A few years ago, I went digging through my archives—by which I mean, I searched my email and my Google Drive—for an interview I’d done in 2016. Bill Russell had just died, and I wanted to relisten to the time I’d interviewed him.
No one likes the sound of their own voice, but listening to interviews you conducted is a particular kind of misery. You want to interject and correct yourself. You hear your own awkwardness. You critique questions that could have been stronger, and note the follow-ups you failed to ask. You empathize with your interview subject.
I’d reached out to Russell after Sports Illustrated asked me to write a piece about him, Jim Brown, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar in conjunction with the three of them receiving the Muhammad Ali Legacy Award. The focus of the piece was their work as activists, not just athletes—centered on the 1967 summit in Cleveland, where they and others met with Ali, initially hoping to talk him out of his Vietnam protest.
There’s a sweet spot in interviewing. If you come in too narrowly focused, over-prepared, you never voice questions whose answers might be revelatory. I often think about something my friend Robert Samuels once said to me, that too many reporters and writers, too often, construct their interviews and later their writing around quotations. They are too reliant on them. And thus, too often, reporters are so preoccupied listening for the specific soundbite they want for a piece they’ve already constructed in their head that they don’t actually hear the substance of the things the person seated across from them is saying. We record the literal words while missing the actual point. As a result, libraries of untold stories still sit in the unused portions of transcripts. That said, there’s equal risk in the other direction. If you come in too clueless, too freewheeling, too unprepared—especially when you’re speaking to someone who’s been interviewed often—you can walk away with nothing but reheated anecdotes.
Listening back, I did better than I’d remembered with Russ, most crucially by shutting up and letting him talk. Take this exchange. I’m letting it run long on purpose.
Lowery: As a black player and then coach in Boston, you faced significant vitriol, and yet you continued your activism. In fact, you traveled to Mississippi and other Southern states to join demonstrations and assist Medgar Evers’ family. Can you tell me about those trips, and why you believed they were important to take?
Russell: Well, to me the most important thing was that I saw myself as my father’s son. And my father—the reason we moved from Louisiana to California, where I grew up—was because he wouldn’t take any crap from anybody, period. That was one of the things I was proud of. The most important thing to me was what my father thought. If he thought something was important, he relayed it to us, and that became our philosophy. And my father told me more than once during my career, “I’m proud of the fact that I’m your father and you’re my son.” And that’s the biggest compliment I ever received. So all of this stuff—it’s just part of the deal.
The reason we left Louisiana, and the reason we left the South, is my father did not like the way they were trying to treat him where he worked—so we left. My father was incensed. He never took any shit off anybody, and growing up black in Louisiana, that was difficult. He worked in a paper bag factory, making bags of different sizes and shapes. Well of course, it was the standard operating procedure of white society—even though he worked in that place for years, and he was a supervisor without being given the title or the money. And he resented that. So he asked for a raise. And they told him, “You’ll be making as much money as the white fellows, and we can’t have that…”
About two weeks later, he told the boss, “This is my last week. I’m going to leave. I’m going up North.” His first destination was Detroit, but it was too cold. Then he knew some guys who worked in a shipyard in California. He stayed in Detroit for a little while, then moved to California, and then he sent for us. I was 9 years old… I told him before he died that I had made All-American in basketball—and what pleased me most about that was that I had the chance to tell him I was proud that I was his son.
…Most people don’t have any idea what it’s like to grow up in a society that doesn’t respect anybody in your family. They want you to do things in a way that continues that disrespect for your family—and I couldn’t do that.
My question was a little narrow, but fortunately Russell took his response deep. What I’d asked was rooted in the best-known parts of Russ’ résumé—he was the NBA’s first black superstar, and its first black coach. It would’ve been easy to interrupt and steer him back there when he started on the long tangent about his father. None of what he was saying made for a quick, clean sound bite. But by shutting up and listening, I was able to hear Russ articulate a deeper truth: that it was impossible to separate his lived experience as a black man in America from the decisions he made about what to do with his fame and his success. Nearly every decision he made, every action he took, flowed from this ethos—this insistence that he would do everything in his power to ensure that he, and his people, finally got the respect they deserved.
“It is not easy for a white man to understand or totally accept the vision of a Black man; skin is the hardest boundary. The point is this: Bill Russell, or any other Black man like him, does not want the white man’s sympathy or, indeed, his friendship,” Gilbert Rogin observed in 1963. “What he wants is recognition and acceptance of himself as an individual, a Black individual, who can meet the world on equal terms and fare unequally, according to his merit.”
Or, as Russell himself put it three years later in a book of his own: “I can honestly say that I have never worked to be liked. I have worked to be respected.”
