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March 19 · This Day in America

1966
Reckoning

Texas Western starts five Black players and wins it all

In College Park, Maryland, a little school from El Paso meets Adolph Rupp's all-white Kentucky, the bluest blood in college basketball. Coach Don Haskins does what he has done all season and says little about: he starts five Black players — Bobby Joe Hill, Orsten Artis, Willie Worsley, Harry Flournoy, David Lattin. No one had ever started an all-Black five in an NCAA title game. Hill strips the ball twice in seconds and the underdogs never trail for long. Texas Western wins 72–65. Haskins always insisted he was just playing his best players. That was the whole point. On national television, in front of a country still arguing about who belonged where, the best players won — and every coach watching understood the game had just changed for good.

Source: www.ncaa.com

Also on this day · 1918

America agrees on what time it is

Until now, time was a local opinion — towns set clocks by the sun, and railroads kept their own. On March 19, President Wilson signs the Standard Time Act, carving the country into five zones and, as a wartime measure, inventing American daylight saving time. From here on, a nation that spanned a continent could finally agree, more or less, on when 'noon' was.

Source: www.thecongressproject.com

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