Bill Russell, 1934-2022
A legend in life.
Good morning. Our regular newsletter format will return on Tuesday. Today: Bill Russell, who died Sunday at the age of 88.
The greatest winner in basketball history. A staunch defender of civil rights. A man who revolutionized the sport and broke one of its biggest barriers at the pro level. Greatness personified in all its forms.
That incredible laugh.
I read Russell’s 1979 memoir Second Wind a decade or so ago. It’s an incredible read, if you can get your hands on it. It tells the stories you’ve heard about Russell both outside of and deep inside the Celtics glory years, but straight from Russell’s point of view. The raw honesty about the racism he faced even as he brought trophies to Boston. The deeply affecting tale of his family’s path during The Great Migration, and the family’s struggles in their new home of Oakland. His personal path to the University of San Francisco and then to the NBA and then to becoming the first Black head coach in major American sports.
He stood with Ali when Ali refused to fight in a war.
He stood with the freedom movement IN BOSTON in 1963 in protesting the city’s school board over de facto school segregation, a decade after Brown vs. Board of Education was decided. He had just brought the Celtics their sixth championship in his seven years in the league. Russell gave what reporters called a “very powerful” speech at the protest, in which thousands of students refused to attend school to instead experience a day of civil rights organization and Black history speeches. I can’t find the speech anywhere, but you can hear Russell talk about the protest at the 16:30 mark in the audio from WGBH-FM here.
He won three straight NBA MVPs and then spoke at a school segregation protest in 1960s Boston. The range is incredible.
That same month, Medgar Evers, the Mississippi civil rights leader, was assassinated in front of his home. Russell was a friend of Evers, and insisted on fighting to keep Evers’ fight alive. He called Medgar’s brother Charles and asked what he could do.
“Get down here,” Evers told Russell, “and we’ll open one of the playgrounds and we’ll have the first integrated basketball camp in Mississippi.”
Evers knew he was asking a lot. He was asking Russell, one of the country’s most prominent African-Americans, to risk his life, to teach basketball to kids — black and white — in the racial tinder box that was Jackson.
Russell did it.
“There were Klansmen (members of the Ku Klux Klan) on the other side of the street,” Evers said.
A group of black leaders called “The Deacons of Defense” provided security for Russell. At night, as Russell tried to sleep in an undersized bed at a local motel, Evers grabbed brief hours of sleep, sitting in a chair, pointed toward the door, a rifle resting in his lap, the last line of defense.
Can you fathom the bravery, the conviction in going beyond all reasonable duty to do what’s right?
Bill Russell was also, repeatedly, victimized by racism. From an essay written by his daughter Karen Russell, published in the New York Times in 1987:
One night we came home from a three-day weekend and found we had been robbed. Our house was in a shambles, and [N----] 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."
Russell was a deeply intellectual person. From a 2019 Andscape piece by Martenzie Johnson:
“He was always ahead of that game, in terms of his disposition towards people. And, in part, it was a consequence of his brilliance,” [sports sociologist Harry] Edwards said over the phone. “I’ve known some brilliant athletes — I don’t mean brilliant in the sense of brilliant about the game — I’m talking about brilliant in the sense of my colleagues, people that I have lectured and worked with at Berkeley and at Harvard and at the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA. Brilliant in the sense of being analytically astute and informed. And I put Bill Russell right at the top of that list.
“He is probably the most brilliant, intellectually, athlete that I have ever come across, and one of the most brilliant people that I’ve come across.”
Russell, well-read on account of his mother, studied the Haitian revolutionary Henri Christophe and had a close relationship with Huey P. Newton, the Black Panther Party co-founder. His future activism was even foreshadowed at birth: William Felton Russell was named after Felton Clark, the former president of historically black Southern University. He would name his only daughter, Karen Kenyatta Russell, after Jomo Kenyatta, an anti-colonialist who became prime minister of Kenya.
On the basketball side, he truly did revolutionize basketball on the defensive end. Obviously, relatively few of us saw him play in real-time. But in the footage available and given what we know about the pro game before Russell’s arrival, his singular impact is breathtaking and undeniable.
The incomparable basketball IQ and (relatively) low scoring numbers make folks think Russell wasn’t also one of the greatest athletes the league has ever seen. Frankly, Russell might have been one of the greatest athletes in the modern world. This 2020 thread from the writer Michael Harriot explains the case in highly entertaining fashion. With cameos from Bill Withers and Johnny Mathis. And this photo.
There will truly never be another like him. All we can do to honor his legacy and life is to be brave, to embrace our excellence and to oppose hate and discrimination in all its forms.
The baddest dude on the planet. Rest in peace, Mr. Russell.
Be excellent to each other.
You could design a college course around the life of Bill Russell, without ever mentioning that he played basketball. His importance is immeasurable.
Bill Russell was a titan.
Great story about the basketball camp in Mississippi