by Kerry Speckman // Photo by Rich Clarkson/NCAA Photos
Having grown up in the tiny town of Chipley, Florida, just south of the Alabama border, basketball legend Artis Gilmore knew all too much about segregation, discrimination and prejudice.
“It was tough back then, very difficult. When I was a kid, you never spoke to a white person unless they spoke to you first,” he says. “I remember separate bathrooms [for blacks and whites]. If we wanted to go to a restaurant, we had to use the back entrance.” Even in college, he recalls, he and a black friend were denied entry to a whites-only bar in South Carolina and were forced to wait in the parking lot for hours while their white classmates partied inside. “We understood there were ‘rules,’” he adds, “and we didn’t really have a choice.”
At the age of 18, Gilmore, who stood 7’2”, enrolled at Gardner-Webb Junior College in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where he excelled. But in his sophomore year, he joined friend and teammate Ernie Fleming on a scouting trip to Jacksonville University.
The mindset wasn’t much different in Jacksonville with black students being told not to cross the bridge or go Downtown—for their own safety. However, Gilmore was so impressed with the school and team head coach Joe Williams—and Fleming, who was redshirted for the first year—he transferred to JU for the 1969-1970 season. Pembrook Burrows left Gardner-Webb for JU just prior.
When Gilmore and 7-foot-tall Burrows (a.k.a. the Original Twin Towers) joined the team’s first black player Chip Dublin on the squad, JU became the first integrated college in the country to start three black players. To put things in perspective, there was only one black basketball player in all of the SEC at the time. By doing so, they sparked the “magical season” that would not only leave an indelible mark on collegiate sports but also race relations in Jacksonville and beyond.
JU alumnus Frank Pace experienced it, too, but as a spectator. A native of New York and white, he had never heard of, let alone seen, bathrooms or water fountains designated solely for whites before coming to Jacksonville. “My memories of that time are of a city [named for] Andrew Jackson, who ravaged the Seminole Indians and rid them of their land,” he recalls. “And there were schools named for Robert E. Lee and Nathan B. Forrest, allegedly, the first grand dragon of the KKK … It was eye-opening.”
Despite Pace’s initial impressions of the city, it wasn’t long before he began to see positive changes in tensions between blacks and whites. When the JU basketball team began to win, race relations improved, as fans united for a common goal—perhaps for the first time in Jacksonville—supporting their hometown team.
“Jacksonville really didn’t have an identity at the time. They didn’t have anything like they do now with the Jaguars,” says Pace. “The city was searching for something, an identity, and they found it in this team. They united this city.”
During that 1969-1970 season, the Dolphins defeated much larger and better funded schools. (More accurately, Gilmore says, JU “annihilated them.”) The team averaged more than 100 points per game for the entire season, the first college team to do so. One of their 27 wins came as a result of a forfeit when Georgetown refused to return to the court after a firsthalf fight that left their star player bloodied and shaken.
Finishing the regular season with just one loss, JU found themselves playing UCLA, a powerhouse coached by the legendary John Wooden, for the NCAA Tournament title game in College Park, Maryland. Oddly, the players themselves weren’t all that surprised. In fact, Gilmore says he knew the team could go all the way before the season even started.
But for Jacksonville, JU’s rise to national prominence was, as Gilmore says, “a galvanizing factor” in changing the culture and improving race relations in the community.
And it was precisely this change in attitude, not simply the team’s Cinderella story, that inspired Pace, now an Emmy Award-nominated producer living in Los Angeles and his producing partner Steve Brodeur (also a JU alum), to make the documentary Jacksonville Who?
Pace and Brodeur spent years doing research, gathering photos and film and interviewing players and other Jax notables who experienced the magic including former sheriff Nat Glover; Alvin Brown, former mayor of Jacksonville; Fran Kinne, then-president of JU; and the late Jay Thomas, a JU alum and Emmy Award-winning actor.
“When I saw Artis Gilmore, Pembrook Burrows and Chip Dublin on the basketball team, that was, in effect, a chipping away at this society of segregation here in Jacksonville,” Glover says in the film.
Jacksonville Who? was screened for a private audience at Jacksonville University in November and will make its public debut on February 20 at 8 PM on the NBA Network, as part of its Black History Month programming.
