The names are not remembered individually, but what the Texas Western basketball team did as a team eventually became a cultural and sporting milestone.
Fifty years ago, Texas Western started five black players — Willie Worsley, Orsten Artis, Bobby Joe Hill, David Lattin and Harry Flournoy — against Kentucky in the N.C.A.A. championship game on March 19, 1966, at Cole Field House in College Park, Md. They were a group recruited from all over the country by Coach Don Haskins, and they were five of the seven African-Americans on the roster.
Today, after reading accounts and watching movies, people tend to think the game was an immediate watershed moment in sports and civil rights.