What began as a simple sports question between old friends has helped preserve an important and largely forgotten part of state high school athletics history.

Bowling Green’s Alonzo Webb, who was a longtime track and field coach at Bowling Green High School, said he was chatting with old friend Ricky Starks about sports and their own playing days – Webb at Glasgow’s Ralph Bunche High School and then, later Glasgow when the school system consolidated – and Starks at Scottsville.

“I was out at Ricky’s house here in Bowling Green and we were just talking – we always talk sports, you know how us sports guys are,” Webb said. “We were talking about the Fifth Region, when we played in it and some of the old players because that’s what we played in. I said, Ricky, ‘Have you ever heard of E-41?’”

Starks had not, so Webb filled him in on the basics of E-41 South Central Area/Region 3 of the Kentucky High School Athletic League – a grouping comprised of area Black schools east of U.S. 41 who competed interscholastically from 1932-57 before the end of segregation in state high school athletics.

Players representing barely remembered high schools including Bowling Green State Street/High Street, Franklin’s Lincoln High School, Russellville’s Knob City High School, Elkton-Todd County Training High School, Horse Cave Colored High School, Glasgow’s Ralph Bunche High School and Drakesboro Community High School competed for decades largely outside the public eye in various sports – mainly basketball, but also football, track and field and golf – plus cheerleading.

“Segregation, unfair as it was, the E-41 players never got a lot of press,” Webb said. “That’s just how it was back then. Maybe they got a few box scores, a few articles, things like that but it wasn’t highly publicized as a league. It just wasn’t recognized.”

Webb and Starks took that initial conversation to heart and decided to do something about that. Ten months after that spark of an idea, “Voices of the Segregated Past: The Kentucky High School Athletic League E-41 Region 3” was released in print. Available in area public and school libraries, the free publication can also be downloaded as an ebook through Smashwords, Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

“I said, ‘I think we ought to honor those guys that played back then – honor the ones who played, and honor the ones still living,’” Webb said. “A lot of people don’t know anything about E-41 or anything about the Kentucky High School Athletic League.”

The initial idea came from Webb and Starks, but others took up the project. A seven-member project committee put in countless hours poring through newspaper archives and records and more contemporary accounts to glean what information was available, but much of the work relies on interviews conducted by Webb and Starks with surviving players from the era – all of whom are at least in their 80s, some older.

“There was a lot to learn,” Webb said. “I wouldn’t say I was surprised – I just didn’t know.”

Beside a better understanding of who competed, Webb and his fellow committee members unearthed details about playing facilities – or the lack of them, oftentimes – and some of the great players and teams of the day.

Among the best were a pair from Horse Cave, Clarence Wilson and Carl Helem, who beat the odds to earn college scholarships and go on to fame playing for the elite Harlem Globetrotters.

Then there’s Welmon Britt Jr., a star football player at State Street who went on to play at North Carolina College for Negroes (now North Carolina A&T) after an unforgettable recruiting pitch from coach John McClendon.

The details of that meeting, plus so many other indelible memories, are peppered throughout ‘Voices of the Segregated Past.’

Webb enlisted a fellow Glasgow native, James Stockton, to join the committee and Stockton – who lives in Hyattsville, Md. – took on the role as principal writer. It was a daunting task amplified by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Stockton admits.

“It’s an amazing thing, how we did this,” Stockton said. “All of our meetings were of course Zoom meetings. I had anticipated coming there sometime, but the pandemic did not cooperate.”

Stockton put together a questionnaire for the other committee members to use when conducting interviews, then compiled that information, edited it down and put it into a compact and informative narrative on a largely hidden topic. In all, 29 former players or cheerleaders were interviewed for the project, Stockton said.

“It was challenging, but it was meaningful as well,” Stockton said. “We went through several iterations, as you might imagine.”

The final product is something Webb, Stockton and the rest of the committee hopes provides some long-overdue recognition for players denied that attention during their playing days.

“These guys in high school, they made a way,” Webb said. “I think they just dealt with the situation – there was no integration, but they had enough leadership in this area and Louisville and Lexington to go ahead and say, ‘Hey, we’ll form our own league.’ There was a lot of pride in it – just like any guy that’s playing sports, he’s going to take pride in it where ever he’s playing – and there was a lot of pride there with the cheerleaders, with the fans.”{&end}