NBA Great, Civil Rights Advocate Bill Russell Dead at 88

Medill DC, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

American icon and legend Bill Russell passed away at the age of 88. He was also known for playing basketball.

Boston Globe:

Mr. Russell, who played for two national championship varsities at the University of San Francisco and who captained the US team that won the Olympic gold medal at the 1956 Games, was Boston’s imposing man in the middle for an unsurpassed string of National Basketball Association titles that made the Celtics the league’s most feared and admired club. “The Yankees won 26 championships,” Mr. Russell once observed. “What did it take them, 100 years?”

The Celtics claimed 11 titles between 1957 and 1969, and their championship constant was the goateed Russell, the gap-toothed, cackling “eagle with a beard” whose flair for invention and intimidation was unmatched. “Russ revolutionized basketball and he was the man who made us go,” said Bob Cousy, the team’s Hall of Fame playmaker. “Without him, we wouldn’t have won a championship.”

Only Montreal Canadiens forward Henri Richard won as many for a franchise in a North American league as did Mr. Russell, who was basketball’s first African American superstar and the first in any sport in Boston, as well as a five-time Most Valuable Player and 12-time All-Star and the Celtics’ player-coach for his final three seasons.

His front-and-center prominence made him both an icon and an irritant in a city that was unaccustomed to a visible and vocal Black man and that was less than welcoming to the centerpiece of its most successful sports team. His home in suburban Reading was vandalized by intruders who destroyed his trophies, painted racial slurs on the walls, and defecated in the beds.

Mr. Russell arrived in Boston, which he once called “a flea market of racism,” at a time when the city still was a collection of tribal white neighborhoods whose residents were suspicious of outsiders. “I had never been in a city more involved with finding new ways to dismiss, ignore, or look down on other people,” Mr. Russell wrote in “Second Wind,” whose subtitle was “The Memoirs of an Opinionated Man.”

Decades later Cousy wrote Mr. Russell a letter saying that he should have been more supportive to his teammate during that time. “It was my responsibility to reach out to you and hopefully share the pain that you had during that period,” Cousy acknowledged.

Mr. Russell, whose parents had been harassed in Louisiana, was sensitive to racist treatment. “The white cops in Oakland stopped me on the streets all the time, grilled me and routinely called me ‘nigger’,” he reminisced. His Black teammates of the University of San Francisco were turned away at an Oklahoma City hotel, and, when Mr. Russell toured with his fellow NBA All-Stars in 1958, the Black players were refused rooms in North Carolina.

“It stood out, a wall which understanding cannot penetrate,” Mr. Russell wrote in “Go Up For Glory.” “You are a Negro. You are less. It covers every area. A living, smarting, hurting, smelly, greasy substance which covered you.”

Yet Mr. Russell, who was in the prime of his career during the civil rights movement of the ’60s, was a role model for African Americans who appreciated both his athletic prowess and his unabashed candor on social issues at a time when outspoken Black men often were considered “uppity” or ungrateful.

Mr. Russell was mobbed by young fans after he gave the commencement address at the Patrick Campbell Junior High School’s “Freedom Graduation” in 1966. This was the second graduation ceremony after the original commencement was disrupted when Rev. Virgil Wood took over the auditorium to protest the presence of School Committee-woman Louise Day Hicks at the predominantly Black junior high. Louise Day Hicks was to many the symbol of resistance to integration in Boston. Mr. Russell’s speech proclaimed, “there’s a fire here in Roxbury that the School Committee refuses to acknowledge… I do not say we have to love each other, but we must try to understand and respect each other.”

Mr. Russell was mobbed by young fans after he gave the commencement address at the Patrick Campbell Junior High School’s “Freedom Graduation” in 1966. This was the second graduation ceremony after the original commencement was disrupted when Rev. Virgil Wood took over the auditorium to protest the presence of School Committee-woman Louise Day Hicks at the predominantly Black junior high. Louise Day Hicks was to many the symbol of resistance to integration in Boston. Mr. Russell’s speech proclaimed, “there’s a fire here in Roxbury that the School Committee refuses to acknowledge… I do not say we have to love each other, but we must try to understand and respect each other.”

“It was the perfect time for his kind of man, a man who would step out, not be afraid to say what he thought, what he believed in, and to also provide some direction for a lot of people, not only in the sports world,” said teammate Tom Sanders, who later coached the Celtics.

Mr. Russell, who believed that “my citizenship isn’t a gift, it’s a birthright,” refused to accept second-class status when he was out of uniform. “A man without integrity, belief, or self-respect is not a man,” he said. “And a man who won’t express his convictions has no convictions.”