On the Shoulders of Giants

by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

  I first read the poetry of Langston Hughes when I was too young to really appreciate it—or poetry in general. Only later did I come to admire the bold honesty of his writing, both in his poetry and essays, turning his critical eye on white America with such subtlety and intensity that white America was forced to react with a mixture of surprise, anger, and shame. And his willingness to accurately describe the grittiness of Harlem life, despite the disapproval of the forefathers of the Harlem Renaissance (Du Bois, Johnson, and Locke) who insisted on publicizing only the uplifting in Harlem, showed even more courage. John Wooden, my coach at UCLA, used to recite Hughes’s poetry by heart, which helped foster a bond between us. Hughes was one of the few writers from that era who kept writing and publishing throughout his life, always providing a clear and resonant voice, like a bell in a dense fog, to guide black America. His lifelong devotion to the black community in the face of overwhelming odds, as well as his dedication to his art as a writer, inspired me in both areas.

  Zora Neale Hurston’s work provides a vivid picture of the daily life during the Renaissance. I especially appreciate her work in documenting black folk stories, preserving an important part of Black Americana. During her lifetime, she endured some nasty criticism from other blacks for writing in the slang of the Southern blacks she had grown up among. Not until later did the world came to appreciate that she wasn’t poking fun at them, but rather honoring them. As a writer, Hurston took on a double burden: not only did she have to convince the white reader that blacks were their equal, she had to convince men of all colors that women were their equals. That she succeeded as much as she did is remarkable. While I could never fully understand her criticism of the Supreme Court decision to end school desegregation, she did create some honest and questioning debate, which is necessary for any progress to take place. She once said, “I have been in Sorrow’s kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows, with a harp and a sword in my hands.” She faced both triumph and defeat with the kind of grace, intelligence, and wit that the rest of us can only hope to emulate.

  James Baldwin was born in 1924, during the height of the Harlem Renaissance, so technically he’s not really a Renaissance writer. But his themes are the distillation of all that his predecessors were writing about. Though separated by a couple decades, the Harlem he wrote about had the same problems as the Harlem of Thurman, Hurston, and Hughes. In fact, one of Baldwin’s most famous stories, “Sonny’s Blues,” echoes the same lesson as Langston Hughes’s poem “Weary Blues.” In both, characters are deadened by their daily struggle on the “killing streets” to survive in an unrelentingly racist society—their hopes, their confidence, their identities as men drying up, as Hughes said in another of his poems, “like a raisin in the sun.” Only when they experience the release from jazz music do they see a path that will allow them to transcend the inevitable suffering. Baldwin said, “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In those words, it’s as if Baldwin had snatched the flag of the Harlem Renaissance from one of its fallen writers and was waving it for his generation to follow. And follow it I have.

  Like James Baldwin, Chester Himes was born during the Harlem Renaissance, but wasn’t strictly a part of it. Yet, his gritty crime novels succeeded in doing what so many writers of the Renaissance had set out to do: portray the wide array of Harlem characters beyond stereotypes, convey the harsh realties of Harlem life as well as the joyous aspects, and do so in books that became popular enough among both white and black readers to actually have an impact. His characters reflect different strata of Harlem life: from the respectable preachers, teachers, laborers, and housewives to the underside of Harlem with its con men, gamblers, petty thieves, drug dealers, and exotic dancers. Part of Himes’s appeal for me is in his life story: raised in a middle-class home in Ohio, goes to college, gets kicked out for playing a prank, commits armed robbery, and is sent to prison for twenty-five years at the age of nineteen. Reading famed mystery writer Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon) in prison, Himes taught himself to write and was soon selling his stories to magazines like Esquire. Paroled after seven years, Himes continued writing, publishing various stories and novels (If He Hollers Let Him Go) that addressed racism and its destructive effects on the black community. But it wasn’t until Himes moved to France that his biggest success came. A French publisher asked him to write a series of hard-boiled detective novels in the tradition of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. What Himes produced was unlike anything ever seen before in the genre. His characters, two tough Harlem cops named Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, were inspired, Himes said, more by William Faulkner’s “ripe violence and absurdist view of life” than by Hammett’s urbane world. This series—which included A Rage in Harlem, The Crazy Kill, Cotton Comes to Harlem, and Blind Man with a Pistol—made Himes famous and brought him literary awards in France. In America, the books were regarded as mere pulp fiction, though today he is regarded as an influential literary author, whose work had a great impact on subsequent black writers, including Ishmael Reed and Walter Mosley. Several movies have been made from this series, the most famous being Cotton Comes to Harlem (1970). While I appreciate Himes’s re-creation of Harlem life, I also enjoy his absurdist humor and vivid action scenes, complete with shoot-outs and chases and fights. Himes obviously loves Harlem, and his stories are a tribute to the diversity of black life.

  Why the Page Is More

  Than Black and White

  But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There’s a song that says, “the time ain’t long.” That song is right. Something has got to change in America—and change soon. We must help that change to come.

