Michael and the Whiz Kids: A Story of Basketball, Race, and Suburbia in the 1960s

Imagine a boy, five feet tall and one hundred pounds, who wants to play high school basketball. Now imagine that he was blind until the age of six and that he’s the first black student to attend his suburban school. And there you have Michael Thompson in 1965 in San Bruno, California. He played at the school where a young English teacher was coaching “lightweight basketball,” a competition for smaller players that has since disappeared. The team that Coach John Christgau put together came t...