Basketball, Constitutional Law, and the Spirals of American Racism

Donald Trump’s attack on everything “DEI” is a racist attempt to reverse the hard-earned gains people of color have made in this country. This latest regression is nothing new. The history of fighting racism in America is slow progress, then serious resistance from conservative forces, which often results in harmful backsliding.

This back and forth in the movement towards racial equality can be illuminated by examining the careers of two of the most important Black athletes in American history and comparing the arcs of their lives to the fight, still on-going, to desegregate America’s public schools. Sometimes, history does provide important parallels and lessons for the present.

To see these connections, we must travel back to post-World War II America. Although the National Basketball Association and the Civil Rights Movement both already existed immediately after the War, they took off during the early 1950’s and 1960’s. 

In 1954, the Supreme Court famously decided Brown v. Board of Education, which held that segregated public schools violate the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution. A year later, the Court ruled that states had to comply with the decision with all “deliberate speed,” which, in practice, meant virtually no speed. 

Nine years after that, twelve southern states were still 98% segregated. The Brown decision went almost completely unenforced. It took the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which authorized Justice Department enforcement and conditioned the receipt of federal money on ending official school segregation—to motivate southern states to begin complying with Brown.

In the sports world during this same era, Bill Russell’s Boston Celtics won 11 championships in 13 years. There is no doubt that Russell is the greatest winner in American team sports history. No other person has ever come close to being the best player on a team that won 11 championships in 13 years. The domination began in 1957 and lasted through the 1968-1969 season. 

Despite this unbelievable success, Russell was subject to unconscionable racism both at home and in other states. In 1963, he returned home to find that people had left feces in his bed. Here is an account of that episode from the New York Times:

Russell…was the target of racial prejudice in Boston. That’s what he got for all that winning. One such episode was particularly jarring: Vandals broke into his home north of Boston and scratched out epithets on the walls and littered his bed with feces. But so often has this horrible story been cited that, in a way, it perversely underreports what Russell went through in Boston. Suffice [it] to say that other stuff happened.

Outside of Boston, when his team travelled, especially to exhibition games in the south, Russell and a few other Black players on the team could not eat in the same restaurants or stay in the same hotels as the White players. On the court, they were heroes but off the court they were subject to the vilest parts of American racism. Author Gary Pomerantz detailed all these atrocities and more in his wonderful book “The Last Pass: Cousy, Russell, and what Matters in the End.”

In that book, the second best player on those early Celtics teams, Bob Cousy, finally spoke out about how much he regretted not being more supportive of all the Black players on that team who suffered prejudice, especially Russell. Cousy was an American hero on and off the court and his support would have made a substantial difference.

So, how are these events connected? Fair question.

Brown v Board of Education is considered one of the greatest if not the greatest Supreme Court decision of all time. Yet, public schools remained segregated long after the opinion came out and are still so today. The hope of Brown was that it would substantially lessen racism in America, especially in our public schools, but sadly the opinion could not enforce itself. Although Brown had enormous symbolic significance, the justices’ refusal to enforce it with teeth tragically reduced the on-the-ground consequences of the decision.

Before Russell entered the league in 1956, NBA teams had few Black players. Even in the years after the Celtics’ early successes, according to one author, “the league had an unofficial black quota system in which each team agreed to limit signing Black players, because they were afraid to lose white audience.” One would have thought that Russell, easily the greatest player of his era, would have substantially reduced racism in basketball, but that turned out not to be true. Change did eventually come to the NBA, but even in the late 1990’s the league was still worried about being seen as a “Black” league.

Just as Brown was hugely important on paper but lacking in implementation, Russell was great on the court, but his winning did little to make the NBA or Boston a more hospitable place for Black players or even a respite from the racism of the day. In other words, winning in both courts (legal and basketball) did little to decrease racism in America in the 1950’s and early 1960’s. The racial progress that was made came mostly out of the civil rights protests and demonstrations on America’s campuses and in the streets—which may or may not be important lessons for today.

