Where there is no path
It’s been 57 years since Cordell Wise stepped onto the campus of Campbell College and made history as the school’s first Black student. For decades, his enormous impact was both under-recognized by the school and dismissed by the man himself. Until now.
By Billy Liggett
Additional Reporting by Stan Cole
Portrait Photography by Somi Benson-Jaja
“Go where there is no path and begin the trail.”
— Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to attend an all-white elementary school in the South in 1960
Only 444 miles of Interstate 95 highway separate the sprawling urban campus of Temple University in downtown Philadelphia and the smaller, rural home of Campbell University.
In 1967, the distance felt like lightyears.
Black students at Temple numbered in the thousands that year, many in the throes of a fight for civil justice as they championed for better facilities and a curriculum that better reflected their culture and history. Just four years later, the school would become one of the first in the nation to offer an African-American studies doctoral program.
Segregation at then Campbell College was entering its 80th year. Visitors to Lillington, North Carolina at the time were “greeted” by a large wooden billboard boldly emblazoned with the image of a hooded white knight holding a burning cross while riding a sheeted horse.
Help fight communism and integration, the sign pleaded, followed by a statement.
This is Klan Country.
Cordell Wise didn’t see his decision to head south that winter as anything “monumental” or important at the time. A star basketball player at his high school in New Jersey and rising star at Temple, Wise’s journey was one of necessity. A self-described “academic failure” up north, Wise saw the south as a second chance to play the sport he loved and — he readily admits — his ticket out of a military draft that would have all but guaranteed him an even longer trip east to a war in Vietnam.
Somebody, he says 57 years later, was going to be the first Black student to enroll at Campbell. If it wasn’t him, it was going to be Patricia Oates from Clinton or Margueritte Lawrence from Apex, who became Campbell’s first two female Black students in the fall of 1968.
He didn’t come here to be a trailblazer, he says. He just came to play basketball.
That part of his Buies Creek experience certainly had its highs — he was the catalyst behind an unprecedented run at the NAIA national title, which had the school on the edge of euphoria for his three-year run.
As expected, however, there were struggles. Stories of segregated restaurants and movie theaters exist, though they’re more comfortably shared by the white teammates who stood by his side than the man himself.
And as uneventful as Wise’s arrival in Buies Creek felt — to him — at the time, his exit from the school after earning his degree in 1970 was equally quiet. A falling out with a coach over a chance at pro ball planted a seed of distrust and disdain in Wise toward Campbell that only grew over the decades that followed.
On Jan. 27, the University offered a long overdue olive branch when it inducted Cordell Wise into its 2024 Campbell Athletics Hall of Fame class, recognizing his significant impact on the school both on and off the court. In returning to Buies Creek for the first time in ages — first during a Homecoming reunion in the fall and finally for his Hall of Fame induction ceremony — Wise was giving a second chance to an institution that gave him a second chance 57 years earlier.
There’s finally an ending to the story of Cordell Wise and Campbell University.
And, finally, there’s joy in sharing it.
Cordell Wise got his first taste of the South at the age of 8. His parents took him on his first ferry boat ride across the Chesapeake Bay — from Maryland to Virginia — to visit his mother’s family when young Cordell approached a water fountain for a quick drink.
“Suddenly, somebody snatched me up from under my arms. It was my father,” he says. “He told me, ‘That’s not our drinking fountain.’ Then he pointed to the signs that said ‘white fountain’ and ‘colored fountain.’ He didn’t want any problems on the ferry, but I had no idea.”
On the beaches in Virginia, large fences separated swimming areas where white people could gather and areas for those who weren’t white.
“That was the South back then,” he says, matter of factly.
It was around this time — back in the more progressive confines of his hometown of Riverside, New Jersey — when Wise first discovered basketball. His father took him to a local gym to simply see if he liked the game. He was introduced to a man named “Pop” Vernon, who coached basketball to boys in the community from elementary school through junior high.
“Pop was one of the greatest men I’ve ever known,” Wise says. “He got me interested in basketball, and unbeknownst to me at the time, it appeared I had a little talent.”
Riverside, Wise says, was a basketball town. When kids weren’t packed in the gym for practices or pick-up games, they were playing in driveways or in parks. His coach at Riverside High School was a good motivator who taught his players the lost art of the pick and roll.
Wise was a 20-points-, 20-rebounds-per-game star in high school, leading his team to the Burlington County championship as a junior and senior in 1964 and 1965. He was also a star football player, receiving a scholarship to play at Penn State from Joe Paterno himself.
But Wise opted for Temple University to play basketball for another legendary coach, Hall of Famer Harry Litwack, who won 373 games at Temple over a 21-year span. Wise worked a summer camp for Litwack prior to joining the team washing dishes in the camp’s kitchen. When he wasn’t working, he was in the gym with Litwack and the rest of the Owls shooting anywhere up to 500 shots a day to refine his game.
“I’d just go out and shoot until my arm cramped up, rest, and then do it again,”
Wise says.
