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Old 07-31-2022, 02:11 PM
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Default Bill Russell passes 88/yrs old

Great person, great player, cool guy


https://www.wcvb.com/article/bill-ru...2022/40763759#
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Old 07-31-2022, 02:53 PM
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“Boston itself was a flea market of racism. It had all varieties, old and new. The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and the university areas had phony, radical-chic racists ...... other than that, I liked the city.”


Bill Russell, 1979

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Old 07-31-2022, 05:34 PM
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RIP Mr. Russell. My prayers and thoughts go out to his family and friends.
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Old 08-02-2022, 03:53 PM
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“Boston itself was a flea market of racism. It had all varieties, old and new. The city had corrupt, city hall-crony racists, brick-throwing, send-’em-back-to-Africa racists, and the university areas had phony, radical-chic racists ...... other than that, I liked the city.”


Bill Russell, 1979

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A 1987 Essay by Bill Russell’s Daughter Detailed Racism the Family Faced in Massachusetts

(By Amanda Kaufman)

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/...vanced_Results

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Old 08-02-2022, 04:06 PM
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A 1987 Essay by Bill Russell’s Daughter Detailed Racism the Family Faced in Massachusetts

(By Amanda Kaufman)

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/08/...vanced_Results

o
o


This is the essay from June 14th of 1987, from l The New York Times.



Growing Up with Privilege and Prejudice

(By Karen Russell)

https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/14/m...prejudice.html





To our children . . . in the hope that they will grow up as we could not . . . equal . . . and understanding.

- WILLIAM FELTON RUSSELL, WILLIAM FRANCIS McSWEENY

IN 1966, MY FATHER AND HIS co-author dedicated his first autobiography, ''Go Up for Glory.'' Today, in 1987, having just received my Doctor of Laws degree, I wonder if I can fulfill the dreams of my parents' generation. They struggled for integration, they marched for peace, they ''sat in'' for equality. I doubt they were naive enough to think they had changed the world, but I know they hoped my generation would be able to approach life differently. In fact, we have been able to do things my parents never thought possible. But that is not enough. I am a child of privilege. In so many ways, I have been given every opportunity - good grade schools, college years at Georgetown, the encouragement to pursue my ambitions. I have just graduated from Harvard Law School. My future looks promising. Some people, no doubt, will attribute any successes I have to the fact that I am a black woman. I am a child of privilege, and I am angry. In ''The Book of Laughter and Forgetting,'' Milan Kundera writes: ''The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.'' It seems that we have not come very far in that struggle in this country. We have entered the post-civil rights, post-feminist era, both movements I owe so much to. Meanwhile, my parents' dreams are still around us, still unrealized.

It is perhaps somewhat ironic that I came back for my postgraduate work to Boston, a city my father once described as the most racist in America. My father is Bill Russell, center for the Boston Celtics dynasty that won 11 championships in 13 years. Recently, I asked him if it was difficult to send me to school here. When he first went to Boston in 1956, the Celtics' only black player, fans and sportswriters subjected him to the worst kind of unbridled bigotry. When he retired from the National Basketball Association in 1969, he moved to the West Coast, where he has remained.

I found his response to my question surprising. ''I played for the Celtics, period,'' he said. ''I did not play for Boston. I was able to separate the Celtics institution from the city and the fans. When I sent you to Harvard, I expected you to be able to do the same. I wanted you to have the best possible education and to be able to make the best contacts. I knew you'd encounter racism and sexism, and maybe, in some ways, that's a good thing. If you were too sheltered, I'm afraid you'd be too naive. If you were too sheltered, you might not be motivated to help others who do not have your advantages.'' Looking back on my tenure at

Harvard, I guess he was right; the last three years have opened my eyes, but law school was only part of it. I became much more aware of disparities in wealth, gender, status.

The race issue had always been with me, but it hadn't occurred to me that my generation would still be saddled with so many other limitations.

