By David Steele
Johnson C. Smith University alumnus Fred Tatum, class of 1969, spent much of the three weeks following his 77th birthday in early February helping arrange a charter bus from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Baltimore for the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association’s annual basketball tournament.
He expects the bus – carrying about 42 passengers at $195 a head – to be nearly sold out for its third straight trip to the tournament’s still-new home in Baltimore.
“We call it The HBCU Bus because we’ve got people from different schools riding our bus,” Tatum said. “So, it doesn’t matter to us who rides our bus. We have some people who didn’t even go to any of the schools that ride the bus. It’s just a family reunion every year.”
The CIAA tournament, played this week for the 79th time, is referred to as a “family reunion” seemingly as often as it is a basketball tournament. It easily lends itself to that description: While the game results matter and the attendance has always been satisfying enough to the conference and its host cities, visitors come as much for the gatherings and the atmosphere as the tournament itself, sometimes skipping the basketball altogether.
Tatum, for instance, remembered decades earlier, as a student and as a young grad, arriving at the tournament with no tickets, hoping to get lucky with resellers after their teams were eliminated.
Twin brothers Carlton and Charlton Harris, 1992 graduates of Johnson C. Smith, also never made game attendance mandatory for their trips to the tournament over the years – and enjoyed get-togethers in nearly empty arenas the most.
“We might go to a game in the middle of the afternoon and the arena’s all sparse, and we would just sit there and have a ball, watching the games, speaking with friends, even though there wasn’t really a lot going on,” Charlton Harris said.
He and his brother were raised in nearby Gaffney, South Carolina, by their parents, who both were Johnson C. Smith alums. The twins will be traveling from Charlotte to Baltimore for this year’s tournament with about 20 other alumni, friends and Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brothers.
Again, game attendance likely will be optional – the formal and informal parties are higher on their agendas, they said.
“Just being a part of that, you feel a certain ownership of the tournament, like, this is our thing,” Charlton Harris said. “It was just always such a nice, nice event to go to.”
Travel, dining and entertainment plans like those of the Harrises and of Tatum – who organizes the charter on behalf of the JSCU 100 Club, Johnson C. Smith’s athletic fundraising organization – are being made at each of the 12 other conference member institutions. That includes West Virginia’s Bluefield State University, which rejoined the CIAA beginning July 1, 2023, after leaving the conference in 1955 and is participating in the tournament for the first time.
It also includes the tournament’s current host institution, Bowie State University in the nearby Maryland suburbs, playing the role that Johnson C. Smith played for 15 years when the tournament was in Charlotte.
The move to Baltimore after the 2020 tournament necessitated actual travel plans for Johnson C. Smith alumni and fans like Tatum and the Harris brothers. The tournament was more like a “staycation” than vacation during its years in Charlotte, Carlton Harris said.
The Harrises also attended the tournament regularly when it was held in Winston-Salem and Raleigh, North Carolina. They estimated they’ve gone to every one since the late 1990s. It became easier after they graduated, of course, Charlton Harris said, when they weren’t “broke students.”
Tatum had his own “broke student” experience during his undergraduate days – he and his friends hitchhiked from Charlotte to Greensboro, North Carolina, more than 90 miles away, in the mid-1960s to attend the tournament. That’s how he saw Earl Monroe, Clarence “Big House” Gaines and Winston-Salem State University win the 1967 CIAA tournament on their way to the NCAA Division II championship.
“You stood out on the highway, about three or four of us, and a ride would come along, pick us up and say, ‘We need to be dropped off in Greensboro,’ and that’s what they would do, and then we’d get rides back,” he recalled, adding with a laugh, “I wouldn’t do that today.”
Now, Carlton Harris said, he enjoys traveling to a different location.
“I think for a lot of people like myself, the CIAA could be on the moon and, hey, I’m gonna have to try and get there some kind of way,” he said.
The immediate concern raised in 2019 when the CIAA voted to move the tournament from Charlotte was that it would suffer from leaving not only a familiar location but a centralized one, in a conference with eight members in the Carolinas. Officials with the CIAA and Visit Baltimore, the city’s convention and visitors bureau, countered by noting that the schools’ alumni were spread throughout the Northeast and mid-Atlantic region as well.
The numbers provided by Visit Baltimore support their claims: After the 2021 tournament was held virtually only due to the coronavirus pandemic, fan attendance rose 5.6% from 2022 to 2023, with a total economic impact of $29.6 million and an additional $17.7 million in off-site spending.
As Tatum pointed out, travel contingents like his are not unusual. His wife of 55 years, Nelda, is a Winston-Salem State graduate and will be one of “12 to 15” alumni on the bus, he said. (However, he said, chuckling, “She’s adopted Johnson C. Smith.”)
Besides that, Tatum said, over the decades he has been attending, the CIAA membership has changed – nearly all of the current Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference schools, as well as schools such as Hampton University and North Carolina A&T State University that now play in predominantly white conferences, were previously in the CIAA. Alumni from those schools still attend, even with no competitive ties to the games being played.
“Howard, Morgan State, Norfolk State, I’ve seen them all here,” Tatum said. “I’ve met so many people over the years, and they become our friends and are still our friends, even from other schools.”
That sense of unity makes the CIAA tournament unique, Carlton Harris said.
“I tell a lot of people what makes the CIAA so special, in my opinion, is you have a lot of small HBCUs that come together, almost like for a homecoming during the wintertime,” Carlton Harris said. “Those other HBCUs – they’re big, they’re in bigger conferences and they’re a little more spread out. Our schools are pretty much condensed – most of us are right here in Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, that area.”
The get-togethers this year in Baltimore will take place in and around downtown Baltimore, at day and evening parties dedicated to each school and at events blending alumni and mixing social groups – some sponsored by official tournament partners but most just pulled together for the sake of gathering with familiar people in a familiar place. And just occasionally they’ll even take place inside CFG Bank Arena, where tournament games will be played.
Tatum’s CIAA experience now, because “we’re all senior citizens,” he said, will be different from his young hitchhiking days, and the Harrises’ experience will be far removed from the days when they packed five people to one hotel room. But the sense of homecoming and reunion will be the same, Charlton Harris said – and concerns about that feeling not traveling well from Charlotte to Baltimore are as unfounded as they were when the tournament moved to other cities throughout the region over the decades.
“They’re always wrong,” Charlton Harris said, “because it always turns into what it always is, which is the CIAA tournament. I mean, it’s an institution. People are going to support it, regardless of where it goes.”