Read Bill Russell’s Boston Globe Magazine op-ed on racism in America
"We are living in strange times, but I’ve seen stranger."
Celtics legend Bill Russell has always been vocal about racism in America, and now is no different.
In an op-ed he wrote for Boston Globe Magazine that was published on Tuesday, Russell touched on the recent protests and social unrest that has swept the country following the death of George Floyd and other people of color. Russell himself experienced racism throughout his life, including during his time living in Boston while playing for the Celtics. From dealing with discriminatory remarks from fans to having his Reading home vandalized, Russell famously called the city a “flea market of racism” in his 1979 memoir, Second Wind.
Still, it did not stop him from stepping up as a pioneer for change. He was a member of the NAACP, stood alongside boxer Muhammed Ali at the Cleveland Summit, and in 1963 walked in the March on Washington. Years later, he made history by being named the head coach of the Celtics in 1966, becoming the NBA’s first person of color to hold a head-coaching position. Today, Russell has remained a prominent voice when it comes to injustice, even publicly criticizing President Donald Trump on Twitter for remarks the president made about what he has done for the black community.
Here’s what else Russell had to say about the race, politics, and the state of the country:
On what America is dealing with right now:
“We are living in strange times, but I’ve seen stranger,” Russell wrote. “There’s the kind of strange that means uncommon or out of the ordinary. The COVID-19 pandemic is surely representative of that. Then there’s the kind of strange that means peculiar, perverse, uncomfortable and ill at ease. Now that’s the kind of strange I’ve known my whole life. It’s the kind of strange Billie Holiday sang about when she sang, ‘Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood on the root,’ referring, of course, to the then common practice of the lynching of Black people.
“It’s the kind of strange that has dogged America from the beginning. The kind of strange that justified indigenous genocide in the name of ‘civility.’ It’s the kind of strange that built a country out of the labor of that ‘peculiar’ institution known as slavery. It’s the kind of strange that justified Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, and the inequities that persist in every facet of the Black American experience.”
His take on politics and the mistreatment of people of color:
“It’s the kind of strange that leads to fighting each other instead of the system, that often attacks those who speak out instead of those who commit injustices. It’s the kind of strange that accepts an inept and cowardly president who caters to white supremacists. It’s the strange voice that condemns those brave enough to kneel during the American anthem until America lives up to its unfulfilled promise, but rationalizes the behavior of a racist who kneels on a Black man’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds until the life is choked out of him.
“Let me remind you of that unfulfilled promise, the one right there in the Declaration of Independence: ‘All men are created equal’ . . . ‘they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’
“I’ve been waiting my whole life for America to live up to that promise and the fact that it hasn’t, that in America the systemic and pervasive killing of Black and brown people has never been strange in the ‘out of the ordinary’ sense of the word, but only in the ‘uncomfortable and ill at ease’ sense of the word, adds up to nothing less than, in the words of that Billie Holiday song again, a strange and bitter crop of injustices, with bulging eyes and the twisted mouth, for the rain to gather, for the wind to suck, for the sun to rot, for the tree to drop.”
His thoughts on the Black Lives Matter movement and Minneapolis dismantling its police department:
“Yet, I am heartened by the waves of Black Lives Matter protesters risking their lives to march among our streets. I am heartened by the Minneapolis City Council’s pledge to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department in response to their protests. And I sincerely hope that these kinds of strange days are forever behind us, and that real, lasting change will finally be realized. Our lives depend on it.”
[Read the full op-ed here in the Boston Globe Magazine.]
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