This weekend, Duke gets around to celebrating its first black basketball and football players, athletes who made significant personal sacrifices to blaze a trail some four decades ago.

“It’s great that something is finally happening,” said C.B. Claiborne, the first African American athlete at Duke when he matriculated in 1965-66. The athletic department brought Claiborne from Houston, Texas, where he teaches marketing at Texas Southern. He will be joined by three ice-breaking football players – Ernie Jackson, Clarence Newsome, and William Turner – in a halftime salute during Saturday’s game against St. John’s.

“This feels like something that needs to be done, and I’m in a position to do it,” Claiborne said, likening the occasion to venturing to Duke in the first place.

Meanwhile, N.C. State has yet to honor Al Heartley, its first black basketball player. Heartley went from walk-on to starting point guard and team captain, smashing stereotypes along the way. Not incidentally, the product of Clayton who graduated in 1971, also smoothed a path for David Thompson, still the greatest player in ACC history.

Duke and N.C. State are hardly alone in snubbing their own African-American athletic heroes. When it comes to making inclusive statements of respect, the Triangle’s core communities infrequently look inward.

Instead they focus on the late Jackie Robinson, an understandable but oddly dispassionate choice.

Robinson became the first black player in Major League Baseball in 1947, when segregation and racial prejudice were accepted throughout much of the country. Violence often accompanied efforts to change that equation.

But Robinson’s brave efforts, for all their importance and merit, were undertaken at a remove from North Carolina. He played in an eight-team National League that extended no farther south than St. Louis. Only spring training in Florida regularly took Robinson below the Mason-Dixon Line.

Yet Durham has a Jackie Robinson Drive near Durham Bulls Athletic Park, and a Jackie Robinson Lane. All very nice. But why not name one street for John B. McLendon, Jr., the Hall of Fame basketball coach who set standards of competitive excellence in the heart of Durham from 1941 to 1952?

McLendon, who died in 1999, won eight CIAA titles while coaching at N.C. Central. He also employed basketball to repeatedly challenge racial barriers, both at NCCU and later by winning national titles and taking jobs in circumstances where African Americans had previously been excluded. The man was an innovator, a gentleman, and an inspiration to many, including fellow Hall of Famer Clarence "Bighouse" Gaines.

“I’m not aware of anybody that’s ever proposed that,” Durham mayor Bill Bell said of naming a street for McLendon. Bell would know. He has served as a Durham County commissioner or the city’s mayor since 1972, except for a two-year hiatus imposed by voters during the mid-90s. “You know why I think it is? Probably nobody’s taken the effort, given it any thought. That’s sad to say. That’s the only thing I can think.”

Over in Chapel Hill, the name of Airport Road, a major northern entranceway, was changed in 2004 to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard. That left the small street behind the town cemetery, a road that previously bore MLK’s name, to take on a new identity.

In characteristic Orange County fashion, a neighborhood committee was convened to make the recommendation, and after several meetings its choice was Jackie Robinson Street.

Since sports was the theme, you might have expected the honor to go to a great athlete from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Among others, the school produced All-American Charles Scott, Class of 1970, the school’s first black scholarship athlete and the greatest of the basketball pioneers who broke the color line in the ACC. His jersey was honored by the Tar Heels; a replica hangs in the Smith Center rafters.

Then there was a guy named Jordan who played at UNC for three seasons (1982-84) before going on to greater glory as the namesake of an athletic shoe. His jersey number, 23, is among six the school retired.

“I never thought of why there isn’t a Michael Jordan Road in Chapel Hill,” conceded town mayor Kevin Foy. “I’ll give that some thought.”

Giving a little more thought to folks like Claiborne and Heartley, McLendon and Scott and Jordan -- people who took risks or reached greatness in the places we inhabit -- would do us all some good. And not only during Black History month.