50 Years Later, A Celebration of Nashville’s Most Significant Game

On Jan. 4, 1965, Perry Wallace’s Pearl High School team took on Father Ryan High School at Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium. The day was significant – on that same day in Washington, D.C., president Johnson outlined his “Great Society” vision in his State of the Union Address. In Nashville, A.W. Willis Jr. took his place at the state capitol as the first African American state legislator since Reconstuction. And at Municipal, the only arena in town large enough to host the spectacle, Pearl and Ryan played the first-ever basketball game between a black school and a predominantly white one in Nashville history. To mark the 50^th anniversary of this game, Father Ryan will take on what is now Pearl-Cohn High School in a varsity game at the auditorium on Jan 5, 2015. In conjunction with the game, the Nashville Sports Council will host a panel discussion on the game’s significance, and the Nashville Public Library will display photos and other artifacts from the era. The star player on the Father Ryan team in 1965 was Willie Brown, an African American student who was a great neighborhood friend to the Pearl players. Father Ryan had integrated its student body in the fall of 1954 and was the first white school in the state to integrate its athletic teams. After losing to Father Ryan on a last-second shot in the historic game, Pearl went on to win the “black state championship” in 1965 and then in 1966 went undefeated and won the first integrated state tournament in Tennessee history. Coming off those consecutive state championships, Wallace, who was also the valedictorian of his senior class, was one of the most highly recruited high schoolers in the country, eventually electing to make history at Vanderbilt as the first African American basketball player in the SEC. Check out more on the reunion events and watch game tape of the 1965 game here.