Asheville’s Henry Logan didn’t set out to shatter racial barriers when he accepted a scholarship to Western Carolina College in 1964. He just wanted to play basketball.
But Logan made history when he, along with Stephens-Lee High School teammate Herbert Moore, took the court for the Catamounts that fall. Never before had a Black man played varsity basketball for a predominantly white college in the Carolinas or anywhere else in the Southeast. Before that, the state’s best Black players tended to go to historically Black colleges or head north to play for Big Ten schools.
By the time Logan’s legendary Western career was over in 1968, the state’s “Big Four” programs — UNC Chapel Hill, N.C. State, Duke and Wake Forest — had Black players. Things had changed for good in hoops-mad North Carolina.
“More than anyone else, he’s the one who set in motion the epochal changes that came to the college game in the South, which, in turn and inarguably, helped speed the process of civil rights in that region,” writes Jim Hughes in Henry Logan: The Stuff of Legend, a recently published ebook.
Hughes started the biography in 1997 and worked on it on and off for years. Logan died in 2023, just as the author was making a final push to complete it. He tells Xpress he wrote the book because he believes Logan’s legacy should be more widely known nationally.
“His story is so phenomenal in three different ways,” Hughes explains. “He was a pioneer. He was an idolized basketball star — he’s the only player in college history with more than 3,200 points and 1,000 assists. And he lost his basketball career and became a hopeless street drunk before recovering from that to have 31 years of continuous sobriety when he died.”
Jordan before Jordan
The legend of Henry Logan began long before he set foot on Western Carolina’s Cullowhee campus.
Asheville attorney Eugene Ellison was a child living in Hillcrest Apartments, a public housing complex, when Logan was a teenager. Ellison could see the Hillcrest basketball court from his apartment.
“You always knew when Henry Logan was in Hillcrest because the word ran rampant that he was in the projects playing ball,” recalls Ellison, who became Logan’s close friend and adviser. “And the area outside the court would just be covered up with people coming to watch him and his buddies come over there to play ball.”
As a sophomore in 1962, Logan led Stephens-Lee to its only state championship in basketball. He scored 21 points for the Bears as they defeated Winston-Salem’s Atkins High School for the 4A title in the N.C. High School Athletic Conference, the organization that governed sports at all-Black schools in the Jim Crow era.
Even then, the skills that would make Logan a college star and future pro were on display. Just 6 feet tall (or maybe a little smaller), Logan was a prolific scorer, passer and ball handler. With his extraordinary quickness and leaping ability, Logan’s playing style was about 10 years ahead of its time, anticipating stars like Julius “Dr. J” Irving and David Thompson, Hughes says.
“I’m telling you man, he was Michael Jordan before Michael Jordan,” Ellison asserts.
Logan was so dominant his senior year in high school that he became the first Black player to be picked to play in the annual Blue-White Senior All-Star game, which features outstanding players from Western North Carolina. That same year, the Citizen Times named Logan its player of the year.
“He is a lad of mild manner and quiet mien, but on the basketball court he is a slasher who cuts and drives with a single purpose: to get the ball through the hoop,” wrote Bob Terrell, then the paper’s sports editor and columnist. “He is so adept at supplementing his vicious drives with a sudden stop-and-pop shot that his defenders have difficulty holding him under 30 points.”
By then, Logan was drawing interest from programs like Ohio State and Minnesota. Leaving North Carolina to play for a Big Ten school was a familiar path for star Black players like New Bern’s Walt Bellamy (Indiana) and Greensboro’s Lou Hudson (Minnesota).
But Logan elected to stay closer to home.
Choosing Western
Hughes says Terrell played a key role in Logan’s journey to Western, which then played in the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). The NAIA is made up of smaller schools than those typically found in the National Collegiate Athlethic Association (NCAA).
During Logan’s final two years at Stephens-Lee, his reputation grew to the point that the school had to play games at off-campus sites to accommodate the crowds, Hughes says. Terrell took note of the excitement and became an active participant in Logan’s recruitment.
A Western alum, Terrell was friends with Catamounts coach Jim Gudger and pushed Gudger to check out the Stephens-Lee phenom. Gudger was interested in bringing in a Black player — not as a political or moral statement, Hughes says — but because he realized the game was changing and that Black players were driving the future.
“Once he saw Henry play, Gudger went all out to get him to Cullowhee,” Hughes writes. “Terrell helped every step of the way, even attending meetings with leaders of the Asheville NAACP.”
After Logan signed with Western, his teammate and friend Herbert Moore came along as part of a package deal, says Steve White, who was a Western student working in the athletic department when Logan was playing. White went on to become the school’s sports information director for 30 years.
The idea was that Moore would be Logan’s roommate and help him with his school work — decades later, Logan revealed that he couldn’t read until he was 35. Moore, not as dominant a player as Logan, left Western after three semesters.
The news that Logan and Moore were headed to Western Carolina College was banner news in Terrell’s Citizen Times. “Local stars first Negroes in Carolinas Conference,” read the headline. But the groundbreaking signing failed to be picked up by any other news outlet in the country, Hughes points out.
‘Henry went through a lot’
Logan was a sensation from Day 1 of his freshman season at the school, which changed its name to Western Carolina University in January 1967. The Catamounts drew about 3,500 people to their home opener in December after drawing only a few hundred the previous year, Terrell wrote. Logan’s sensational play would lead to packed houses at home and on the road throughout the season as he averaged 27 points a game, according to reports in the Citizen Times.
But race was never far from the surface.
“Henry went through a lot that first year,” White recalls. “There were a lot of things that happened on the court that people did not know about.”
