Attucks!: Oscar Robertson and the Basketball Team That Awakened a City by Phillip Hoose
on October 23rd 2018
ISBN: 0374306125
Pages: 224
Goodreads

Using newspaper articles, photographs, and personal interviews, Hoose tells a compelling story of race, sport, and triumph in the face of adversity. The book revolves around the high school basketball scene in Indiana in the 1940s and 50s. With no professional sports teams in Indiana, communities in Indiana were mad for basketball and the high school basketball scene was fiercely competitive. It was also fiercely white. With school segregation in its heyday in Indiana, there were schools and then there were all-black schools and teams from the two spheres rarely met on the same field or court. Hoose centers his story at Crispus Attucks High School, an all-black school in Indianapolis that built a powerful, championship-caliber team that eventually helped force the integration of the basketball scene because if you were the best in your league (read: white school) but you had not played the best team in the state (read: Attucks Tigers) were you truly the best? This book will appeal to fans of narrative nonfiction and to those who appreciate reading about a group of people whose mantra became “Respect all, but back down from no one.” Highly recommend for high school and adult collections.

Reviewed by Jill O’Connor, Merrill Memorial Library, Yarmouth