As prepared for the college game as he was, Wise was equally unprepared for the classroom. His GPA after his first semester was below the minimum needed to play as a freshman. That 1966 Temple squad would go on to a stellar 21-7 record and a trip to the NIT quarterfinals (the following year, they made it to the NCAA Tournament).
In 1969, what would have been Wise’s final season with the Owls, Temple won the NIT in New York’s Madison Square Garden.
“I really think if we would have stayed together, we could have done damage in the NCAAs,” Wise says. “But that didn’t happen.”
What did happen was a twist of fate. Wise’s high school teammate Ken Faulkner did head south to Campbell College and was part of a Fred McCall team that went 10-17 that year and needed some help. Wise also had a teacher in high school who was a Campbell alum. Word of his uncertain future at Temple made its way to Buies Creek, and McCall was soon on the phone with Wise with a proposition.
“He told me I could be a big fish in a little pond, but I wasn’t really worried about that,” Wise recalls. “I remember when I got down there, Coach McCall drove me around. This was old Campbell, where they had a big circle drive in the middle of campus [where the Academic Circle sits today]. Coach drove me around that circle twice to make it seem like a bigger campus.
“But again, I wasn’t really worried about any of that.”
Campbell College wasn’t the last in North Carolina to desegregate in the spring of 1967, but it was also far from the first. UNC’s law school admitted four Black students in 1951 after the McKissick v. Carmichael case ruled their previous rejection based on race was unconstitutional. Three years later, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka ruled that separating children in public schools on the basis of race was also unconstitutional.
By the end of the decade, Black students were admitted into UNC and NC State’s undergraduate programs. Private schools in the state like Davidson and Wake Forest (1962) and Duke, Elon and Gardner-Webb (1963) — though they were not beholden to the same standards of integration that public schools were — soon followed suit.
Cordell Wise’s admission into Campbell in 1967 was one of the final important acts made by the school’s second president, Leslie Campbell, son of founder J.A. Campbell. Campbell had announced his retirement the previous year and stepped down after the spring semester to make way for his successor, Norman Adrian Wiggins.
Wise’s admission didn’t necessarily make headlines in Buies Creek, at least not in the student newspaper, Creek Pebbles. One article that fall did tout Wise’s addition to the basketball team, but made little fanfare about race or desegregation.
“I met with the dean [A.R. Burkot], and he told me that as a precaution, they got everybody together in an assembly to tell them I was coming,” Wise says. “And I don’t know what they said, but when I got to campus, I had no problems.”
Others who broke the color barriers at their schools weren’t as fortunate. At Catawba College, basketball star Garland Davis was greeted with a cross burning on his lawn in Salisbury, courtesy of the Ku Klux Klan.
“None of that ever happened at Campbell,” Wise says. “And I can probably attribute that to the presence of Fred McCall, because he was the type of individual who wouldn’t put up with anything like that.”
Wise’s friends and teammates from the late 60s at Campbell do recall a few run-ins, off campus. Bob Hager (’69) arrived in Buies Creek as an “18-year-old Yankee” from Pennsylvania who had never been exposed to racial issues common in the South. He remembers demanding his friend be served at a grocery store that served burgers and hot dogs after Wise was initially refused.
“Campbell was a suitcase school and really only us Northerners were on campus on weekends,” Hager says. “So Cordell, our friend John and I went to the movies in Dunn, and as we approached the ticket booth, a young lady asked that we wait a minute while she went into the theater to check on something. She returned with the manager, and he informed us we’d have to sit in the balcony. I thought the theater was full, but we entered and followed the manager up the stairs — looking down on the first level, we saw there were only about 10 other people in the theater. We were sitting in the ‘Black section.’”
On campus, Wise was embraced. Teammates took him under their wing and showed him the ropes. With basketball not a distraction in his first semester that spring, Wise buckled down in the classroom and worked to bring his GPA up. He said the smaller class sizes and one-on-ones with professors and counselors were a blessing.
Weekends were spent mostly on campus, playing ping pong or shooting pool in the old student union. Sometimes, they would hop in a car and drive to Fayetteville or Durham.
Most of his time, though, was spent in the gymnasium. And his impact as a basketball player can’t be understated.
According to one classmate, Wise was magic.
“He was one of the most dynamic athletes I’d ever seen and without a doubt, the greatest to play for any sports team at Campbell during my years there — including those NAIA champion soccer squads,” says David Fulton, a 1970 graduate. “The roof, numerous times, was literally blown off the rafters of Carter Gymnasium when Wise made moves to the basket never before seen on the Campbell campus.”
In Wise’s first year with the team, Campbell went 16-10, a six-game improvement from the previous year. They’d go on to win 20 in 1969 and 24 in 1970, the program’s first two 20-win seasons as a senior college. That 1970 season saw the Camels beat nationally ranked Elizabeth City State in the District 29 championships to advance to its first-ever NAIA national tournament berth in Kansas City.
Over his three-year career at Campbell, Wise led the Camels to a 60-27 overall record and was a two-time NAIA All-American. He was the fastest player in program history to reach 1,000 points (in just 53 games) and set a school mark with 26 rebounds in a game against High Point. That 24-win mark in 1970 still stands as the second-highest win total in Campbell history.
