The First Champions: Lincoln High’s 1925 Basketball Triumph

Nearly six decades after Wheeling established a public school for its Black children, Lincoln High School carried the city’s name to the top of West Virginia’s first statewide basketball tournament for Black high schools.

The final score was Lincoln 25, Kimball 24.

Only one point separated Wheeling’s Lincoln High School from its opponent when the final whistle sounded in March 1925. Yet that single point secured something monumental: Lincoln had become the first champion of the West Virginia Athletic Union’s statewide basketball tournament for Black high schools.

The players from Wheeling had not simply won another game. They had written Lincoln’s name into West Virginia sports history.

From Wheeling’s Colored School to Lincoln High

Lincoln’s championship story began long before basketball entered the picture.

In the fall of 1866, only a short time after the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the Wheeling Board of Education established a tax-supported public school for the city’s Black children. John W. West became its first teacher. He was later joined by his brother Robert West.

John West’s surviving reports and correspondence reveal the tremendous responsibility carried by those early Black educators. They taught children of different ages and academic levels, maintained the school and submitted reports to federal Freedmen’s Bureau officials charged with monitoring Black education during Reconstruction.

The school’s existence was repeatedly strengthened by the determination of Wheeling’s Black residents. Parents petitioned the Board of Education for improved facilities, additional teachers, graded instruction and evening classes. Allies such as Dr. John C. Hupp used their positions on the Board to amplify those demands and insist that the city fulfill its legal obligations.

The institution that began as Wheeling’s Colored School eventually became known as Lincoln School and Lincoln High School. By the 1920s, it was much more than a classroom created in the aftermath of emancipation. It had become a center of learning, culture, leadership and community pride.

In 1925, Lincoln’s basketball team added a state championship to that growing legacy.

A State Tournament Born Under Segregation

Black high schools in West Virginia developed their athletic programs within a segregated educational system. Their students generally could not compete in the tournaments and associations organized for white schools.

Instead, Black educators and communities created institutions of their own.

The West Virginia Athletic Union organized statewide athletic competition among Black high schools. In March 1925, teams gathered on the campus of West Virginia State College—now West Virginia State University—in Institute for the union’s first state basketball tournament.

The West Virginia Encyclopedia reports that teams representing 11 of the state’s 24 Black high schools participated. They came from communities separated by mountains, rivers, coalfields and considerable travel distances. Among them were programs from areas with much larger Black populations than Wheeling, particularly the coal-producing counties of southern West Virginia.

Lincoln represented a comparatively small Black community in the state’s Northern Panhandle.

That did not prevent Wheeling’s team from reaching the championship game.

Waiting there was Kimball High School of McDowell County, a program from the heart of West Virginia’s southern coalfields. Kimball and other southern schools would become perennial powers in the Black state tournament.

But the first championship belonged to Lincoln.

Wheeling prevailed, 25–24.

Remembering the First Champions by Name

Championships are often reduced to a school name, a year and a final score. The individuals who made them possible can gradually disappear from public memory.

The surviving record allows us to restore at least some of those names.

Lincoln was coached by J. H. Rainbow. The documented roster included:

• William Riley

• Joseph Woods

• Oliver Shannon

• Leroy Spriggs

• Charles Early

• John W. Kinney

These young men carried Wheeling into the first championship game and emerged as West Virginia’s inaugural Black high school basketball champions.

The score suggests a tense, fiercely contested final. In an era of much lower scoring, every possession mattered. A single basket, free throw, defensive stop or recovered ball could separate victory from defeat.

Lincoln held that one-point advantage.

Among the players was John W. Kinney, who would later become a Lincoln coach and school administrator. His presence on the championship roster connects generations of the school’s history. Kinney first represented Lincoln as a student-athlete and later helped guide the institution and the young people who followed him.

The championship was therefore not merely an isolated athletic achievement. It became part of a continuing tradition of leadership within the school.

More Than a Tournament

The West Virginia Athletic Union tournament became one of the most important annual gatherings in Black West Virginia.

