It’s easy to remember the shots that Bill Russell blocked or the N.B.A. He won several championships. There were so many of them, he is considered one the greatest basketball players ever.
His most significant legacy, however, is not the sport he dominated but his work off the court. Russell was a civil-rights activist, who used his celebrity status as a star athlete to confront racism from his youth to his death at 88. He was among the first to do it.
Russell’s example has inspired many athletes to speak out. The N.B.A. players’ union encourages its members to be passionate about their politics, especially around social justice. Without Russell’s risking his own livelihood and enduring the cruelties he did as a Black player in the segregated Boston of the 1950s and 1960s, athlete activism would look much different today, if it existed at all.
“The blueprint was written by Russell,” the Rev. Al Sharpton spoke in an interview on Sunday. He continued: “It is now trendy on social media to take a stand. He did it even though it wasn’t trendy. He set the trend.”
Spike Lee, director and long-time N.B.A. member, said in a text message that he was “we are losing so many greats my head is spinning”. fan, said in a text message, “We are losing so many greats my head is spinning.”
Lee said Russell “is right up there with Jackie Robinson as changing the game in sports and activism in the United States of America, and we are all better because of these champions.”
Russell, a West Monroe, La. native, was a trailblazer right from the moment that he stepped foot on an N.B.A. court.
“My rookie year, in the championship series, I was the only Black player for both teams,” Russell once quipped to an audience while accepting an award in Boston. “And see what we did, we showed them diversity works.”
Russell marched along with the Rev. He marched alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963 during his prime playing career. (He played for the Celtics between 1956 and 1969). He declined an invitation to sit behind King. Russell addressed Black students who were participating in a sit-in that year, offering his public support for protests against segregation in Boston public school.
When the civil rights leader Medgar Evers was assassinated, also in 1963, Russell contacted Evers’s older brother, Charles, in Jackson, Miss., and offered his assistance. Russell was suggested by the elder Evers to run an integrated basketball camp within the Deep South. This would have been a serious safety risk for Russell. He said yes and went ahead with the camp, despite the death threats.
Russell, the N.F.L., was formed four years later when Muhammad Ali was subject to a torrent of criticisms for refusing the fight in Vietnam War. star Jim Brown, Kareem AbdulJabbar (then Lew alcindor and still playing at U.C.L.A. Ali was supported by a group of people who gathered in Cleveland. Russell didn’t care about this stance.
Russell immediately wrote that he was jealous of Ali.
“He has absolute and sincere faith,” Russell wrote for Sports Illustrated. “I’m not worried about Muhammad Ali. He is more prepared than anyone I know to face the trials ahead of him. What I’m worried about is the rest of us.”
Russell’s activism made an impact on generations of athletes. Spencer Haywood was one of those athletes. He was a member the Seattle SuperSonics and Russell coached him for four seasons. (In 1966 Russell became the first Black coach of the N.B.A.
In an interview on Sunday, Haywood stated that Russell and he would often dine at 13 Coins in Seattle after road trips. Russell would then regale Haywood with stories about civil rights. During these dinners, Russell lauded the young player’s willingness to sue the N.B.A. in 1971 for not allowing players to enter the league until four years after their high school graduation — a case that went to the U.S. Supreme Court and was eventually decided in Haywood’s favor.
“He was teaching me because he knew what I had stood up for with my Supreme Court ruling,” Haywood said. “And he admired that in me. And I was so overwhelmed by him knowing.”
Haywood said his teammates would jokingly refer to Russell as Haywood’s “daddy” because of how close they were. Sometimes, Haywood’s late-night talks with Russell came with surprising advice about activism.
“He always used to tell me about not getting too carried away because we were in the ’70s,” Haywood recalled. “He was kind of guiding me, saying: ‘Don’t go out too far right now because you are a player and you need to play the game. But you’ve made one stand and you did great in that, but don’t go too far.’ He was, like, giving me a guardrail.”
Russell was not afraid of going too far in his role as a player activist. He wasn’t deterred by the racist taunts he absorbed at games, or when vandals broke into his home, spray-painted epithets on the wall and left feces on the bed after he moved his family to Reading, Mass. Residents of the predominantly white neighborhood began a petition to stop him from moving his family to another house.
“I said then that I wasn’t scared of the kind of men who come in the dark of night,” Russell wrote for Slam magazine in 2020. “The fact is, I’ve never found fear to be useful.”
He didn’t always have the support of his teammates. In 1961, for instance, the Celtics travelled to Lexington, Ky., to play an exhibition against the St. Louis Hawks. When the restaurant at the hotel would not serve the team’s Black players, Russell led a strike of the game. His white teammates also played the game. Bob Cousy, one of Russell’s white teammates, told the writer Gary M. Pomerantz decades later for the 2018 book “The Last Pass: Cousy, the Celtics and What Matters in the End” that he was “ashamed” at having taken part in the game. President Barack Obama used the 1961 story to award Russell the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.
“For decades, Bill endured insults and vandalism, but never let it stop him from speaking up for what’s right,” Obama said in a statement Sunday. “I learned so much from the way he played, the way he coached, and the way he lived his life.”
The activism didn’t stop as Russell got older. Russell has been a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter in recent years. Colin KaepernickThe former N.F.L. Former N.F.L. quarterback, who began kneeling during 2016’s national anthem to protest police brutality.
“Bill Russell was a pioneer,” Etan Thomas, a former N.B.A. In a text message on Sunday, he said that Russell was a political activist and player. Thomas said Russell was “an athlete who used his position and platform to stand up for a bigger cause.” He added that “he was the type of athlete I wanted to be like when I grew up.”
Russell’s influence in leading the 1961 strike could be felt in 2020, when the Milwaukee Bucks refused to play a playoff game as a protest of police brutality. Russell is on Twitter wrote that he was “moved by all the N.B.A. players for standing up for what is right.” In a piece for The Players’ Tribune weeks later, Russell wrote, “Black and Brown people are still Racial discrimination: Fighting for justice still hold the highest offices in the land.”
Sharpton pointed to those actions as Russell’s legacy.
“He did it before some of these guys were born,” Sharpton said. “And I think that what they need to understand is every time a basketball player or athlete puts a T-shirt on saying something about Trayvon or ‘I Am Trayvon’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’ or whatever they want to do — ‘Get your knee off my neck!’ — they may not know it, but they are doing the Bill Russell.”
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