  LANGSTON HUGHES

  I am a Harlem Renaissance Man, not because of my achievements, but because of my goals. And right now, my goal as a writer is to offer books that use the past to illuminate the future. To unearth and put on display all the broad, black shoulders for future generations to climb upon and see what they are capable of. For example, what is the first full-length feature film directed, written, and produced by an African-American? If you answered Ossie Davis, Eddie Murphy, or Bill Cosby, you’re wrong. The first was Oscar Micheaux, the son of former slaves, who was born in 1884. While working as a homesteader in South Dakota, he wrote, published, and distributed his first novel, The Conquest (1913). When a film company offered to produce his novel The Homesteader (1919), Micheaux agreed. But when he became dissatisfied with their approach, he decided to found his own production company and wrote, directed, and produced the movie himself. He was the first. He was also the first African-American filmmaker to produce a sound film, The Exile (1931). His 1920 film, Within Our Gates, was an angry response to D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915), which is credited with reviving the Ku Klux Klan. Micheaux’s film cleverly counters Griffith’s racist portrayals of blacks by replicating a rape scene from The Birth of a Nation. Using the same lighting, blocking, and setting as Griffith, Micheaux instead replaces the drunken black rapists attacking a white woman with a white man assaulting a black woman.

  Is knowing how many points I scored in my career going to change any lives? No. Is knowing about Oscar Micheaux going to change any lives?

  Yes, I think it will.

  Year after year, studies among educators reveal the same conclusions. African-American students do much better in classes in which they read about positive role models who are also African-American. One study evaluated twenty-four hundred children’s books published from 1937 to 1990 and concluded that African-American characters appeared in only 15 percent of them. And it’s not just the quantity, it’s also the quality of representation that’s damaging. Let’s face it, it’s hard to encourage a positive self-image if you’re reading Mary Poppins, in which Mary meets two African-Americans, who have this to say: “Ah bin ’specting you a long time Mar’ Poppins…. You bring de
m chillun dere into my li’l house for a slice of watermelon right now. My but dem’s very white babies. You wan’ use a lil bit black boot polish on dem.” Or Dr. Doolittle’s meeting with the character Prince Bumpo, an African-American who pleads with Doolittle, “If you will turn me white, I can go back to the Sleeping Beauty. I will give you half my kingdom and anything else besides…. Nothing else will satisfy me. I must be a white prince.”

  So, yes, it is important that we follow in the footsteps of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance by providing books that feature real African-Americans, devoid of how anyone else might want us to appear. That we offer books that teach our children through example. That those books accomplish that by celebrating our strengths, highlighting our accomplishments, detailing our frustrations, and revealing our human frailties. In other words, show us to be utterly, thoroughly, and unrepentingly human—just like everyone else.

  Marcus Garvey challenged us by exclaiming, “Up you mighty race! You can accomplish what you will!” If history has taught us one important lesson, it’s that we can indeed accomplish anything. But the single wave that buoys us up out of the water started with another wave miles away and out of sight. No one rises up alone. The better we understand that, the higher we can rise. Together.

  “Fairness Creeps

  out of the Soul”

  Basketball

  Comes to Harlem

  When it’s played the way it’s spozed to be played, basketball happens in the air; flying, floating, elevated above the floor, levitating the way oppressed peoples of this earth imagine themselves in their dreams.

  JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN author of Brothers and Keepers

  The First World Championship

  of Basketball

  On March 28, 1939, eight young black men from Harlem anxiously stood on the polished wooden floor of the Chicago Coliseum facing eight white men in the final championship game of the first-ever World Professional Basketball Tournament. Surrounding them was a sold-out crowd of three thousand raucous fans—most of them white, most of them shouting out the name of their favorites: the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars.

  The black team, the New York Renaissance Big Five, known in Harlem as simply the Rens, tried to ignore the boisterous crowd while waiting nervously for the game to begin. After all, they had finished the season with a remarkable record of 112 wins against only 7 losses. So far in this tournament they had beaten two other all-white teams as well as their archrivals, the Harlem Globetrotters. But the Oshkosh All-Stars had an impressive record, too. And not only were they the National Basketball League’s Western Division Champions, but they were local Midwestern sons with the crowd enthusiastically behind them.

  The stakes had never been higher for these young players. The winning team would receive $1,000—and be crowned the first-ever World Champions of Basketball. Even though 1939 was at the tail end of the Great Depression, $1,000 still wasn’t a huge sum, only about $13,000 in current money. Today’s NBA players make that much just for lacing up their endorsement shoes before a game. But these two teams couldn’t have been more determined to win if they’d been playing for $10 million. At stake was something far more precious than money; because this was the first ever basketball tournament that included both white and black teams, the winners would be the acknowledged basketball champions of the world.

  For the Oshkosh All-Stars, a victory would be a fitting culmination for the team that had been perpetual bridesmaids: for the past three years they had been Western Division Champions in the racially segregated National Basketball League, but had yet to win a national title. If they were ever going to be national champions, it would be today, with the crowd solidly behind them. For the Renaissance Big Five, winning would be a vindication for sixteen years of capturing many Colored Basketball World Championships, but never being allowed to play against white teams in national championship games because no professional leagues wanted to see a black team as champions.