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It’s easy to forget how good Russell was at basketball —11 NBA championships, 22.5 rebounds per game— and how much he had to put up with in order to do it. He is one of just four people inducted into the basketball Hall of Fame as both a player and a coach. He did it all while living and working in the “flea market of racism” that was 1960s Boston. “I once described Boston as the most racist city in America. I had good reason,” Russell wrote in his 1966 book. “Shortly after the Celtics won a third title, a man walked up to me while I was sitting in a new Lincoln at a traffic light. ‘Hey, nigger, how many crap games did it take you to win that car?’ the man shouted.”
In a Washington Post essay earlier this year, Kevin Merida argued that Russell’s name should be included in the never-ending debate -- most often between Lebron James and Michael Jordan -- of who should be crowned the greatest basketball player of all time. “Rather than settle the GOAT debate (an impossibility), I would like to expand it to include non-basketball factors of greatness,” Merida writes.
“Bravery, perseverance, excellence amid loneliness and grand accomplishment under extreme pressure, including death threats,” he continues. “Yes, I’m talking about Bill Russell.”
We often debate the greatness of our athletes and the sincerity of their activism. Russell was best-in-class at a time where his excellence very literally placed his life on the line. He showed up on the front lines of fights not just in the black neighborhoods of Boston but also across the south, particularly in Mississippi. He lent air cover to other protesting black athletes, not just Ali, but also John Carlos and Tommie Smith, joking that he wished he’d thought of their raised glove protest first. He declined Martin Luther King Jr.’s offer to sit on stage during the March on Washington, and instead witnessed the “I Have A Dream” speech from his seat in the second row of the crowd. It’s easy to let Russell’s achievements, on and off the court, fade into the recesses of memory. But when you take the time to revisit them, it’s impossible to not be stunned by their breadth and depth. “I’m ashamed to say, I had pretty much stored Russell’s career on my bookshelf,” Merida writes. “Time will treat unfavorably even the best of the best. I don’t like that about time: how it inevitably looks at you with unimpressed eyes and a short memory.”
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When Bill Russell was drafted in 1956, just a decade had passed since Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color barrier. It had been six years since the NBA had welcomed its first three black players, and now, by the time Russell came along, there were 16. To that point, black basketball was primarily a sideshow. NBA owners openly discussed implementing a quota to keep the league’s roster’s majority white. The best black talent played for the Harlem Globetrotters. The ABA, where the kind of gameplay that we think of as stylistically “black” was born and then nurtured to adolescence, wouldn’t come around for another 11 years. There had never, to that point in history, been a black superstar basketball player in the NBA. “Until Bill Russell, professional basketball lacked a galvanizing emblem of African American excellence,” author Aram Goudsouzian wrote in his 2010 biography of Russell.
Russell had been acquired as the Celtics missing piece, a big-bodied rebounder whose inside game could compliment the team’s true star, Bob Cousy, who was then the best and best known basketball player in the country. But despite being home to the NBA’s most popular point guard, as well as the league’s most legendary coach in Red Auerbach, the team had repeatedly failed to win a championship. Russell changed that. Across a 13-year career, Russell captained a Celtics dynasty that made the franchise one of the most iconic in the history of American sports. At one point, they won eight straight NBA championships. “If it weren’t for Bill Russell winning all of them championships would anybody be talking about the Boston Celtics? No!” Larry Bird declares in filmmaker Sam Pollard’s documentary “Bill Russell: Legend.” By the time he retired, Russell had more championship rings than he did fingers upon which to wear them, 11 in total.
“More than any athlete of his era,” President Obama said as he presented Russell with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011. “Bill Russell came to define the word winner.”
By doing so, Russell proved to the league, its owners and coaches, and white basketball fans, that the athletic prowess of a black man could be the tent post of the league. When sportswriters took a vote in 1980, Russell was crowned the best player in the history of the league to that point. The NBA never looked back.
For the next six decades, the NBA would be ruled by black superstars. Players like Jerry West and Larry Bird are exceptions to the rule, drowned beneath an ocean of black names. When the NBA named the top 75 players of its first 75 years, 59 of those players were black. Of the 17 white players on the list, just 12 of them played after Russell’s retirement as a player in 1969.
That’s not to say that had it not been for Bill Russell that there never would have been a black superstar. That much was preordained. But someone had to be the first. And the thing about being the first, about truly innovating, is that all that comes after is derivative, one way or another. The first person over the top forges the path, taking the most bullets to their body so that those who run behind them can make it even further, can ascend to heights that that first never himself could have envisioned. All of the innovations that came after — the business acumen of Magic Johnson, the global superstardom of Michael Jordan, the game-bending talents of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal, the cultural domination of Allen Iverson, the societal impact of Lebron James — must be counted among Bill Russell’s legacies.
