It was true, I had changed. I’d learned not to joke around with the other students, to not volunteer answers in class, to isolate myself as much as possible. Smiling just seemed to antagonize the bullies, so, yeah, I’d stopped smiling. Since the nuns were powerless to protect me, I had to find some refuge on my own. I found it on the basketball court. Basketball was one of the few activities at Holy Providence, and despite my lack of ability or interest, being on the team kept me away from Sylvester Curtis and his knuckle-dragging crew. I was a nine-year-old kid imprisoned in a grown man’s body and played like a newborn colt running on wobbly legs and waving gangly arms. I must have looked like a puppet being controlled by a drunken puppeteer. If my teammates passed the ball to me, I soon made them regret it. But no matter how badly I played, at least on the court no one was punching me in the face.
In one game, trapped by the other team and having lost the dribble, I was desperate to get rid of the ball. Unable to find an open teammate to rescue me, I glanced over my shoulder at the basket, pivoted, and tossed up my first hook shot. An in-and-out miss. But that feeling—the sense of power and control as I was being swarmed, yet still able to rise above them to do what I had to do—that feeling energized me. In an environment in which I was swarmed daily by bullies and had no control but to become invisible, I found something on that court, and in that shot, that gave me back a little of what I had lost. Pride, self-respect—visibility. I practiced that hook shot all winter, perfecting it as much as I could. For the next thirty-three years, I was always on a basketball team. And the skyhook became my signature shot.
I was never invisible again.
Escaping Narrow Corridors: Life Lessons of the Rens
The New York Renaissance Big Five, known locally as the Rens, were the first team to win the World Professional Basketball Tournament, in 1939. Amazingly, despite being born in Harlem and raised only a mile away, I hadn’t heard about the Rens until 1964, when I was seventeen years old. And yet, I’d had connections to them I wasn’t even aware of. Dolly King, one of the officials at some of my high school games, had played for the Rens in the 1940s. The Harlem Globetrotters, featured in Go, Man, Go!, which had first inspired me to try basketball, were perennial rivals of the Rens. They had even faced the Rens, and lost, in that 1939 championship tournament. William “Pop” Gates coached boys’ basketball in Harlem. He was one of the first blacks to play in the National Basketball League and the only player to appear in all ten World Professional Basketball Tournaments in Chicago. Many of the guys I knew who were five to ten years older than I had been taught by him, one of the greatest players in basketball history, yet I had no idea of who he was. Joe Lapchick, former Original Celtics great, had given me the MVP for the New York Catholic High School Championship. Not only was his team the main rivals of the Rens, but he had been friends with the Rens and had personally helped them during some intense racist episodes. My high school coach, Jack Donahue, was friends with Joe while Joe was coaching the Knicks and later St. Johns University. St. Johns had a great program and was often highly placed in the national rankings. Coach Lapchick gave Coach Donahue films of St. Johns games that he in turn showed the guys who played for him at the summer camp, including me. Watching those films, I was undoubtedly learning Rens plays and moves without ever having heard of them. Joe’s son Ritchie attended Coach Donahue’s camp in the summer and ended up sleeping in the bunk next to mine at camp. We became good friends and have maintained this friendship ever since those days. The Rens’ history was brushing against me all the time, like strangers bumping while passing on a crowded street.
Historical connections and influences were all around me, but I hadn’t noticed. That same year I first heard of them, 1964, I became part of a summer internship in journalism and started earnestly studying the Harlem Renaissance (see the chapter “ ‘Mad Medley’: How Harlem Influenced My Life”). The more I studied the giants of the Renaissance, the more I realized how many influences we have acting on us, whether or not we know it. If a teenager first learning guitar tries to copy Jimi Hendrix, it doesn’t matter to him that Hendrix was influenced by Muddy Waters. But how much richer his enjoyment would be, how much better he might play that guitar, if he did know. For me, studying the greats of the Harlem Renaissance was like watching a dozen more Marques Hayneses trapped in a narrow corridor determined to get past an unmovable obstacle. Each found a way around, some using words, some using a musical instrument, some using art, some using their athletic prowess.
The goal of the heavyweights of the Renaissance was to make the black American visible to white America. To have them seen for whom they really were, not some stereotypical cartoon image that whites had been raised on and therefore were comfortable with. Jazz made the black musician visible. Du Bois, Garvey, Locke, and Johnson made the black political agenda visible. Hughes, Hurston, McKay, and Toomer made the black writer visible. The Rens made the black basketball player visible. Now they could all be seen for who they really were, what they were capable of achieving—and contributing.
