Lawrence resident Leonard Monroe remembers playing basketball during the days of Jim Crow as a member of the Promoters, an all-black high school basketball team active from the 1920s until the 1950s.

Leonard Monroe could run.

During his high school days in the late ’40s, Monroe reckons he was the second-fastest quarter miler in the state of Kansas. The only one faster was Wyandotte High School’s Frank Cindrich, he’s quick to recall.

Graduating from Lawrence High School in 1950, Monroe was awarded several athletic scholarships, but none to the school of his choice.

Lawrence resident Leonard Monroe remembers playing basketball during the days of Jim Crow as a member of the Promoters, an all-black high school basketball team active from the 1920s until the 1950s.

“Oh, I got a lot of scholarships, but they were all to black schools,” he said. “I wanted to go to KU because they had the best track team in the world.”

Passing on each scholarship extended his way, Monroe enrolled in Kansas University. He was ready to run as a Jayhawk.

The first day of practice, head track coach Bill Easton sat Monroe down and flatly told him he was not allowed to run because of the color of his skin.

“He said ‘you’ll never run for me,'” Monroe said. “I was so heart broken it was pitiful.”

Racial segregation laws, also known as Jim Crow laws, played a significant role in Lawrence’s history, said Bill Tuttle, KU professor emeritus of American history. Often, people forget stories like Monroe’s, Tuttle said. Or they’re remembered only as an oral history.

“It’s hard to find written records,” Tuttle said. “But it’s absolutely important for us to remember our history. These are lessons to be taught.”

The Promoters basketball team, 1940.

In April, Tuttle moderated a panel discussion at the Watkins Museum of History entitled “The Lawrence Promoters: High School Basketball in the Days of Jim Crow.” Former members of Lawrence’s separate, all-black high school basketball team —  Monroe, James Barnes and Verner Newman — discussed their personal stories. The team was active from 1926 to 1950, when the leagues integrated, Tuttle said.

“We have an idealized version of Lawrence and John Brown and fighting slavery,” Tuttle added. “But there was a period of many, many years where Lawrence was a Jim Crow town.”

After his conversation with Easton, Monroe dropped out of college and joined the Air Force. The experience was neither his first nor last with racism in Lawrence, he said.

“Back in those days when I was growing up it was pretty segregated,” Monroe said. “We couldn’t eat in no restaurants downtown or anything like that. We could go into Varsity Velvet Ice Cream, but we couldn’t even take a lick off the cone until we were outside.”

Even Lawrence’s movie theaters were off limits to African Americans, said Verner Newman III.

“And then after they integrated they’d still put us in the last two rows of seats or we had to sit in the balcony,” he said. “If I were to go to a movie today I would still go into the balcony. I got used to it.”

More often than not, people are surprised to hear about Lawrence during that period, all three men agree.

Either they’re surprised, Newman said, or they don’t care.

“These kids nowadays don’t want to hear anything about last year or ten years ago,” he said. “They don’t care about the history.”

That apathy isn’t a new phenomenon, Tuttle said. Even while Jim Crow laws were on the books, many white people were oblivious to the level of segregation in town, he said.

“I would imagine most white students were completely unaware that we had separate black and white basketball teams playing in separate leagues,” Tuttle said. “People would be surprised to know that, but it was something the black community was very proud of.”

Monroe and Newman played for the Promoters in the late ’40s.

“We played black teams in Topeka, Atchison, Leavenworth and Kansas City,” Monroe said. “A lot of the white students didn’t even know we had a team. We had a big pep club, cheerleaders and everything.”

What The Promoters didn’t have was transportation.

“We never had no busses like they have now,” Monroe said. “The white guys had buses, but we didn’t. My brother and his best friend drove us to each game.”

After high school, Newman also enrolled at KU. Unable to play sports and with the classes being above his head, Newman said he dropped out less than a year later.

Options were few in Lawrence, Tuttle said. Respectable jobs were difficult, if not impossible, to come by.

Rather than sticking around town, Newman said he enlisted in the Navy. Enlisted life offered both Newman and Monroe opportunities that weren’t available back in Lawrence.

After six years, Newman left the Navy and found work checking parking meters for the Lawrence Police Department. While on the police force, Newman said he taught himself fingerprinting and cartography. His skills worked to his advantage and he rose through the ranks.

Newman retired from the police force in 1960 at the rank of captain.

After four years in the Air Force, Monroe was not as lucky when he returned to Lawrence. Using the GI Bill to his advantage, Monroe enrolled in an electrical trade school in Kansas City. Even then, he was unable to find work in Lawrence.

“(In the Air Force) I was working with B-47s, multimillion-dollar bombers. I did all that stuff,” Monroe said. “I sure did it in the Air Force, but I couldn’t do it here.”

“I couldn’t get a decent job simply because of the color of my skin. So I went back in the Air Force in ’58 and I stayed in until I retired,” he added.

Once again in the Air Force, Monroe said he enrolled in every school possible. Learning as much as possible, he rose through the ranks.

Throughout his career Monroe spent time in Germany, Japan, Korea, Shreveport, La., and San Antonio, Texas, to name a few places. He’s survived monsoons and war zones. He even met then-president Gerald R. Ford.

“Oh, I’ve been all over,” he said. “I had a lot of advantages and opportunities in the military that I didn’t have out here.”

In 1976 Monroe returned to Kansas a senior master sergeant. He found work as a superintendent of a city garage, the town’s first black superintendent.

Now 83, Monroe walks with the help of a cane. He’s not as fast as he once was, but a youthful air remains. He cracks a smile discussing his six children, each of whom hold college degrees.

Monroe said he looks back on the past and feels proud to have been a part of history, painful though it was.

“You hope your kids do better than you, and all mine did,” he said. “You don’t want to hold a grudge. I could still be mad as hell. But I’ve let a lot of that go.”