Georgetown's John Thompson: Coach was a civil rights giant to team, nation, world

As a Black youth growing up in segregated Washington, D.C., John Thompson was accustomed to sitting in the back of his Catholic church behind white parishioners and receiving Holy Communion after them.

“I even had to put my money in the collection after all the white people put their money in the collection,” Thompson once told John Mudd, his schoolmate at Archbishop Carroll High who became the pastor of St. Augustine Catholic Church in Washington, where Thompson worshiped.

When Thompson helped lead Carroll’s basketball team to a 55-game winning streak, the high school had mostly white students, all white administrators and an all-white faculty.

“John was in the forefront of integration,” Mudd said. “He was one of the few Black students in a white school. He was kind of loved and respected by everyone, but racism was very real and very deeply seated. And I suspect he was observing and learning how to manage in a white, racist world as a 15-year-old kid. That was the beginning of that learning experience."

Thompson is best known as the towering presence on Georgetown’s sidelines as its head men's basketball coach, a formative figure in young men’s lives and an outspoken one for African Americans.

When he died in August at age 78, his life and legacy became even more enduring at a time when athletes are finding their voice against racial injustice.

Thompson was born Sept. 2, 1941, in Washington. During his life, he told many stories of growing up in the segregated city, but he loved Washington so much that after starring at Providence College and playing backup center for the NBA's Boston Celtics, he took at job as head boys basketball coach at St. Anthony's, a tiny high school in Northeast D.C. that played among Washington's Catholic league giants.

"What he did was give that team some self-esteem," says Barbara Gallagher, a nun at St. Anthony’s during Thompson’s tenure there. “He instilled a spirit of knowing they could do things. He insisted that when they come to the ballgame, they have a suit and tie on and they change in the locker room so that they could be gentlemen.

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"Some of the boys had bad grades, so he asked one of the sisters if she would tutor them on the side, which she did do. ... He just gave these kids a sense of pride and self-esteem, and they did so well for themselves in winning games."

“I was more a John Thompson fan than I was a (Georgetown) Hoya fan,” said Ed Cooley, who grew up in Providence and went on to become the head men’s basketball coach at Thompson's alma mater. “In our community, all young, Black males wanted to go to Georgetown because we could identify with the coach. There weren’t many Black coaches that we as youngsters could look up to."

Taking over at Georgetown

When Georgetown hired Thompson as its coach in 1972, Washington was coming out of period of unrest and rioting following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The elite, predominantly white university was looking for a more national identity while trying to establish a better relationship with the city’s Black community.

In Thompson’s third season, the Hoyas were on a losing streak. Mike Riley, then a freshman guard on the team, remembers a game at the school’s on-campus arena in which someone climbed up to the flat part of the roof, opened a window and hung a sign containing a racial slur that was visible from the court:

“Get rid of the (expletive) flop Thompson.”

In such dark moments, Thompson’s players would sense him cling to them tighter. Georgetown went on a run that led to the school’s first NCAA tournament appearance since 1943. Thompson remained in his position until 1999.

“Coach used to always say that people disregard color if you have economic value,” said Riley, who later served as an assistant coach under Thompson. “And I have found that to be very, very true. And so you just to have to live with that.”

Thompson had turned St. Anthony’s into a powerhouse in Washington’s Catholic league. The task at Georgetown was far more daunting.

“Another backstory that he would never let me share while he was living,” says John Butler, who played for Thompson at St. Anthony's from 1966 to 1970, “is that some in the archdiocese Catholic league, some coaches, did not speak favorably about him when he went to Georgetown.

"And that really, really hurt him that there would be some who knew him because he was a product of the Catholic schools, he spent his time at Carroll High School and helped to put the place on the map, and some coaches who knew of his commitment to young people, and, having played against him, would take the opportunity to talk down about him when he went to Georgetown, in efforts, I think, to sabotage his success.”

Thompson often recruited overlooked Black players who bought into his system of pressure defense and tough academics. In 1981, Thompson landed Patrick Ewing, a 7-foot native of Jamaica who was the most highly sought after recruit in the country.

“He was the main reason" Ewing committed to Georgetown, says Ewing, now head coach there. “Georgetown was my last visit and leading up to all of it, to have the opportunity to see a Black man who looked like me, who carried himself with class and dignity and he was someone that you could be like or emulate.”

Together, Ewing and Thompson led the Hoyas to three NCAA championship games and the 1984 national title during Ewing’s four years at the school.  When he reached his first Final Four in 1982,  Thompson famously rebuffed a question in the media about being the first Black coach to do so. Thompson suggested he was the first Black coach with the opportunity to do so. “I resent the hell out of that question,” he boomed.

Producing scholars, not just stars

Of 78 players who stayed four years at Georgetown under Thompson, 76 graduated.

“He was really running the Underground Railroad,” said Riley, a product of Washington’s Cardozo High School. “He was bringing inner-city kids over here that went to the D.C. public schools, Philadelphia public schools, New York public schools or wherever public schools and he was getting them degrees.”

In 1989, Thompson skipped two games in protest of the NCAA’s "Proposition 42" academic requirements that he felt punished kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Thompson's visible contention helped influence the NCAA to modify the rule the next year.

Thompson dramatically walked off the court to a standing ovation before his protest, a poignant visual in light of today’s social justice movement.

“He did that before anybody," said Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, Thompson’s fiercest rival who became his friend. “Not just the Prop 42 stuff, that was one thing, but he did it, and he it did all along in little ways here and there. In meetings, talking about African American referees getting a chance, and he helped that. Just everyday things. And he was always outspoken and willing to put himself on the line.

"And he would do it today. You know, we need people like him today that are willing to do that and he set that example. I think that’s why we’re all trying to do things today.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Georgetown's John Thompson a civil rights giant, on and off the court