GEORGE RAVELING

Owning "The Dream"

By USC Athletics Black History Month

February 4^th, 2015

In 1986, George Raveling became the first African-American head coach in the history of USC men’s basketball. He was a pioneer in his own right earning the prestigious John W. Bunn Lifetime Achievement Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

“He wasn’t just a coach, he was a role model,” George Mason head coach Paul Hewitt told Sports Illustrated. “He showed a lot of white administrators that they could hire other black coaches who could represent their universities well.”

But while Coach Rav has enjoyed a distinguished career in and around basketball, including his current role as Nike’s director of international basketball, his most lasting legacy came outside the world of hoops.

Raveling was in the right place at the right time to not only witness history, but capture it. He was hired to do security for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, and ended up standing nearly shoulder-to-shoulder with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as he projected four of the most powerful words in the history of oratory, “I have a dream…”

Seconds after the speech ended, with “free at last” still ringing in the ears of the transfixed crowd, Raveling found himself eye-to-eye with King, and summoned the courage to ask him for the original speech. King obliged, and Raveling has held onto those precious pages ever since.