Stephen G. Bloom is a professor of journalism at the University of Iowa. He is the author of seven nonfiction books, the latest of which is The Brazil Chronicles, due out in November.
For anyone who grew up in Iowa during the 1940s or ’50s, or was a student at the University of Iowa in the 1960s, the name Bobby Washington will ring a bell. While nowhere near as agile and skilled an athlete as Caitlin Clark, Washington was a talented and wildly popular basketball player. Just like Caitlin, if you mentioned just the name Bobby, everyone knew who you were talking about.
Bobby was a starter on the Iowa basketball team that three years earlier had lost in the NCAA Final Four to University of San Francisco and Bill Russell, who scored 26 points and grabbed 27 rebounds in a single game, a record that stands today.
Along with gangling, six-foot, seven-inch Nolden Gentry Jr., and Don Slaughter, the trio from championship Rockford (Illinois) West High School, all on scholarships at Iowa, played together as freshmen and sophomores. After Coach Bucky O’Conner was killed in a freak car accident in 1958, Washington, Gentry, and Slaughter played on the starting five for Sharm Scheuerman, at 24, the youngest-ever coach in Division I basketball.
Ten years ago, I wrote a story on the 50th anniversary of an event that would change local history.
Washington, who was African-American, shot and killed a racist ex-Marine in an Iowa City bar in 1964. Washington pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to 50 years at Fort Madison State Prison. A model inmate, Washington was paroled after eight years, but the terms of his parole stipulated that he not leave Henry County, Iowa. What kind of job could a Black ex-con just released from prison for murder hope to get in rural white Iowa?
With few marketable skills, Washington was hired to coach the prison’s football and basketball teams, something he did for the next 25 years. It was an existential existence, befitting a character out of a Kafka novel. Guards didn’t trust him; neither did inmates—Washington was a turncoat.
Bobby Washington died a month ago, August 20, at age 87. This is his story: THREE SECONDS: A Murder, Place, and Time