This is a fun bit for me to write for this week’s final Black History Month profile. Bill Russell is the Boston Celtics incarnate. If you think about the Celtics you have to know about #6. I have a big autographed photo of Bill Russell in my house with his huge hands holding all of the NBA championship rings he earned. Bill Russell led the Boston Celtics as a player and a player/coach to an unprecedented 11 NBA Championships in 13 years. He was the first African American to coach an NBA team, or major sports team in the US. He won a gold medal on the USA Olympic team, two NCAA titles at the University of San Francisco and was a 12 time All-Star and five time MVP of the league.
Moreover, Bill Russell changed the game. He was the first big man to play defense and his epic battles versus Wilt Chamberlain are stuff of legends. However Bill Russell was not all about basketball. Bill was an outspoken civil rights advocate, marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and was a star in an era of the segregated south. In 1961 Bill Russell refused to play an exhibition game in Lexington, Kentucky because a local restaurant would not serve the black players. Early in his career he charged the NBA with having a quota system limiting the number of black players on each team. In 1963, at the height of the civil rights struggle in the south, he accepted, uneasily and at great personal risk, a request to travel to Mississippi to organize and lead integrated basketball clinics.
Bill Russell was recently awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama
We of the old can now only help to guide the young — not black, not white, not yellow. Just, the children. For all my battles, I have learned just that. We, white and black, on one side or the other, have made our prejudices and our philosophies and now fight our battles. Pray, God, that in the future our children will not have to. – Bill Russell, 1966