director at Hampton Institute, Hampton, Virginia. It was the first of two tournaments providing a national championship forum for African American high schools. The second Black National Interscholastic existed from 1935 to 1967, and was sponsored first by Tuskegee Institute and later Tennessee State.

The racial exclusion policies at the University of Chicago and other university-sponsored basketball tournaments was the catalyst that forced the African-American community develop its own national tournament to give recognition to schools with Black student bodies. The first four tournaments were held at Hampton Institute.

Armstrong Technical (DC) won the championship first year, competing against nine other schools—two from West Virginia, three from Virginia, and four from North Carolina. Armstrong beat Huntington Douglass (WV) for the title. The following year the field expanded to include teams from Florida and Kentucky. In a repeat of the championship game from the year before, Armstrong again defeated Douglass for the title. The black schools from West Virginia performed well, despite the state's small Black population. The Black schools in the state were the first in the nation to form a state association, in 1924, and their program obviously paid dividends later on.

In 1931 the NIBT became more national in scope when Chicago Phillips (IL) and Gary Roosevelt (IN) participated in a 14-team field. Phillips, coached by Julius Norman and led by Agis Bray, won the tournament that year. Gary Roosevelt, which took third that year, was coached by one of the best of the early African-American coaches, John Smith, and the school dominated the tournament throughout the 1930s.

The NIBT had a troubled history. The tournament was cancelled in 1932 due to flooding, and after the 1933 event Hampton dropped sponsorship due to cost. The 1934 and 1935 tournaments were played at Municipal Auditorium in Gary, Indiana, and the 1936 tournament was played at Roanoke, Virginia. The 1937 and 1938 tourneys were cancelled, but Williams revived the NIBT in 1939 at Fayetteville State College, North Carolina. It stayed there for three years, but the last tournament, in 1942, was held in Durham, North Carolina.

A rival tournament at Tuskegee Institute, Alabama, adopted the same name as Williams's tourney when it went national in 1941.

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