  For the sixteen players awaiting the opening whistle, this game was the climax of a sports rivalry dating back several years. But for the enthusiastic crowd screaming and stomping from the stands, this game was a race rivalry dating back hundreds of years. Each side knew exactly whom they wanted to win. And, for most, their reasons had nothing to do with basketball.

  When a Game Isn’t Just a Game: The Great Black Hope

  For African-Americans across the United States who had hoped that the start of the twentieth century would bring enlightenment and opportunity, so far it had been mostly decade after decade of bitter disappointment. Racism wasn’t just a matter of public debate among politicians and academics in editorials and at cocktail parties, it was a harsh reality that blacks in the United States had to struggle with daily. Aside from the long list of Jim Crow laws meant to subjugate and humiliate, there was always the real possibility in some places of lynching. Between 1882 and 1930, a black man, woman, or child was hanged by white mobs at an average of once a week.

  This final game, then, wasn’t just about which team of young, energetic men would put the ball through the hoop more times than the other. For many of the 118 million whites in America, winning would be further proof of the superiority of the white man, physically, mentally, and morally. But for the 13 million blacks in America, winning would provide empirical evidence that, given a chance to compete on a level playing field, African-Americans were equal to whites in every way. As many black parents knew, this wasn’t a lesson just for whites, it was something their own young children had to recognize, if they were to grow up with any hope of having their voices heard and their dreams realized.

  Sometimes a game is only a game. But sometimes, such as this time, it was so much more.

  The Color of Competition:

  Black Versus White in Sports

  Up to this point, America’s record concerning black athletes (with the exception of boxing) had been consistent: allow blacks to compete against other blacks for colored championships; allow blacks to compete against whites to pump up the ticket sales (black-vs.-white games had higher attendance); but never, ever, ever let blacks compete against whites for national titles because these titles carried not only more money, but the immeasurable treasure of white pride. At first, this formula was the result of the common attitude among whites that blacks were too lazy and undisciplined to excel at sports. Later, as blacks began demonstrating exceptional achievements in most sports, the formula became a sort of Jockstrap Curtain, designed to keep black athletes on one side, barnstorming for loose change, while on the other side the high salaries and higher prize money remained in white hands. “How long is this state of affairs going to exist?” asked the black newspaper New York Age in 1920, referring to segregation in baseball. “Are our ball players—despite the active part they took in the war for Democracy, despite their gentlemanly behavior on the diamond and in civil life—to be forever confronted with this unsurmountable color barrier? Is there no conscience in the white solon’s hearts? Will there never be any way out for the Negro?”

  Baseball began excluding black players in 1867, when the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) formally banned any African-Americans from participating. When the NABBP folded a couple years later, the major league American Association accepted as members the Toledo Blue Stockings, whose catcher, “Fleet” Walker, became the first professional black baseball player. However, Walker faced enormous player resistance, even from his own team. “He was the best catcher I ever worked with,” admitted teammate Tony Mullane, but “I disliked a Negro and whenever I had to pitch to him I used anything I wanted without looking at his signals.” As a result of this kind of attitude, the American Association bowed to public pressure and returned to segregation in 1887, followed by the International League in 1890, the year Fleet Walker retired. American baseball would remain segregated until Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Still, it took another thirteen years until the last holdout, the Boston Red Sox, integrated.

 
Football followed a similar pattern. In the beginning, a few exceptionally talented African-Americans were permitted to play on the college and professional level. The American Professional Football Association was founded in 1920, changing its name to the National Football League (NFL) in 1922. The NFL permitted a few notable black players, including Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard, who had been the first black college player to compete in the Rose Bowl; Robert “Rube” Marshall; and Paul Robeson, who would later become even more famous as a singer/actor/political activist. In 1933, the NFL also became exclusively white, banning all blacks until 1946, when Kenny Washington and Woody Strode (who later became a respected actor, appearing in Spartacus opposite Kirk Douglas) joined the Los Angeles Rams, and Marion Motley and Bill Willis joined the Cleveland Browns.

  Professional basketball, though popular in the black community, was also largely segregated. The American Basketball Association, founded in 1925, banned black players. Although blacks became continually more prominent in college play, it wasn’t until 1942 that the professionals followed suit when the National Basketball League accepted Bill Jones and three other African-American players on the Toledo Jim White Chevrolet team, as well as five ex–Harlem Globetrotters on the Chicago Studebakers. Two years later, in 1944, West Coast professional leagues began admitting African-American players: Kenny Washington, who would two years later make history in the NFL, made history this year by joining the Hollywood Bears; Jackie Robinson, who three years later would shatter the color line in baseball, shattered it this year by joining the Los Angeles Bulldogs. But when it came to a whites-only policy, basketball proved to be more tenacious than most other professional sports. When the Basketball Association of America formed in 1946, they banned black players. Then in 1950, Chuck Cooper became the first African-American in the draft of the newly formed National Basketball Association (NBA). Cooper was picked by the Boston Celtics.