Speaking of “getting by on good behavior,” the basketball legend Bill Russell passed away on July 31 at the age of 88. Many “good white people” in his day weren’t even getting by on good behavior – they were outright hostile because he was black.

I remember him well when he started playing for the Boston Celtics in 1956, having won the NCAA basketball championship with the University of San Francisco in 1955 and 1956, and the Olympic gold medal. My dad was in awe: “He’s got springs in his legs!”

It didn’t occur to me until I started reading tribute articles what a tough time he had. Here are some snippets from Jason Gay of the Wall Street Journal. His article is worth the read in its entirety.

He was ruthlessly honest. He came of age in Louisiana, then Oakland, at a time when blunt racism, segregation and vestiges of slavery were norms, and moved from college (where the sport tried to curb his dominance by widening the foul lane) to the NBA in an era when a rival club owner could discuss quotas and whether or not Black players should be allowed to guard white stars. Some stories are well known—Russell and teammates boycotting a game in Kentucky after being refused service at a restaurant; Russell returning to his home in the Boston suburbs to find it trashed, a racial epithet scrawled in excrement on his wall. There were other humiliations—the way white coaches asked Russell to pal around with Black players, assuming they would be fast friends; A restaurant guest flipping Russell her keys, thinking he was the parking lot valet; A Boston neighborhood petitioning to try to stop Russell and his family from moving there. 

He moved there, nevertheless. 

“He was a man.” It was not a declaration of modesty, but a demand of basic respect. Russell…is inarguably one of the greatest athletes in the history of team sports, collecting 11 titles in 13 seasons with the Boston Celtics. But Russell’s essential legacy is his lifelong insistence on being rendered as a complete human being, with all rights, privileges, fears and frailties—“a man, nothing more,” as he put it more than five decades ago. – Jason Gay, Wall Street Journal, August 1, 2022

Howard Bryant of ESPN wrote:

When Russell arrived in Boston, widely considered the most racist city in America, he did so only because neither the ownership of the St. Louis Hawks nor its white fan base wanted a star Black player as its face…The [Celtics] belonged to the coach, Red Auerbach, and his star, [Bob] Cousy, who basked in being the leader, the hero from the local college (Holy Cross) but could not accept — as most great players cannot — that he was being eclipsed by a better teammate. Cousy won six titles with Russell, but none without him. Auerbach won nine titles as a coach, but none as a coach without him. The city responded to the Celtics’ greatness by failing to draw attendance, by humiliating Russell and revealing whenever it could, the racial double standards of feting white stars while merely appreciating its Black ones. Russell won two college championships at the University of San Francisco… He won a gold medal for a country whose Black children several months later required national guard protection to go to school in Little Rock, Arkansas. [I wrote about a similar event that happened in New Orleans in 1960.] Later that season, in 1957, Russell would win an NBA title for a city whose racial inequalities were so pronounced that by 1974, Boston would resemble Little Rock from 16 years earlier. – Howard Bryant, ESPN, August 1, 2022

These are painful memories. Where were the people who should have called their compatriots out on these injustices? Some of them were in church on Sunday, no doubt, “complacently getting by on good behavior.”

People conceived and brought into life by God don’t make a practice of sin. How could they? God’s seed is deep within them, making them who they are. It’s not in the nature of the God-begotten to practice and parade sin. Here’s how you tell the difference between God’s children and the Devil’s children: The one who won’t practice righteous ways isn’t from God, nor is the one who won’t love brother or sister. A simple test. (1 John 3.9, 10, MSG)

So cut away the thick calluses from your heart and stop being so willfully hardheaded. GOD, your God, is the God of all gods, he’s the Master of all masters, a God immense and powerful and awesome. He doesn’t play favorites, takes no bribes, makes sure orphans and widows are treated fairly, takes loving care of foreigners by seeing that they get food and clothing. You must treat foreigners with the same loving care— remember, you were once foreigners in Egypt. (Deuteronomy 10.16 – 19, MSG)