By Des Bieler, Washington Post August 27, 2020
When Bill Russell saluted NBA players Wednesday for “standing up for what is right,” his words carried extra weight.
Not just because Russell, 86, is the NBA’s greatest winner, and arguably its greatest player. And not just because he has been a civil rights activist for as long as he’s been a sports icon.
Russell also happens to know a thing or two about staging an NBA boycott, as the Milwaukee Bucks did Wednesday in refusing to play in a postseason game to protest racial injustice in the wake of the shooting of Jacob Blake. . .
Nearly 60 years earlier, Russell was the one pulling himself out of an NBA game as a demonstration against racist behavior. His Black teammates on the Boston Celtics followed suit, as did Black players for their opponent, the St. Louis Hawks. . . In addition, the game Russell and others pulled out of was a preseason exhibition, not a playoff contest.
However, it’s likely that NBA players today would have no trouble finding common ground with a sentiment Russell expressed at the time: “I am coming to the realization that we are accepted as entertainers, but that we are not accepted as people in some places.”
In the case of the 1961-62 Celtics, one of those places – but hardly the only one – was Lexington, where Boston’s Frank Ramsey and St. Louis’s Cliff Hagan had been all-American teammates at the University of Kentucky. At the time, the NBA needed to drum up local interest wherever it could find it, but not all the Celtics and Hawks players would find the welcome enjoyed by Ramsey and Hagan, both White (the Wildcats infamously took until 1969 to incorporate a Black player under former coach Adolph Rupp).
Two Boston players and future Basketball Hall of Fame members, Sam Jones and Thomas “Satch” Sanders, were refused service in the coffee shop at their team hotel in Lexington. “We had gone downstairs to eat, and they said, ‘Well, we really can’t serve you people,’ ” Sanders said in 2018.
Russell led the infuriated pair and K.C. Jones, another Black player and future Hall of Famer, to the room occupied by legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach. Upon hearing that they intended to take the next flight back to Boston, Auerbach asked that the players reconsider, asserting that the seats were already sold and the game would be played.
Russell, who by then had helped Boston to four of its 11 championships with him, would not be swayed. Instead, he made it clear that it was better for hi1m and his Black teammates to walk away, and leave Lexington with the nonintegrated game its denizens apparently preferred.
“I told Red we were leaving,” Russell recalled in 2013. “I said it was because it was important to me that everybody, everywhere, knows that the Black players are deciding they’ll stand up for themselves.”
Two Black players for the Hawks joined the boycott. One of those St. Louis players was Cleo Hill, a first-round pick earlier that year who was also denied service in Lexington. He earned the wrath of the Hawks’ owner, was subsequently ostracized by Hagan and other White teammates and – in something of a foreshadowing of the fate that would befall Colin Kaepernick – he was out of the NBA after that season. The game went on with only white players.
By contrast, Celtics owner Walter Brown told Auerbach that the game should not have been played at all and vowed to “never to subject my players to that embarrassment again.” Ramsey also declared his “100%” support for Russell and the other Black players.
“No thinking person in Kentucky is a segregationist,” Ramsey said then. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am as a human being, as a friend of the players involved and as a resident of Kentucky for the embarrassment of this incident.”
A day after the 1961 boycott, Russell told reporters: “We’ve got to show our disapproval of this kind of treatment or else the status quo will prevail. We have the same rights and privileges as anyone else and deserve to be treated accordingly. I hope we never have to go through this abuse again.”
“But if it happens,” he continued, “we won’t hesitate to take the same action again . . . ” Nearly 60 years later, Russell saw NBA players take similar action, for similar reasons. The Bucks’ protest was the culmination of days-long expressions of anger by NBA players over the shooting of Blake, who took seven close-range bullets to his back from a Wisconsin police officer. . .
On Wednesday, Russell said on Twitter that he was “moved” by what he saw developing in the NBA bubble. He also thanked TNT analyst Kenny Smith, a former NBA player, for walking off the set that evening in solidarity with the Bucks and others. “I am so proud of you,” Russell told Smith. “Keep getting in good trouble.”
On the game prompting the league’s commissioner to move the game to Houston. The unprecedented walkout or boycott, Kendle says “went beyond the world of sports and was more a reflection of American society at the time.”
Among the 21 black players to boycott that game nine (Winston Hill and Sherman Plunkett out of Maryland State; Ernie Warlick out of North Carolina College; Willie Brown, Buck Buchanan and Ernie Ladd out of Grambling; Clem Daniels out of Prairie View; Mack Lee Hill out of Southern and Dick Westmoreland out of North Carolina A&T) were HBCU products.
Well, how much is the shooting seven times in the back by that police officer in Kenosha of Jacob Blake, an unarmed innocent African-American, a reflection of our times? And what do the killings by police and white vigilantes of unarmed black Americans Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbrey, Dontre Hamilton, Eric Garner, John Crawford III, Michael Brown Jr., Ezell Ford, Dante Parker, Tanisha Anderson, Akai Gurley, Tamir Rice, Rumain Brisbon, Jerame Reid, Phillip White, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray amongst a list of others just in the last five years say to us about where we are today?
While the NBA players – joined in the boycott by players and teams in the WNBA, Major League Baseball, Major League Soccer, pro football, pro tennis and other sports – were pondering their next move, I opined that they cancel the season and spend the next two months marshalling all their energies to make sure, as much as they can, that Agent Orange and all those that support him are not reelected come November 3.
I then urged them to followup by committing to an on-going process to hold whoever is elected to taking down the monuments – whether they be physical, psychological, philosophical, legal, ideological, structural, historical or institutional – that undergirds this blindness.
I then also urged, as Russell did in 1961, that if the abuse and discrimination continues, to be prepared to walk out again.
I followed with the phrase, “This ain’t no game!”
I think the players and their union wisely chose, with advice and help from the likes of Barack Obama and Michael Jordan, to return to the playoffs with a greater commitment from the NBA and its owners and management to take further steps to address this problem.
One of the agreed upon measures was to, if possible, turn all the NBA arenas in America to voting locations or minimally work with elections officials to find election related uses for those facilities.
The league also pledged to establish a social justice coalition that will be “focused on a broad range of issues” including increased access to voting and police and criminal justice reform.