West Charlotte’s ‘forgotten’ 1954 state title team celebrates 70th anniversary this year
West Charlotte High School’s football team will try to win the N.C. 3A state championship Saturday in Raleigh. Back at home, there will lots of former Lions wishing the team luck.
Among those graduates is an 87-year-old former West Charlotte football player fans and foes called “The Hammer,” and Johnny Johnson said he can remember “like it was yesterday” when West Charlotte won its first football state championship.
Seventy years ago, in 1954, West Charlotte drove up to Kinston and beat Adkin High 13-6 to win the N.C. Negro High School Athletic Association state title.
West Charlotte finished 10-1-1, and beating Adkin was one of the biggest accomplishments the 16-year-old school had on its resume.
“But when we got there, we were afraid of them,” Johnson said.
The only team to beat West Charlotte that season was Durham Hillside, which won 12-7 in September 1954, when the Lions opened a new football stadium in the same year it moved to its current location on Senior Drive, just off Beatties Ford Road.
Previously the school sat down the street in what is now Northwest School of the Arts.
Hillside ruined that opening night celebration for West Charlotte, but Adkin later eliminated Hillside in their state semifinal game.
Johnson said when the Lions got off the bus in Kinston, there were banners hung all over the gym that read“Beat West Charlotte.”
He said fans were everywhere.
“Adkins had torn Hillside up,” Johnson said. “And when we got there, we just said we would do the best we could. We just didn’t know.”
Prior to joining the N.C. High School Athletic Association in 1966, West Charlotte and other African-American schools in the state competed in the N.C. Negro association. In 1958, it changed its name to the N.C. High School Athletic Conference. All of the state’s public schools weren’t fully integrated until about 13 years later.
Since joining the NCHSAA, West Charlotte has reached seven state championship games, winning in 1995. But a lot of people have always assumed, Johnson said, that the ‘95 team was the only Lions’ state championship team.
“Well, I’ll never forget what we did,” Johnson said. “I’ve got all kinds of pictures. We were pretty good.”
Johnson played on the offensive and defensive lines. He said he was called “The Hammer” because of how hard he could hit. His coach, Jack Martin, became a legend who would eventually have the field at West Charlotte named after him.
Martin, who died on June 2, 1994 at age 89, was a Camden, S.C., native who graduated from Johnson C. Smith in 1931 and began his coaching career at Gastonia’s old Highand High School before coming to West Charlotte when it opened in 1938. For the Lions, Martin would become the school’s all-time winningest football coach with a 201-84-16 record in addition to coaching basketball, baseball, track and golf.
Martin would guide West Charlotte to two more football playoff appearances (1959 and 1961 first round playoff losses) and was a mentor to a pair of future Lions’ pro athletes — 1957 graduate Pettis Norman (AFL and NFL) and 1959 graduate Curtis Sifford (PGA golf).
In 1954, junior quarterback Joe Robinson — who became a college coach in Maryland — was his star player.
A full roster is unavailable, but from researching newspaper archives from that season, other players on the West Charlotte roster that year included Johnson, Willie Borroughs, Eugene Brown, John Campbell, John Garner, Vern Harris, Roosevelt Hicklin, Theoplis Ingram, Ray Mackey, Bobby McCullough, James McCollie, John McHampton, Willie Moore, Charles Nance, Raymond Phillips, Arthur Ross, Thomas Rowe, King Smith, Haywood Young and William James Young.
Haywood Young scored on a TD run and Robinson threw a touchdown pass to Smith in the state championship game, which was played on Nov. 24. Johnson said it didn’t take long, once the game started, for the Lions to start believing they could win.
“King Smith was our running back and he ended up being a policeman,” Johnson said. “He ran like a rabbit. We had Cecil Wallace and we called him ‘The Bear.’ He was so big, you know, and he looked like a big teddy bear. We had a lot of seniors on that team and I really enjoyed playing for coach Martin. We all did. He was a good coach.”
Johnson said he’ll be keeping up with Saturday’s state final when West Charlotte plays Fayetteville 71st. Of course, he wants West Charlotte to win — but he doesn’t want anybody to forget who came first.
“They can never take our record,” he said. “We were the first ones to do it.”