Actually, people of my generation have a new breed of racism (and sexism and classism) to contend with. The new racism is more subtle, and in some ways more difficult, to confront. Open bigotry is out, but there have been a number of overtly racist incidents recently, at Howard Beach in New York, for example, and on college campuses throughout the country. What provokes these incidents? The new racism seems to be partially submerged, coming out into the open when sparked by a sudden confrontation. Then there is the sort of comment Al Campanis, then a Los Angeles Dodgers vice president, made recently on the ABC News program ''Nightline,'' that blacks ''may not have some of the necessities'' required to achieve leadership positions in baseball. Campanis continued that lacking necessities could be demonstrated in other areas: blacks are not good swimmers, he said, ''because they don't have the buoyancy.'' (I've already ordered my ''I'm Black and I'm Buoyant'' bumper sticker.) The Campanis incident is more than just your garden-variety, knee-jerk racism. I sincerely doubt that Campanis meant any harm to come from his remarks; in fact, he probably doesn't think of himself as a racist. But does it matter? How am I supposed to react to well-meaning, good, liberal white people who say things like: ''You know, Karen, I don't understand what all the fuss is about. You're one of my good friends, and I never think of you as black.'' Implicit in such a remark is, ''I think of you as white,'' or perhaps just, ''I don't think of your race at all.'' Racial neutrality is a wonderful concept, but we are a long way from achieving it. In the meantime, I would hope that people wouldn't have to negate my race in order to accept me.

Last year, I worked as a summer law associate, and one day a white lawyer called me into her office. She told me, laughing, that her secretary, a young black woman, had said that I spoke ''more white than white people.'' It made me sad; that young woman had internalized all of society's negative images of black people to the point that she thought of a person with clear diction as one of ''them.''

I am reminded of the time during college that I was looking through the classifieds for an apartment. I called a woman to discuss the details of a rental. I needed directions to the apartment, and she asked me where I lived. I told her I lived in Georgetown, to which she replied, ''Can you believe the way the blacks have overrun Georgetown?'' I didn't really know how to respond. I said, ''Well, actually, I can believe that Georgetown is filled with blacks because I happen to be black.'' There was a silence on the other end. Finally, the woman tried to explain that she hadn't meant any harm. She was incredibly embarrassed, and, yes, you guessed it, she said, ''Some of my best friends are. . . .''

I hung up before she could finish.

I WAS AFRAID TO come back to Boston.

My first memory of the place is of a day spent in Marblehead, walking along the ocean shore with a white friend of my parents. I must have been 3 or 4 years old. A white man walking past us looked at me and said, ''You little nigger.'' I am told that I smiled up at him as he went on: ''They should send all you black baboons back to Africa.'' It was only when I turned to look at Kay that I realized something was wrong.

We lived in a predominantly Irish Catholic neighborhood in Reading, Mass. For a long time, we were the only black family there. It was weird to be the only black kid at school, aside from my two older brothers. I knew we were different from the other children. Notwithstanding that, I loved school. In 1968, in the first grade, we held mock Presidential elections, and the teacher kept a tally on the blackboard as she counted ballots. There were 20 votes for Hubert H. Humphrey, four or five votes for Richard M. Nixon and one vote for Dick Gregory. No one else in the classroom had heard of Gregory. I was mortified. But I had just done what the other kids had done: I had voted like my parents.

I think my brothers and I may have been spared some of the effects of racism because my father was a celebrity. But I know that his position also made us a bit paranoid. Sometimes it was hard to tell why other kids liked us, or hated us, for that matter. Was it because we had a famous father? Was it because we were black? We had one of those ''fun'' houses - lots of food, lots of toys, and, the coup de grace, a swimming pool. I was proud to have friends over. They were awed by my father's trophy case. Actually, so were we.

