In 1964, Bill Russell, the best basketball player in the world, returned from a Civil Rights mission in Mississippi, the most dangerous state in the union for a Black person.
Mississippi was where 11 black people had been murdered in racist attacks in the year since a white assassin killed civil rights activist Medgar Evers and where civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were still missing.
That’s where Russell, risking his life, conducted integrated basketball camps.
When asked if he feared for his life, he responded “I’d rather die for something than live for nothing.”
When asked if he would leave his Celtics, who had just won their 6th straight championship, to continue to participate in the civil rights movement, he said, “Yes, but only if it would make a concrete contribution. There’d be no choice. It would be the duty of any American to fight for a cause he strongly believes in.”
When asked if he worried that his reputation took a hit because he was an activist athlete, he shot back, “I’m a man. If I have to be a boy to be popular, then I don’t want it. If my popularity depends on a thing like this, I don’t give a damn.”
That was Bill Russell. A great basketball player, and an even greater humanitarian.
Russell’s Upbringing
Born in Monroe, Louisiana in 1934, Russell’s father moved the family from the Jim Crow south to Oakland when young Bill Russell was just 9. The South wasn’t made for a man like Charles Russell who refused to capitulate to the demands of Black docility.
“Charlie Russell was not a man who was ever going to be kept back,” Russell said of his father, “and because he was a man, he broke the bonds and eventually left.”
Russell, whose mother passed away when he was only 11, was molded by a man who placed his dignity at the center of every move he made.
Charlie Russell was a proud Black man, and so too was Bill Russell.
In fact, when many people were still using the word Negro, Bill Russell openly embraced the word Black. At a time when the American lexicon used the word black to mean something bad– black heart, black thoughts, Black Sox– Russell took public pride in the word.
“When I was much younger,” he told a reporter, ”One of the things we have done has been to rescue the word black. It’s just about out of the woods now. Yeah, we’ve just about got it out of the woodpile.”
During his career, Russell’s assertion that he would be treated fair, and that every Black teammate of his would be accorded the same treatment, made the NBA what it is today.
As a player, Bill Russell controlled the game with his length, athleticism, and his mind, putting fear in offensive players’ hearts as they drove to the hoop.
With a career average of 15 points and 22 rebounds, Russell won 11 championships and 5 MVPs. He was the first Black head coach both in the NBA and in all professional sports and won two of those 11 rings as a player/coach. These accomplishments make him arguably the greatest basketball player to ever live, even if one thinks his era was dominated by a bunch of plumbers and firemen.
But you can’t measure who Bill Russell was by statistics.
Russell’s activism was more valuable to the league and the game than his athleticism.
Today, the league understands that it is Black and embraces that blackness.
It no longer tries to hide from it with racial quotas, like in Russell’s day. That’s because men like Bill Russell made the league understand early on that it was going to be a Black league, which meant treating the Black players with dignity.
Standing Up And Standing Tall
Before Russell, the league treated Black players like second-class citizens, and teams had no problems scheduling games in the South, even if it meant the Black players stayed in segregation.
In 1958, when the Celtics played a “home” game in Charlotte, and Russell and his Black teammates, along with the Black players from the Minneapolis Lakers, including Elgin Baylor, had to stay in a segregated facility, Russell became irate and vowed never to play in the South if he had to stay in segregation.
Because Russell called out the league and insisted on being treated with dignity, league owners promised to deal with the situation at their next meeting in January. They added a non-discrimination clause that stipulated teams would no longer play in the South unless all players were treated equally.
Two years later when Black teammates faced discrimination before a game in Kentucky, Russell led a boycott of Black players from the Celtics and St. Louis Hawks of that night’s game.
As Russell later said of the situation, “For a great number of years colored athletes and entertainers put up with these conditions because we figured they’d see we were nice people mostly and, in most cases, gentleman, and they’d say, ‘These people aren’t so bad.’ I’m not insulted by it. I’m just embarrassed. I’m of the opinion that some people can’t insult me. But it was the greatest mistake we ever made, because as long as you go along with it, everybody assumes it’s the status quo. The way I feel about it, if I can’t eat, I can’t entertain.”
Off the court, like few athletes of his generation, or even athletes after, Russell stood tall. Not because of his 6’10” frame, but for his willingness to stand up for what is right.
To Russell, too many Black players of his generation were in what he called the “twilight zone.”
“That’s between two different worlds—white world and black world,” as he put it. The black athletes in this position, he said, “slips in between there and, he ‘thinks white.’ And all he wants is to get what he can get.”
They worried about being liked and not upsetting white people.
The all-time great rebounder, however, believed that Black people had to grab white people’s attention for real change.
“It’s like the story of the old man who starts every day by hitting his mule over the head with a club ‘to get his attention.’ We have got to make the white people too uncomfortable and keep it uncomfortable, because that is the only way to get their attention.”
Refusal To Be Tolerant
Russell was effective because he didn’t care what people thought about him.
He couldn’t stand words like “tolerance,” because to him, if a white person said he was tolerant, that simply meant whites found him okay to deal with because he didn’t rock the boat. If a white person was tolerant, that meant that they were okay with the status quo.
Russell wanted radical change, not toleration.
He didn’t have the “twilight zone,” as he said most black athletes had. He admired the few guys like Jackie Robinson that upset the white sensibilities because they didn’t play nice. “I used to love to read how Jackie Robinson was ‘surly’ and over sensitive’ because he had the audacity to think he was a human being.”
As Russell spoke out against injustice on and off the court, white people around him asked him to be grateful for what he had.
But Russell swatted that suggestion away as if it was a Jerry West layup.
“I tell them to go to hell.”
Because he insisted on better treatment for himself and his people, and never held his tongue, white people called him ungrateful.
But it’s because Bill Russell refused to give an inch, on and off the court, that basketball and society are better off.
SOURCES:
“Russell Would Give Up Basketball for Rights,” Chicago Daily Defender, July 20, 1964.
Bill Russell, Go Up for Glory, 11.
“I Owe the Public Nothing,” Saturday Evening Post, January 18, 1964.
“Where the Negro Goes From Here,” Sport, September 1966
