The Awakening

By USC Athletics Black History Month

February 9^th, 2022

In the 1940s and 50s, being good at sports was not good enough for Black athletes. Navigating the storm of desegregation in sports would be a greater test of their courage, determination and temperament than their athleticism.

Jackie Robinson created the mold and Verne Ashby followed it.

Ashby grew up in Los Angeles in the long wake of Robinson and others who had broken the color barrier in sports and society, but those waves had not truly crashed upon USC’s shores yet. Ashby’s high school, Manual Arts, just a few blocks from USC was a far more diverse institution with its student body broken almost evenly between Black, white and Asian.

Of course, USC had dipped a toe back in the 1920s - most notably with football’s first All-American Brice Taylor - but that awakening was short-lived and it would be decades before the athletic programs truly tackled integration.

Like Robinson, Ashby was more than an athlete. He was the student body president as a senior in high school and elite academically. But he could hoop too, guiding Manual Arts to the 1958 City Championship and making All-City in the process.

He was coveted up and down the coast as a basketball recruit, scouted and offered by every major university except for Stanford, which had never had a Black player at that time. He even drew interest from national powerhouse programs like Kansas, where he was hosted by Wilt Chamberlain on his visit.

Originally, Ashby was going to Cal to play for legendary head coach Pete Newell, but Newell confessed that he was close to retirement so Ashby decided to stay home and go to the school down the street, USC.

“I was going into a situation where I didn’t know what to expect,” Ashby said about USC’s very limited history with Black student-athletes.

At that point, Ashby received a call from a man he had never met, Herman Hill. A couple years after Taylor’s glory on the gridiron, Hill was USC’s first Black basketball player. Ashby would be the second.

“After I went to USC, he called me up and wanted to give me his story. We went out to dinner and talked,” Ashby said about Hill. “Herman Hill’s advice was that you have to deal with the environment that you are in.”

Hill’s environment was undoubtedly different than Ashby’s, but USC had not progressed as quickly as the community around it. For Black students, it was a business relationship, a commuter school for the locals like Ashby who slept every night in his childhood home on Exposition and Arlington.

“I was knowledgeable enough to realize that things were conservative and different there,” Ashby said of his college experience. “I wasn’t going to be invited to join a fraternity. I wasn’t going to be able to get involved in things on campus. It was not a socializing place that I spent a lot of time at.”

Ashby described a USC campus where “you could probably see every Black student that you knew” by walking the campus each day. On the basketball court, he was the only Black student.

But, the nature of team sports is different. To succeed, he had to ingratiate himself to the locker room and his teammates had to accept him. And they did.

“I didn’t feel neglected. I felt part of the team,” Ashby said.

It helped that he was part of one of the best recruiting classes in school history, a group of players who dominated the Los Angeles high school basketball scene the previous year. And, they had immediate success on the court, going 13-2 as a freshman team while breaking scoring records.

As a junior, Ashby inked his place in USC men’s basketball history like any great Trojan does, beating UCLA in an overtime classic. After that, the newspapers dubbed him “Jumping Jack” Ashby.

While Ashby had endeared himself to the locker room, that camaraderie and loyalty would be put to the test. Los Angeles was not perfect, but it was a safe haven by comparison to the civil rights struggles boiling up in the South.

As the team got set for the 1962 season, which included road trips to Kentucky and Houston, Ashby would be confronted by the ugliness of segregation. He was undaunted but also uncertain of what was to come.

The trip to Lexington was a success. The Trojans handed legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp a rare home loss, 79-77, thanks in large part to Ashby’s clutch free throws late in the game.

“The Kentucky experience was fine,” Ashby said. “We stayed in a hotel that happened to be on campus. No one paid much attention to us, but it was pretty clear that there were only white people in the audience and no Black players on their team.”

Later in the season, USC travelled to Houston for a pair of games that did not go quite as smoothly.

“The trip to Houston was different. When we arrived in Houston, the coaches were informed that the hotels were segregated and we were not welcome to stay in any hotels if I was there,” Ashby said. “I had to stay in a dorm.”

The team put it to a vote. And in a show of unity, they all stayed in the campus dormitory with Ashby.

“It was wonderful. It was a strong act,” Ashby said of of his teammates’ support. “They wouldn’t have played if Houston had not found a way to resolve the sleeping situation.”

The experience in Houston changed Ashby’s perspective forever.

“That was the first time I had to face the segregation issue hands-on, directly. That was the first slap in the face moment where I realized this was a serious situation that I would have to deal with for the rest of my life and that I couldn’t waltz through it like I did in Los Angeles.”

Ashby, who recently turned 82, did anything but waltz through the rest of his life. He became politically active after he was asked to help President John F. Kennedy during his visit to the USC campus. Ashby also joined the Skull & Dagger society and earned a spot in the Blue Key honors society. He graduated from USC, majoring in history with a minor in education, and went on to collect an MBA from Harvard Business School.

His career path took him across the globe, living in Sweden for a stretch, but he ultimately returned home where he now lives with his wife, Helena, who he met at USC. She has a story of her own to tell, named the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department’s first female division chief in 1995.