One night we came home from a three-day weekend and found we had been robbed. Our house was in a shambles, and ''NIGGA'' was spray-painted on the walls. The burglars had poured beer on the pool table and ripped up the felt. They had broken into my father's trophy case and smashed most of the trophies. I was petrified and shocked at the mess; everyone was very upset. The police came, and after a while, they left. It was then that my parents pulled pack their bedcovers to discover that the burglars had defecated in their bed.

Every time the Celtics went out on the road, vandals would come and tip over our garbage cans. My father went to the police station to complain. The police told him that raccoons were responsible, so he asked where he could apply for a gun permit. The raccoons never came back.

The only time we were really scared was after my father wrote an article about racism in professional basketball for The Saturday Evening Post. He earned the nickname Felton X. We received threatening letters, and my parents notified the Federal Bureau of Investigation. What I find most telling about this episode is that years later, after Congress had passed the Freedom of Information Act, my father requested his F.B.I. file and found that he was repeatedly referred to therein as ''an arrogant Negro who won't sign autographs for white children.''

My father has never given autographs, because he thinks they are impersonal. He would rather shake a person's hand or look that person in the eye and say, ''Pleased to meet you.'' His attitude has provoked racist responses, and these have tended to obscure the very basic issue of the right to privacy. Any professional athlete, and certainly any black professional athlete, is supposed to feel grateful to others for the fame he or she has achieved. The thoughtless interruptions, the insistence by fans that they be recognized and personally thanked for their support, never let up. I'll never forget the day I left for college at Georgetown. I had never been away from either parent for more than two weeks, and now I was moving 3,000 miles away. I was at the airport, saying goodbye to my friends and my family. I was crying so hard that I actually cried my contact lens out. And I was hugging my dad - it was a real Hallmark moment. A man came up, oblivious to the gathering, and said to him, ''You're Wilt Chamberlain, aren't you?'' We all turned to look at him as though he were crazy. He asked for an autograph. My father declined.

I always admired the way my father dealt with these intrusions. He never compromised his values. It would have been easier to acquiesce to the fans - or to a sponsor who offered him a lower fee than they would a white person for endorsing a product. But he would not. I struggle to emulate him.

I WENT TO COLLEGE WITH Patrick Ewing, whose playing style has been compared to my father's.

Patrick came to Georgetown from the public high school in Cambridge, just a few blocks from the Harvard campus. I have a lot of sympathy for him. When he played in college, people in the stands -presumably educated people -held up signs that said ''Patrick Ewing Can't Read Dis.''

When my father first played for the Celtics, the fans called him ''chocolate boy,'' ''coon,'' ''nigger'' - you name it, he was called it. Almost three decades later, Patrick Ewing was facing the same sort of treatment, and I was, in a way, reliving my father's experience in watching it happen. I never talked to Patrick about it because I respected his privacy. From being in public with my father, I knew how difficult it was to be someone like Patrick. Aside from everything else, when you're over 6 feet, 9 inches tall - as both of them are - it's hard to be inconspicuous. Your presence seems to make other people uncomfortable, and everyone seems to feel further compelled to speak to you. Still, I hoped Patrick knew he wasn't alone. Several weeks ago, I heard on the news about a racial incident in Taunton, a town not far from Cambridge. It concerned two girls, high-school students and best friends. One was black, the other white. When the school yearbook arrived, it was discovered that the caption under the photograph of the white girl included the words ''Nigger Lover.'' On the news, the school principal said that the incident was just an isolated ''prank,'' not a racist act.

I remember a day in my own high school when a guy who was really popular walked by me in the hall and hissed ''nigger'' under his breath. I told one of my close friends, and she insisted that I must have misunderstood him, that he must have said ''bigger.'' I felt betrayed. I feel awful for those girls in Taunton. Adolescents can be really cruel. Adults may have the same thoughts, but they are not as likely to say them to your face. Not that the latter is necessarily an improvement. I could always pinpoint the source of the bigotry in my high school, but the new bigot is much harder to detect. Our society has taken to the presumption that racism -and sexism - no longer exist, and that any confrontations are the work of a few ''bad actors.'' Given this myth, the person who complains about genuine harassment can expect to be seen as the source of conflict.