Logan’s first game as a Catamount was against Piedmont College in Demorest, Ga. The all-white Piedmont squad did not cover itself in glory that day.
“They called me every kind of name they could think of, some I’d never even heard before,” Logan told Hughes. “I got pushed and tripped and elbowed every time I made a move or drove through the lane. Every time I heard the N-word I just played harder.”
In another incident, Logan and Moore had to sit out when Western traveled to Lafayette, La., to participate in the Bayou Classic tournament. Louisiana law prohibited sports competitions between Black and white players.
“I really am grateful that we don’t cherish ideas as absurd as some they still linger to in Louisiana,” Asheville’s Larry Kibby wrote in a letter to the Citizen-Times shortly after the tournament. “This is probably the only way they could stop this fabulous freshman.”
The racial incidents lessened over time as more teams in the conference and around the state integrated, White says.
Over his four years in Cullowhee, Logan averaged 30.7 points per game. He still holds virtually every school scoring and assist record and is ninth on the all-time college basketball scoring list with 3,290 points. He scored 60 points in one memorable 1967 game and helped lead the United States to the gold medal in the 1967 Pan American Games, played in Winnipeg, Canada.
The fall
Logan was drafted by the National Basketball Association’s (NBA) Seattle SuperSonics in 1968 but opted to make more money by signing with the Oakland Oaks of the rival American Basketball Association (ABA).
As a rookie in 1969, Logan was a teammate of future Hall of Famer Rick Barry on a team that won the ABA title. His future as a pro looked bright.
But by then his personal life was spiraling out of control, leading to the end of his first marriage.
“In Oakland, I got to drinking real bad,” Logan told Hughes. “Running around with prostitutes … I tried to stop but couldn’t. I was out of my mind.”
Back in Asheville after his rookie season, he continued his out-of-control ways and put on so much weight that he reported to training camp at more than 200 pounds. A series of knee injuries, along with his drinking, left his once-promising career in tatters. He was out of the league after two seasons.
His troubles continued after he came back to Asheville full time. He was an illiterate alcoholic who hadn’t earned a degree at Western, severely limiting his employment opportunities, Hughes points out.
Things reached a nadir in 1978, when Logan tried to kill himself with a combination of alcohol and pills. But as luck would have it, Harold Aday, pastor with the Swannanoa Assembly of God, called Logan just as he woke up from his pill- and alcohol-fueled haze. Aday wanted Logan to run a youth outreach program at his church.
When Logan told Aday about his attempted suicide, the pastor rushed over and prayed with him. Logan became a Christian that day, Hughes writes. He joined the church and became youth outreach director. A few years later, at the age of 35, he finally learned to read because he wanted to read the Bible.
“He had a very spiritual experience, and I tried to tell that in the book,” Hughes says.
Logan didn’t get his drinking under control right away, Hughes writes. He had periods of sobriety but didn’t quit alcohol entirely until 1992.
‘Tell it all’
A Durham native and lifelong basketball fan, Hughes first heard about Logan in 1994 from Kevin O’Connor, who had played basketball at Belmont Abbey College in the 1960s. Intrigued, Hughes decided he needed to tell Logan’s story.
In 1997, he moved to Asheville and met Logan.
“I hung around with him for almost a year,” Hughes says. “We played in the old geezer game at the Asheville Y, which is a lot of fun. He embarrassed some of the younger guys. He was still a pretty good player, especially for a pickup game.”
Hughes interviewed family members, former teammates and opponents and people like Ellison and Terrell over the years. But the book remained unfinished until late last year.
“It was very slow going, and a lot of things happened in my life, and a lot of things happened in Henry’s life,” Hughes says.
In the beginning of their relationship, Logan laid out one condition for Hughes in writing the book.
“Tell it all,” he insisted. “Don’t leave anything out. The drinking, the women — all the crazy things I did the whole time I was lost. If Christ has the power to work a miracle on a man like me, anyone can be saved.”
Hughes believes Western Carolina was somewhat reluctant to embrace Logan’s legacy for many years because of his personal problems, but that has changed. He was inducted into the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame in 1990. In 2002, his No. 10 jersey was retired. The concourse at the Ramsey Center, where the men’s basketball team plays, has a large display, including a video, honoring Logan.
White says Logan would attend games a few times a year in his later years. “One of his teammates from Charlotte would pick him up in Asheville and bring him to the games because at that time Henry’s legs were really in bad shape, and he had a hard time accelerating and braking his automobile,” he says.
Honoring Logan
Logan’s legacy has been embraced outside Cullowhee as well. In 2000, he was inducted into the N.C. Sports Hall of Fame. In 2023, he was posthumously elected to the Small College Basketball Hall of Fame.
Ellison advocated for Logan’s induction into the Small College Basketball Hall of Fame.
But there is one honor that has thus far eluded him. Ellison and Hughes believe Logan deserves a spot in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the sport’s highest honor.
“I didn’t do anything but share Henry’s story,” Ellison says. “I didn’t do anything but make sure that Henry had somebody with him to cut through all the bull when people wanted something, including trying to get to the Hall of Fame.”
Ellison is in contact with people from the NBA, as well as those associated with the long-gone ABA in hopes of getting his case heard for the Naismith Hall.
“When you look at special athletes and special people, the uniqueness about them has to do with how they master their trade,” he says. “They have a natural gift that they are able to maximize. Henry Logan was like Michael Jordan, he was like Rick Barry, Artis Gilmore, Spencer Haywood. Henry Logan’s name fits right with theirs. He was special.”
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