And all of this, the act of being the best at the thing that he does, was, at the time, a dangerous form of activism. “Sports offered a particular potential for racial progress,” Goudsouzian wrote. “Despite such dramatic instances as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the 1957 Little Rock Crisis, the civil rights movement had not yet sustained public momentum.” But the integration of sports allowed for a new type of black humanization in the minds of white liberals. For the first time, white Americans could form parasocial relationships with black men (and later women) through the athletic prowess they displayed on the field or the court. “Television shows presented blacks only as stock characters. But televised sports, news programs, magazine features and newspaper articles could uphold black athletes as heroes.”
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In October 1961, Bill Russell led an unplanned protest against segregation.
The Celtics had traveled to Lexington, Kentucky in order to play a game honoring their teammate Frank Ramsey, who had been an All-American at the University of Kentucky. But when two of the team’s black players, Sam Jones and Satch Sanders, attempted to order food at the hotel restaurant, they were denied service. When Russell was told, he refused to play in the game, ultimately resulting in him and six other players leaving Kentucky and not appearing in the game. “My attitude was: I’m going home because if I’m getting ready to play and I can’t get a pregame meal, why should I play?” he later explained.
It was an act of activism, the kind that was commonplace during Russell’s career. The kind he trafficked in not just when he, himself, was personally being disrespected and dehumanized. Russ was, unquestionably, “a race man,” as is compellingly depicted in director Lauren Stowell’s recent documentary series “Celtics City.”
After the assassination of Medgar Evers, Russell went to Mississippi, where his grandfather —the first person in his family ever born free— still lived, and held basketball camps for the children of civil rights workers. He began joining local protests in Boston, where school integration had bitterly divided the city. “I didn’t know that people didn’t grow up going to marches,” Russell’s daughter Karen Kenyatta Russell notes in Celtics City. He spoke publicly against the unspoken racial quotas that were being enforced by coaches and general managers in order to prevent NBA rosters from becoming too black, too quickly. Later, he became one of the leading, most outspoken black activists against the redevelopment of downtown Boston at a time when Roxbury, the heart of Black Boston, remained deeply underserved and impoverished.
All of this came at a price. Not a theoretical one. The risk was not to his bottom line, to his marketability, or to his popularity among white fans. With each act of activism, Russell was very literally risking his life. At one point, in 1963, Russell’s home in Redding was broken into, robbed, and viciously vandalized. “The house was in shambles. Someone had destroyed all of his trophies and when my parents went to go to bed, they pulled back the sheets and someone had defecated in their bed,” Kenyatta Russell recalls in the documentary. The n-word had been smeared on the walls in excrement.
“The racist violence of white people in Boston has been so intense in part because the Black community has taken forceful steps to secure its freedom,” legendary activist Mel King wrote in 1981. “The struggle by the community of color has been actively opposed by the cornerstones of white Boston society including the Catholic church, the Brahmin power structure and white politicians. As always, from Reconstruction to present, when people of color threaten to become too effective, violent retaliation is carried out.”
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The most important thing Bill Russell ever did, as it relates to basketball, has nothing to do with his on-the-court play.
When Red Auerbach retired in 1966 the Celtics announced that Russell would take on a player-coach role, making him the first black coach in any major American sport. In three years as a player-coach, Russell led the Celtics to 162 wins, just 83 losses, and two NBA championships. “At that time, you didn’t think about anything like that,” Bernie Bickerstaff, who spent three decades as an NBA assistant and head coach beginning in the mid-1980s, told the New York Times after Russell’s death in 2022. “In fact, if you’re sitting back and you’re a young Black at that time, it seemed far-fetched.”
In 1968, Sports Illustrated named him sportsman of the year, putting Russell on its cover for the third time. “The career of Bill Russell is astonishing for its consistent brilliance. Still, in 1968, he brought to it a new dimension; as coach as well as star player of the Celtics—leading and doing—he drove his group of veterans to Boston’s 10th world championship since he joined the team 12 years ago,” wrote George Plimpton. “At a time when the host of superb Negro athletes commands esteem for performance, Russell has proved his ability to lead athletes of both races—and leadership has been an area of sport inaccessible to black men.”
For decades now, Americans, including the white ones, have been forced to cede that black athletes are equal (and often superior). But such acknowledgement is often accompanied with its own version of a slight. The acknowledgement of physical as a means of implying mental and emotional lacking. Sure, the thinking goes, black athletes are the beasts that drive the show — the tigers and elephants at the center of the circus — but it’s the white men, the coaches and general managers who serve as ringmaster. It’s the oppressive, prejudiced ideology of “shut up and dribble.” By topping and then replacing Bob Cousy as one of the defining faces of the league, Russell had launched the era of the black NBA superstar. Then, by taking the reins from Red Auerbach, and leading the Celtics to two more rings, Russell showed skeptical white basketball fans that the black mind can be as brilliant and exceptional as the black body. He proved that black men and women could not just dominate the sport, but that they could run it.
“If someone asked me to write my epitaph, I would keep it short and simple,” Russell wrote, two years before his death. “Bill Russell: He was a man.”
What could be more important?