In Taunton, they crossed out the epithet in every copy of the yearbook. It would apparently have been too expensive to recall the edition. Too expensive for whom?

CERTAINLY, NOT ALL MY MEMORIES of the early years in Massachusetts are bad. At Christmas, the Bruins and the Celtics held an ice-skating party in the Boston Garden for the children of players. Most of the Celtics' kids were tall, had high centers of gravity and couldn't skate to save our lives. We slid over the ice pushing chairs in front of us like walkers.

The Bruins' kids seemed to have sprung from the womb wearing skates, and they terrorized us. At home, too, life could be exciting. One night, my dad's friend Cassius Clay came over and gave us boxing lessons.

We also got to know members of the Celtics organization. Much later, these friends welcomed me back to Boston and, during law school, I went to the Celtics home games on a fairly regular basis. I loved being in the Garden and seeing all those championship flags. I'm really proud. And it was nice to see my father's old teammates, such as K. C. Jones, the head coach, who was my father's college roommate, and Red Auerbach, the club president. They all remember me from when I was little, and they're proud of me in the way my father is proud of their kids. Red Auerbach could be hard on me, though; he always asked me why I wasn't at home studying. More than once, he told me that my father had been really lazy at times, dropping a not-so-subtle hint.

From 1967 until his retirement two years later, my father played and coached simultaneously for the Celtics - the first black coach in the N.B.A. For the next few years, he worked for KABC, in Los Angeles, and in 1973 became coach and general manager of the Seattle Supersonics. Over the years, he has worked for ABC and CBS Sports as well as WTBS, Ted Turner's ''superstation.'' In April, he was named coach of the Sacramento Kings. It is expected that he will ultimately become both general manager and president of the club. He would be the first black president of an N.B.A. franchise.

During the years my father played for the Celtics, my mother stayed at home with us. She was - and is - an extremely creative and outgoing person who has had a great influence on my life. (She taught my brothers and me how to read before we started school, an activity I later pursued to the exclusion of all others. She used to have to lock me out of the house so that I would play.) After my parents separated in the late 1960's, my mother explored a variety of occupations. She now lives as a practicing Buddhist in a small town in California, where, because of her friendly and sympathetic nature, the whole community knows her by name.

My first exposure to the West Coast came in 1973, when, after my parents were divorced, I went to live with my father in the affluent Seattle suburb of Mercer Island. This time, we were one of five or six black families in the neighborhood. I was in the sixth grade, and I was the only black child in my school.

On Mercer Island also, we had problems with the police. Whenever a black person drove onto the island, police cruisers would follow, regardless of how familiar the car and the driver might be. Only recently, after talk of a discrimination suit and several complaints from the black families on the island, did this practice cease.

In my family, there are plenty of stories that involve cars. There was the time, in 1978, that my two brothers, Bill Jr. and Jacob, and a friend drove my father's new Rolls-Royce from New York to Seattle. They were pulled over and searched at one point by the police, for no apparent reason. They also remember raising a lot of eyebrows at pit stops along the way. In my father's 1979 memoir, ''Second Wind,'' he tells of being pulled over by the police in Los Angeles, again for no apparent reason, while driving a Lamborghini. When he asked what the problem was, the policeman told him a radio alert had gone out for a car of the make he was driving. ''What kind of car is it?'' my father asked. The policeman couldn't say. Unfortunately for him, Lamborghini isn't spelled out on the hood.

THE OLD RACISM SEEMS, THESE DAYS, ever ready to resurface with a vengeance. During the 1960's, when my parents were marching to ''We Shall Overcome,'' there was a different sense about the future. In 1963, the year after I was born, the March on Washington was a march toward the lofty goal of integration. There was a notion that we could build new communities, build new ties. Not only would blacks get to share in the pie, but there was a bigger pie. Women, blacks, Hispanics, Asians would enter the mainstream of society and practice the American dream. The pendulum is now swinging in the other direction. The neo-conservative movement, personified by President Reagan, seems to be leading the way toward retrenchment. To me, the slogan ''Let's Make America Great Again'' is scary.

