Deal with the Devil

I've stirred some controversy in my journalism career with my stance on private schools. I have to start by saying I don't hate private schools. Most are pretty benign. Places like USC and Stanford –while experiencing some negative issues over the years – are good examples of how academic and athletic success can work well on private campuses.
My general beef is that they are exclusive by nature and there's a general air of elitism surrounding them. That said, if you want to go to Clemson, then by all means, go ahead and go.
This stance isn't true across the board, though. There are some schools with ridiculous legacy programs, wherein a dimwitted student can make it in if their parent went to the same school. I don't want to say names, but don't make me yale it out loud.
One school in particular bugs me. I'll admit my own biases, but the acclaim surrounding Duke is really troubling to me. Certainly part of this feeling is born in me as a fan of a rival school, but there's much more to it than that.
Here's some history: Duke is named after an industrialist, James Duke. Administrators at the school proudly tout the fact that he raised crops like tobacco and cotton without the use of slave labor. That's true. They fail to mention slavery was outlawed when Duke was 7, so...Duke wasn't a slave owner but his father was and it's inconceivable that a man who ran tobacco and cotton plantations would have chosen to not own slaves had he had a chance.  Duke was hardly benevolent. His cigarette company controlled 40-percent of the market and was repeatedly sued by competitors and suppliers for unscrupulous and monopolistic business practices. He was at the center of the Black Patch Tobacco Wars, a two year confrontation that had Duke undercut the fair market value of tobacco to his suppliers, even though black patch tobacco was highly prized and very difficult to cultivate. Duke was eventually found guilty of violating antitrust laws and his company was broken into four smaller companies, one of which was RJ Reynolds. Executives from all four would eventually testify before Congress that cigarettes didn't cause cancer.
But it isn't just cigarettes that are problematic. His brother helped found a power company to supply electricity for a series of family-owned textile mills. Duke Energy has a dubious – at best – environmental record, having repeatedly "accidentally" spilled coal ash into North Carolina waterways, killing off wildlife and poisoning drinking water. Flint's water was poisoned through stupidity; North Carolina's was poisoned through unscrupulousness.
Anyone who knows Duke University to any degree understands the school has many references to Trinity. Trinity was the name of the school prior to Duke's donation of the 2016 equivalent of just over $500 million – on the condition the school change its name to Duke, of course. Ah, to be a robber baron, huh?
As his father was a slave owner, Duke did nothing to help advance the cause of blacks in America. It's true the rest of the South had race problems, but sit ins at lunch counters in Greensboro, and even right down the road from Duke in Chapel Hill, were at least efforts to reverse those wrongs. Duke, on the other hand, tightened its stance on segregation. Martin Luther King's "Dream" speech was a year prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and National Guard troops forcibly integrating campuses in the South. Duke stood firm on racism. It was fully 7 years after the Dream speech – and 8 consecutive years of losing every game to rival North Carolina – before Duke integrated its campus...with a black basketball player. Had they won even a few games in that span, who knows how long they would have stayed all-white.
Indeed, public campuses had to be forced to integrate by law. Duke could have integrated decades before, after Jackie Robinson debuted in MLB, but they waited until the '70s. Yes, The Brady Bunch was on the air while Duke was still all-white.
There is a moderate amount of evidence that legacy lingers to some degree to this day at Duke. After all, one of the school's most acclaimed players lost his job for uttering racial statements.
So that's the Duke legacy, one of ruthless, unscrupulous business practices, self-aggrandizing donations, and perpetual racism. When someone like Jalen Rose calls black players playing for Duke "Uncle Toms," he's talking less about their personal make up and more about the institution and legacy they support by wearing the Duke jersey.
"Let's think about all the good he's done" isn't enough to wash away all of the negativity. Nobody goes to Al Capone University or Jesse James University or John Wilkes Booth University. Supporting a cancer-causing, environment-wrecking, labor-crushing, antitrust-violating racist might be OK in Durham, but it's not OK with me, no matter how good your basketball team might be.