In 1957, the boys’s basketball program at Tennessee Agricultural & Industrial State University in Nashville had the entire makings of an amazing group: a coach devoted to the basics of the sport and a fast-breaking offense that utilized relentless full-court stress.

“We felt that if we stayed focused, there was nobody else who could beat us,” mentioned Dick Barnett, a taking pictures guard for the group.

That was true, thrice over. The Tennessee A&I Tigers would turn out to be the primary group from a traditionally Black school or college to win any nationwide championship, and the primary school group to win three back-to-back championships.

But the group, caught within the headwinds of the Jim Crow South, has struggled for recognition ever since.

Barnett, now 87, who went on to play for the 2 New York Knicks championship groups within the Seventies, has spent the final decade working to right that. He has spent years campaigning for the Tigers to be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and is educating a brand new era of basketball gamers at Tennessee State University, as the college is now recognized, concerning the barrier-breaking group.

His journey is now the topic of a brand new PBS documentary, “The Dream Whisperer.”

And if Barnett has his method, the journey will embody one last cease: the White House. More than 50 members of Congress have signed a letter on the group’s behalf asking for an invite “for long overdue acknowledgment and proper celebration.”

Time is of the essence. Only seven gamers from the championship groups are nonetheless alive, and solely three of them and a surviving assistant coach are wholesome sufficient to journey, mentioned Danielle Naassana, a producer of the movie.

“I still feel like it’s a big issue — not just for me, but for my race — to be accepted and to go to the White House after being omitted all of these years,” George Finley, 85, a former heart for the group, mentioned in an interview.

The White House didn’t reply to a request for remark.

If the group will get there, it will likely be due to Barnett.

Barnett grew up in segregated Gary, Ind., taking pictures Ping-Pong balls right into a tin cup. But when he was round 9 or 10 years outdated, he traded them for a basketball and would shoot at a neighborhood courtroom late into the evening.

On a type of nights, he was training his signature jump shot — a query mark-shaped shot with loads of air — when the Tigers’ coach, John McClendon, confirmed up asking if he’d like to affix him at Tennessee A&I.

Barnett arrived in Nashville in 1955, the 12 months Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi and Rosa Parks was arrested in Montgomery, Ala., for refusing to surrender her seat to a white man on a metropolis bus. The group was keenly conscious of the societal forces working towards them, Barnett mentioned. Their largest hurdle may very well be summed up in two phrases: “Skin color, skin color, skin color,” he mentioned.

“The implication was that you were not good enough as white folks to do what we wanted to do, that this is America, this is a white American society,” he mentioned. “We were a part of American history, even though we were a different color, a different style.”

Barnett mentioned McClendon put in “tremendous effort” to maintain his gamers targeted and perceive that “we were just as good as anybody else playing this game,” even when it meant staying in non-public properties when enjoying on the highway as a result of inns wouldn’t host them.

“I always knew I was great,” Barnett mentioned. “I was a great shooter. I was a great player.”

McClendon, a disciple of basketball’s inventor, James Naismith, was preventing his personal battle. He had tried to maneuver Tennessee A&I to the N.C.A.A. however was denied entry, so as a substitute, the group performed within the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics.

The Tigers, conditioned for pace and accuracy, jolted the league by successful championships in 1957, 1958 and 1959. Nine gamers from the Tennessee A&I championship groups would go on to play skilled basketball.

The championship wins are famous on pendants that hold from the rafters on the Gentry Center at Tennessee State, however the group’s legacy was all however misplaced to historical past, till Barnett “decided to do something about it,” as he says within the documentary.

In the movie, the previous N.B.A. gamers Julius Erving, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley and Phil Jackson all make the case for the group’s induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. But it took Barnett almost a decade to make the case to Hall of Fame voters that his group was worthy of recognition.

In 2019, he lastly slipped on the orange jacket on the induction ceremony as a consultant of the group.

“His leadership on the floor as a basketball player was really the type of, show me don’t tell me,” mentioned Eric Drath, who directed the documentary. “That was the same way it was with making the film.”

Ron Thomas, the creator of “They Cleared the Lane: The NBA’s Black Pioneers,” mentioned it was widespread within the Jim Crow period for Black groups to be ignored by the white media.

“America has missed out by not being able to hear about and read about and see the teams of some of these great coaches and players, of that era,” mentioned Thomas, the director of the journalism in sports activities, tradition and social justice program at Morehouse College. “They got no exposure whatsoever.”

But for groups just like the Tennessee A&I Tigers, there was an additional layer of duty, Thomas mentioned: “They represent more than just themselves.”