In the spring of 1944, in the heart of the Jim Crow South, two basketball teams, one black and one white, risked their futures and their freedom to play an unprecedented secret game. Historian and award-winning author Scott Ellsworth will recount this extraordinary story in the Cornell Department of History’s 2016 Harold Seymour Lecture in Sports History April 21 at 4:30 p.m.

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in Cornell’s Kaufmann Auditorium, Goldwin Smith Hall.

Ellsworth’s talk is based on his best-selling book “The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change and Basketball’s Lost Triumph,” named a Top 10 Books of 2015 by the Chicago Tribune and 2016 winner of PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing. Ellsworth tells the story of the first integrated college basketball game ever played in the South. He weaves together the story of the team at North Carolina College for Negroes and an all-white group of elite former college players at Duke University’s medical school, and the story of the struggle for civil rights in the Jim Crow South.

“Scott Ellsworth is a master story-teller and a meticulous and insightful historian of race in America,” says Derek Chang, associate professor of history and this year’s coordinator of the Seymour Lecture. “We are delighted that he will be sharing this astonishing and illuminating story at Cornell.”

A professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan, Ellsworth has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He also is the author of “Death in a Promised Land,” an account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot.

The Harold Seymour Lecture in Sports History is presented annually by Cornell University’s Department of History with the support of George Kirsch ’67. It brings distinguished sport historians in the world to Cornell each year.