In the late winter of 1961, as Willis Reed and his basketball teammates at Grambling State in Louisiana prepared for the N.A.I.A. tournament, their head coach scheduled an unusual sort of practice session. This one would be led by Mildred Moss, a professor of home economics, and it would include such topics as the place settings at a formal dinner and the proper use of cutlery.
For Reed and virtually all of the other Grambling players, the trip to Kansas City, Mo., for the tournament represented their first venture beyond the segregated South. Reed, the Tigers’ freshman center and later a starter for the Knicks, was typical, having grown up in Bernice, a mostly black hamlet in a part of northern Louisiana that had one of the worst rates of lynching in the nation.