Forgotten High School Basketball Champs In Stillwater Get To Celebrate 68 Years Later

Their coach said to keep quiet and play as spectators for the other team yelled racial slurs at the Washington Bears basketball team in 1956. That didn't change when the Washington High School team kept winning on the road to the title.

Fast forward 68 years later, and the line to get into the gym at the Stillwater Community Center is long on a Saturday night in February.

But a few minutes won’t matter after waiting several decades for this celebration.

“Oh yeah, long time,” Laughs John Cook and Charles McGlory.

A long time since the two played high school basketball for the Washington Bears.

“You don't realize something like this is going to come back,” said Cook. “When it happened, we got a team trophy, and then we thought that was it, and then now all of this.”

This night brings the crowd back to 1956 when the Washington High School Bears won the Class C Basketball State Championships in Oklahoma.

Back then, the players didn’t get the honor they deserved.

“You have to keep in mind the context: 1956, we're two years after the Brown vs. Board of Education,” said Dr. Laura Arata, a Professor of History at Oklahoma State University. “But we’re two years before Clara Luper sits in at the Katz drugstore and demands to receive service at the counter, so it’s very early in the civil rights movement in Oklahoma.”

The all Black players on the Washington Bears were competing against all-white teams for the very first time. They heard far more than cheers.    

“The n-word, all of that we were called all of that while we were playing, and our coach Tom Watkins said to us, you all just play, don't retaliate, don't say anything, just play,” recalled teammate John Reed Jr. “And of course, we kept winning. We kept quiet. We played ball.”

Instead of being welcomed home to Stillwater when they won it all, Reed Jr. remembers crosses burning in his neighborhood.

“Those three tournaments really helped me and encouraged me to become a fighter,” said Reed Jr., who went on to protest throughout the civil rights movement. “It encouraged me to stand.”

The year after the Bears won, integration in Stillwater began. Black students left their teachers and The Washington School behind. 

The last four living members of the team now have championship rings, but their story will be told decades from now.

Stillwater has formed a committee to begin the process of preserving the historic all-Black school, and the alumni association plans to hang the banner of the player who won the championship from the rafters.   

“It’s unbelievable, it’s overwhelming,” said Cook.

Their celebration might have been decades too late, but their legacy will last.

“I'm a bear!” yelled surviving player James Reed. “And I want the world to know.”

Related Story: Preserving Stillwater's Forgotten All-Black School Building