The life of another generational Black player who came of age just a few years after Russell tells a similar story.

It is well-accepted that the greatest high school basketball player of all time is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (then known as Lew Alcindor, which is the name I will use here because that was the name he used during the time relevant to this post). His record in High School was 95-6. He enrolled at UCLA in 1966 and became the most dominant college player in American history.

UCLA would go on to win three straight national championships losing only one game in the process. Because of Alcindor’s success, the NCAA instituted a new rule in 1967 forbidding dunking during games. Alcindor, of course, used the dunk with immense success, given his seven foot-one frame. The ostensible purposes for the ban were to reduce player injuries and to make college basketball more competitive.

But it is more likely that the ban was motivated by racial prejudice, as the country did not want the most dominant player in college and the roadblock to other teams winning the championship to be a Black athlete. It is important to remember that as of 1966, racism was still so ingrained on and off America campuses that no Black athlete had yet been allowed to compete in the Southeastern Athletic Conference (more than ten years after Brown was decided).

A lesson from the no-dunk saga is that there was a limit to White people’s tolerance of Black people’s success. There is no chance the rule would have been implemented had Lew Alcindor been white. To avoid looking like all this was personal, the NCAA kept the rule until 1976. Make no mistake, however; the rule was about one man and everyone knew it. History has labeled the ban, “The Lew Alcindor Rule.”

Returning to the courts of law, during the middle to late 1960’s the Supreme Court finally started enforcing Brown by requiring substantial measures by school districts to figure out ways to integrate their schools. The main tool that judges required to be used was busing, which was, of course, incredibly controversial.

But just as some real progress was being made, President Richard Nixon made several appointments to the Supreme Court who were not empathetic to judicial efforts to remove the vestiges of state sponsored segregation. One of them, William H. Rehnquist, who would later become Chief Justice, wrote a memo as a law clerk to Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, urging Jackson to rule for the school districts in the Brown litigation.

Towards the end of the 1960’s and then into the early 1970’s, the Court watered Brown down considerably by distinguishing between de jure and de facto discrimination. This distinction meant that states and localities had no constitutional obligation to address segregation not directly caused by their laws and policies but by the ostensibly “private” housing decisions of the parents involved.

By 1976, the year the slam dunk rule was repealed, many states were no longer under legal obligations to address the segregation caused by intentional government policies that had lasted for decades. The conservative justices did not care that the context of those allegedly “private” housing decisions was intentional government policies (like redlining) that had the purpose and effect of creating and sustaining residential discrimination across the country.

What does all of that have to do with Lew Alcindor and the slam dunk rule? The idea of segregated schools being prohibited by parchment barriers such as the 14^th Amendment made elite Whites feel good about themselves in the “pat ourselves on the back kind of way.” But when it came to making serious efforts to really deal with the problem, the white power structure in this country pushed back. 

With the success of Bill Russell on the court (as well as a few other elite athletes in other sports such as Muhammed Ali, then known as Cassius Clay), the American sports landscape began to open up much more to Black players in ways not seen since Jackie Robinson broke the race barrier in baseball decades earlier (a story for a different post). Lew Alcindor then entered the scene as a uniquely gifted talent in both high school and college. So much so that the power structure decided enough is enough, and they tried to limit that success by instituting the no dunk rule. 

That decision was not too different from the arc of the Supreme Court’s desegregation decisions. Yes, segregated schools violated the 14^th Amendment, but by relieving states of all obligations to cure that segregation once official state laws on the subject were taken off the books, the Court was trying to limit the positive effects of Brown just as surely as the NCAA embraced Alcindor in theory but then tried to limit his success in practice. 

It is of course not surprising that race, law, and sports often intersect in ways that provide cautionary and relevant lessons about all three topics. Today’s governmental efforts to eradicate all things “DEI” after decades of serious efforts to lessen racism in American should, quite tragically, not surprise anyone.

--Eric Segall