Page 11 - Florida Sentinel 7-16-21

Feature
NBA Playoffs Games Have Tampa Tie In Middleton
BY FRED HEARNS
(Special to the Florida Sentinel Bulletin)
Every time Milwaukee Bucks’ forward Khris Mid- dleton makes a jump shot, hits a free throw or gets a re- bound against the Phoenix Suns in the 2021 National Basketball Association Championship Playoffs, he rings a bell for Tampa, Florida. The Bucks’ Khris Middleton and George Schroeder Middleton (for whom the high school in East Tampa is named), both came from the same South Car- olina lineage.
Middleton, the 29-year-old Bucks’ star, grew up in Charleston, South Carolina as the son of James and Nichelle Middleton. He
GEORGE S. MIDDLETON
later played basketball three years at Texas A & M Univer- sity.
In 2012 the Detroit Pis- tons made him the 39th over- all pick in the NBA Draft. In 2013 the Pistons traded him to the Bucks and he has been a perennial All-Star in Mil- waukee, Wisconsin. His Bucs teammate is the two-time NBA Most Valuable Player, Giannis “The Greek Freak” Antetokounmpo.
KHRIS MIDDLETON ...Milwaukee Bucks’ forward
and Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune.
Middleton died in 1933 and in 1934 Tampa’s first high school built for Black students opened at 4302 N. 24th Street. It graduated its last class in 1971. The new campus, 4801 N. 22nd Street, opened in 2002. The Mid- dleton presence in South Carolina dates back to 1678, when white planter Edward Middleton founded an agri- cultural empire in Charleston. The Middleton family eventually owned more than 2,800 enslaved people and held more than 63,000 acres of farm land. Middleton Place, a National Historic Landmark, is the subject of a 2008 book titled Beyond the Fields – Slavery at Middleton Place.
George
Middleton
leader. He
worked
with
came to
Charleston in the 1890s and quickly became a community
Booker T. Washington, Dr. W. E. B. DuBois, James Weldon Johnson
Tampa from
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