While there’s no denying Wise was the catalyst behind the success in those three years, today he attributes that three-year run to his teammates — players like Faulkner, Allen McRae, Andrew Broadie, Willie Maull and Jim Waicus, to name a few.
“I got double teamed a lot,” he says. “So basic math says there’s only five people on a team, so if two are on me, somebody’s got to be open. So I did a good bit of passing. It’s not like today, where you see guys double teamed and they want to prove they can get it.”
Carter Gym in those days could barely hold just over 1,000 people, and that was with fans standing along the baseline and practically within arms’ reach of the players. Wise called the atmosphere on game nights “electric.”
“We packed it every night. It was like my second home.”
Basketball wasn’t the only sport he excelled at. Wise was a highly touted and recruited wide receiver on his high school football team, but Campbell had nixed its football program in the early 1950s. The school did have a flag football team — and in one game where Wise had scored “three or four” touchdowns, he was approached by the track coach, George Wood, who was “in need of a sprinter.”
He found one. Wise competed in the 100-, 220- and 440-yard dashes and won the 1969 District 29 title in the 220, sending him to the NAIA national championship in Billings, Montana, where he advanced to the second round. He did all of that without training.
“I was already in pretty good shape, so I just showed up to the meets,” Wise says. “It certainly wasn’t the reason I came to Campbell.”
By the time Cordell Wise graduated from Campbell College with his degree in physical education in 1970, there were at least six Black students enrolled in the school — a number that would more than double by 1972. Those years also saw a rise in the number of Asian and Latino students.
Today, roughly 42 percent of Campbell University undergraduate students identify as a minority or mixed race.
“Cordell Wise should know that he was admired and respected by many Campbell students who didn’t know him personally,” says David Fulton. “He brought to us some of the greatest excitement I have ever experienced. It was a very special time for Campbell when he was there.”
Wise was a junior at Campbell when the Carolina Cougars — a member of the American Basketball Association, a league that would eventually merge with the NBA in 1976 — reached out to the coaching staff to inquire about drafting the Camels’ All-American forward.
Wise was never told about this call until months later. He would go on to stay another year at Campbell, but a bitterness toward the program and its coaches had formed. The Cougars would draft Wise a year later, but, he says, the roster was “pretty well solidified.”
“I went to camp, had a good camp and ended up getting cut after the first exhibition game,” he says. “Then I went on.”
Wise was picked up by the Eastern Basketball League, a semi-pro league full of Division I players who fell just short of the NBA and ABA. Wise lasted three seasons in what he called a “rough and tumble league,” before starting his post-basketball career. He found jobs in the casino industry in Atlantic City before moving on to investment banking as a stockbroker and branch administrator. He also taught and coached in Trenton, Willingboro and Camden schools in New Jersey for a decade.
Ever the all-around athlete, Wise found a new passion in tennis. He learned the sport through the son of a friend who was training for his high school team.
“This kid taught me how to hit a tennis ball,” he recalls. “But more than that, he told me not to play [tennis], but learn it. It took me three weeks just to learn to hit a backhand properly. Then another for the forehand. After that, I took a couple courses, and I ended up taking the USPTA courses, and I became certified.”
He’d go on to become director of tennis at Mill Creek Park in Willingboro for 10 years and site director for the National Junior Tennis and Learning Center in Trenton. He most recently worked as assistant pro at Sea Pines Racquet Club in Hilton Head, South Carolina, where he taught alongside two-time major champion and former World No. 1 singles player Stan Smith.
Wise was enjoying tennis and retirement in the Hilton Head area when he received a call from Stan Cole, longtime sports information officer for Campbell University Athletics and current associate director of athletics. Cole had long championed for Wise to be inducted into the Campbell Athletics Hall of Fame; his omission
an inexplicable wrong that he hoped to right.
The uneasy relationship between Wise and his alma mater was the subject of a short article in the Winter 2014 edition of Campbell Magazine. Cole says that feature opened the path toward reconciliation, and when he reached out to Wise to inform him of his induction into the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024, Wise was ready to make amends.
He made his first visit to campus in over 50 years for Homecoming last fall, and he was among five — joining Rodrigo Cagide, Barbara Foxx, Erin Switalski and Earl Stephenson — inducted into the Hall on Jan. 27 of this year. Both visits brought Wise back to happier times.
“I saw many old friends and saw several people I’d forgotten about, and we reminisced about things like how the traffic circle used to be there and how we had to go to chapel to avoid demerits,” he says. “Being in a Hall of Fame isn’t something you thought about when you played. We played the sport because we loved it. But the fact that Campbell took the time to honor me … it’s deeply felt by me. I gave Campbell everything I had, and it’s good to be recognized for that effort.”
As for the break-up and the reasons for it, Wise’s words are true to his name.
“Time is a healer,” he says. “I’ll say this about the South. If people didn’t want you around, they told you. And nothing like that ever happened on campus at Campbell. I met some of the finest people I’ve ever known there. I choose to remember that.”
Hear Stan Cole’s complete interview with Cordell Wise on the Campbell Call podcast, available at gocamels.com or through Apple or Soundcloud streams.