The NBA community and the world, in general, suffered a great loss on Sunday as news came out that the great Bill Russell had passed away. Russell was a giant of the game who won a record 11 NBA titles to go with numerous other accolades, and he was also the first black athlete to speak out on the racism that they had to routinely suffer through during his time in the NBA.
Despite all of his contributions to the dynastic Celtics, a certain section of people in the city of Boston remained extremely hostile towards him solely due to the color of his skin. His daughter Karen once shared a disturbing account of what her father had to go through off the court in the 1950s and 1960s in a column that she wrote for the New York Times in 1987.
via New York Times:
“One night we came home from a three-day weekend and found we had been robbed. Our house was in a shambles, and ”N***A” 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.”
It’s shocking to see the lengths that some of these people went to, to harras a black man, and the sad part is how most of the individuals from back then would have gotten away with it too. It was one of the many reasons why Russell had no love for the Celtics fanbase but only for those within the Celtics organization who had treated him with respect.
We can only imagine how difficult it would have been to go out and perform knowing what the people felt about him, but at least he had those within the Celtics organization by his side, which helped him carry on in those turbulent times.