As the event grew, it attracted players, coaches, students, families and supporters from across the state. By the 1930s and 1940s, the tournament rotated among West Virginia State College, Garnet High School in Charleston and the Carmichael Auditorium in Clarksburg.

It developed traditions of its own, including the informal “Midnight Classic,” in which players from eliminated teams continued playing for fellowship and bragging rights.

The tournament also revealed the hardships Black teams encountered while traveling. Many hotels and restaurants refused to serve African Americans. Players frequently ate in school cafeterias and stayed in the homes of Black families in the host communities.

Segregation attempted to restrict where these students could sleep, eat, study and compete. Black communities answered by creating networks of hospitality, safety and mutual support.

The tournament became more than a series of games. It was a statewide community gathering—an environment in which Black excellence was expected, celebrated and preserved.

Lincoln High School of Wheeling stood at the beginning of that tradition.

Excellence Within an Unequal System

Lincoln’s victory should be celebrated, but the segregated structure surrounding it should not be romanticized.

The West Virginia Athletic Union existed because Black students were excluded from the athletic system available to white schools. Separate tournaments were a creative and powerful response to discrimination, but they were also evidence of that discrimination.

Lincoln’s players demonstrated excellence within a system that denied them equal recognition.

They competed against the best Black high school teams in West Virginia and won. Their championship was genuine. Their accomplishment does not require an asterisk simply because segregation forced them to compete in a separate organization.

If anything, understanding the obstacles makes their success more remarkable.

The tournament continued through the era of school desegregation. Its final championship was played in 1957. By then, Brown v. Board of Education had declared segregated public education unconstitutional, and West Virginia’s school systems were moving—sometimes unevenly and uncertainly—toward integration.

Lincoln High School had already graduated its final class in 1956. Wheeling closed the school to students in all grades beginning that fall, bringing an end to an institution whose history stretched back to 1866.

The school closed, but its history did not disappear.

A Championship in Wheeling’s Larger Story

Lincoln’s 1925 victory belongs in the larger narrative of Black education in Wheeling.

That narrative began with John W. West teaching the city’s first publicly supported Black school. It continued through the advocacy of Black parents who demanded better facilities, additional teachers and equal educational opportunities. It included Dr. Hupp’s forceful defense of the law, the establishment of night-school instruction and the development of Lincoln into a full high school.

Then came the athletes.

William Riley, Joseph Woods, Oliver Shannon, Leroy Spriggs, Charles Early and John W. Kinney inherited an institution built through decades of sacrifice. On a basketball court at West Virginia State College, they demonstrated what that institution had become.

Lincoln was not a marginal school producing marginal results. Its students could compete with—and defeat—the best programs in the state.

The 25–24 championship score is therefore more than a sports statistic. It is evidence of institutional strength, disciplined coaching, student talent and community determination.

Reclaiming the First Championship

West Virginia has a proud basketball tradition, but the history of its segregated Black schools has too often remained outside the state’s familiar sports narrative.

Lincoln High School deserves its rightful place within that history.

Before the celebrated state championships of later Wheeling schools, before integration transformed athletic competition and before generations of West Virginia basketball legends became household names, a group of young Black men from Wheeling traveled to Institute and won the first state tournament created for them.

They were the first champions.

Their victory belonged to Lincoln, to Wheeling’s Black community and to every teacher, parent and student who had sustained the school since 1866.

A century later, their names deserve to be spoken again.

-T

Historical terminology note

Contemporary records used terms such as “Colored School,” “Negro high school” and “colored athletes.” These terms are retained when referring to official historical names or quoting period sources. In the present-day narrative, we use “Black students,” “Black schools” and “Black community.”

Sources

• C. Robert Barnett, “West Virginia Athletic Union Tournament,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia.

• West Virginia Public Broadcasting, “March 19, 1925: First Black State High School Basketball Tournament Begins”.

• Doug Huff, “Segregated State Basketball Championships,” West Virginia Sports Writers Association.