How far back do these people want to go? Moreover, if making America great again entails the perpetual existence of a poor underclass, I don't know if I want it. If it means enormous military buildup at the expense of social programs, I don't know that I'm for it.

Blacks make up about 10 percent of this year's graduating class at Harvard Law School. Black enrollment has declined since my first year, but school officials say the number has increased slightly for the class of 1990. Harvard Law is factionalized and seems to break down along race, religious and class lines; I suspect there is more anti-Semitism at the law school than anti-black sentiment, because of what appears to be a larger Jewish minority. The student body is about one-third female. I never had a black female professor. I was without role models, although I admire many of the faculty members.

MY FRIENDS, FROM Harvard and elsewhere, reflect my fragmented background. I could never invite them all to the same party and survive. Nor can I meet them all on the same ground.

At the law school, I made friends with fellow anti-apartheid protesters and members of a loose-knit group of leftists known as the counter-hegemonic front. I have other friends whose politics I strongly disagree with. I have sometimes been drawn to the children of famous or wealthy parents because of an immediate sense of commonality; we know how to protect one another. One of my best friends is Chris Kennedy, son of Ethel and the late Robert F. Kennedy. We never use last names when introducing each other, because we resent people who remember only our last names.

After I graduate and take the bar examination, I'll work on Gov. Michael S. Dukakis's Presidential campaign. Some of my more radical friends would say that I'm selling out by trying to make my voice heard from within the system. It seems that blacks have to make a tough choice - be co-opted or go without representation. I'm not sure if that either/or depiction is accurate.

HOW WILL I DEAL with racism in my life?

I have no brilliant solution. On a personal level, I will ask people to explain a particular comment or joke. When I have trouble hailing a cab in New York, as frequently happens -cabbies ''don't want to go to Harlem'' - I will copy down the medallion numbers and file complaints if necessary. On the larger level, I will work with others to confront the dilemma of the widening gap between the black middle class and the black lower class, a gap that must be closed if my generation is to advance the cause of racial equality.

Like many middle-class children who grew up accustomed to a comfortable life style, I will also have to work to balance the desire for economic prosperity with the desire to realize more idealistic goals.

If I do ever find a man and get married (after all those magazine and newspaper articles, I realize that I have a better chance of becoming a member of the Politburo!), will we want to raise our kids in a black environment? Sometimes I really regret that I didn't go to an all-black college. When I was in high school on Mercer Island, I didn't go out on dates. A good friend was nice enough to escort me to my senior prom. I don't know if I want my kids excluded like that. If it hadn't been my race, it might have been something else; I guess a lot of people were miserable in high school. Yet, I have to wonder what it would be like to be the norm.

I am concerned about tokenism. If I am successful, I do not want to be used as a weapon to defeat the claims of blacks who did not have my opportunities. I do not want someone to say of me: ''See, she made it. We live in a world of equal opportunity. If you don't make it, it's your own fault.''

I also worry about fallout from this article. One day during college, I was walking down the street when a photographer asked if he could take my picture for the Style section of The Washington Post. The photograph appeared with a caption that said I worked at a modeling agency, which I did -as a booking agent. Two things happened. I got asked out on some dates, which I didn't mind. And I received a letter that, accompanied by detailed anatomical description, said I was ''a nigger bitch who has no business displaying your ugly body.'' What kind of letters and comments can I expect to receive as a result of this article? Although I am speaking as an individual, I run the risk of being depersonalized, even dehumanized, by others.

Daddy told me that he never listened to the boos, because he never listened to the cheers. He did it for himself. I guess I have to, too.

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