Adolph Rupp Was Not A Racist According To Paris Western Players

By Jeanine Scott The Bourbon County Citizen
Published August 6, 2020

Upset by the news on ESPN and other national news outlets that there is a push by some of the faculty at the University of Kentucky to rename Rupp Arena because of Rupp’s alleged history as a racist, former Paris Western High School basketball player Allen Lewis contacted me to try and set the record straight.

“I don’t know what research those people did or where that is coming from exactly, but I hate to see the man’s name slandered,” said Allen Lewis, who was on the 1954 Western High School basketball team. Western High School was the school in Bourbon County for black students before educational segregation ended in the 1960s.

Lewis wasn’t on the WHS basketball team in 1953 when the team won the National Negro High School Basketball Championship but he accompanied the team when they went to Tennessee A & I (later Tennessee State) to play for the national championship. That trip led him to a decision to attend college there and after graduation, he moved to New York City and eventually became a principal in the city’s school system.

Lewis said that Coach Rupp contacted the Western HS coach, William “Chief” Reed in 1953 and asked to speak at the team’s banquet that year.

According to Lewis, Rupp and Reed had worked together in the past, most notably in 1950 when Jim Tucker nicknamed (J.D.), an outstanding basketball player at Western, was getting ready to graduated.

“Rupp talked to Coach Reed and said he’d like J.D. to play on his team at the University of Kentucky,” he said, “But since that would have made him the first black player in the SEC, he has to talk to the SEC first and they said no— that they weren’t ready for that.”

Lewis said the Rupp could have stopped at that point— he had nothing to gain by helping Tucker if he couldn’t play for UK.

“But he contacted the coach at Duquesne, who was a friend of his, and recommended that they offer Jim a basketball scholarship,” he said.

The coach, Chick Davies, took Rupp’s advice and Tucker was offered a basketball scholarship. Tucker’s stories basketball career at Duquesne included being a two-time All-America. After college, he was drafted into the NBA as one of only two black players in the league at that time. He won an NBA championship as a rookie with the Syracuse Nationals in 1955.

Tucker said in later interviews that he did not think Adolph Rupp was a racist and thought that he was unfairly branded as one. Tucker died at the age of 87 in May of this year.

“There aren’t too many Western High School basketball players left,” said Lewis, “and I just wanted people to know about our experiences with Coach Rupp.”