February is basketball season as well as Black History Month, an appropriate time to look at how a group of youngsters known as the “Rhythm Boys” found themselves in the middle of social struggle, even as they battled for a Nebraska state basketball title in 1967-68.

Places like Detroit, Newark, N.J., and Birmingham, Ala., are more widely known as cities in which racial tensions came to a head around this time, leading to riots and various other atrocities.  Omaha is not as commonly associated with this movement, but as author Steve Marantz describes in The Rhythm Boys Of Omaha Central (Univ. of Nebraska Press, 264 pp.), all the ingredients were in place there, including de facto segregated neighborhoods, a young generation open to racial co-mingling and not afraid to stand up to their more conservative elders, and an incendiary event — a visit by the Dixiecrat presidential candidate George Wallace, to bring tensions to a boil.

Marantz, who lived through the experience as a student at Omaha Central, an institution that could be likened to today’s “magnet” schools, attracting high achievers, delivers much more than a game-by-game description of a successful high school basketball season among difficult circumstances.  The level of detail, gleaned from interviews with the participants as well as the diary of one of the school’s popular girls, brings the reader inside the mind of these kids as their world is collapsing around them.

The basketball team and their success on the court serves as a handy frame for the larger story of how these racial tensions developed.  The girl whose diary gives such an intimate glimpse into the teenagers’ perspective questions her interracial relationship with one of the team’s black players; several of the players are key figures in the protest of the Wallace visit that sparked a violent confrontation between police and protesters; a Jewish neighborhood known at “Bagel” was often the most welcoming to the area blacks, including team members.

Through it all, this talented team reeled off a string of victories, in a way trying to will its way through the bubbling tensions and bring the community together as sports often do.  Sometimes, life gets in the way.