Rewriting History:
Investigating Myself
American philosopher George Santayana said, “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.” That’s pretty much why I write history books that focus on the heroic exploits of African-Americans. Many of the people I write about were deliberately left out of the history books that we were forced to read in school. For me, that history was “written wrong” and needed to be corrected. My intention was to make them visible so they could be role models for others. To show how each, in his or her own way, dribbled gracefully around that obstacle in the narrow corridor. Novelist Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men) said, “History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.” For African-Americans, uncovering that past, which has purposefully been buried or distorted or simply ignored, is especially important. And so I intend to continue rewriting history merely by revealing some truths that have been hidden.
The impact history has on our daily lives is monumental, even if we’re unaware of it. Of course, the more we are aware of it, the more we can understand the impact and use it to “better face the future.” The person unaware of history is like a rudderless boat just floating out in the middle of the ocean, hostage to the waves and currents. The person who has some awareness of the past knows how to fashion a rudder and which direction land is.
Even though I became aware of the Rens at seventeen, I didn’t really find out about all their accomplishments until 1995, the same time I learned that the Harlem Globetrotters hadn’t come from Harlem, but from Chicago! I didn’t even know that the two teams had been vocal and sometimes bitter rivals for many years, though they played each other for the first time at the World Professional Basketball Tournament in 1939. The more I found out about the Rens, the more I realized how much of my career as a black professional basketball player I owed to these courageous and talented young men who had barnstormed through the country on a bus, sometimes playing two games a day, every day, enduring racist threats and abuse, so that I could step out on the court as a black man and no one would even question it.
You might say that since I didn’t fully know about the Rens until after my playing days were over, they had no direct effect on me. Two problems with that. First, as I’ve shown, we are constantly influenced by forces of which we are unaware. Sometimes it’s biological: from male-pattern baldness to a deadly disease that is genetically passed along. Sometimes it’s psychological: a traumatic experience as a toddler, now long forgotten, makes you avoid public places or dislike small dogs. The Rens’ influence on me as a player was a subtle six-degrees-of-separation kind of thing: learning the Rens’ plays and moves by watching Coach Lapchick’s films and playing on the playground with older players coached by Pop Gates.
Second, just because I was no longer a professional player, I wasn’t
dead. Standing in the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1995 during my induction, learning about the glories of the Rens for the first time, made me wonder how great it would have been to me as a kid if I’d known about them then. And that inspired me to make sure their story—and the stories of other “forgotten” African-American heroes—were told. The Rens had directly and powerfully influenced me, if not so much as a basketball player, definitely as a historian and member of my community. At the same time, I couldn’t help but wonder whether those two childhood events that brought me to basketball—the movie and the beating—also had some historical connection beyond the moment. According to historian Arnold Toynbee, the word history comes from Greek for “investigate.” And so I investigated.
One day in 1954, I walked into a dark movie theater with my mother and a couple hours later stepped out into the daylight a changed boy. I had seen what basketball, when played by the greats, could be like. And so, for the first time, I saw it as a possible alternative to baseball. I didn’t know or care about how historically accurate the film was. Nothing could change that those guys really knew how to play. That while they were on that court with a basketball in their hands, they were in complete control of their world. That was a Truth beyond facts.
But the facts of how Go, Man, Go! made it to that theater also reveal a Truth. The film is one of the few directed by legendary cinematographer James Wong Howe (The Rose Tattoo), who received sixteen Academy Award nominations during his career. During World War II, racial animosity against the Japanese forced Howe to wear a button that said, “I am Chinese.” In support, his pal actor James Cagney also wore a button. Howe compounded his social problems when he married a white woman. They’d had to wait several years to marry because of the laws against interracial marriage. Even after the laws were repealed, it took them three days to find a judge who would marry them. The accommodating judge’s enlightened comment at their marriage was “She looks old enough. If she wants to marry a Chink, that’s her business.” The House Un-American Activities Committee questioned Howe because of his work with so-called Communists like actor John Garfield.
The name of the writer of Go, Man, Go! appeared on the screen as “Arnold Becker.” But Becker wasn’t the real writer; he was a front for Alfred Palca, who wrote and produced the film, single-handedly raising the $175,000 budget. “I’m an old lefty, and I thought I could do something to help the blacks,” he said. “That mattered to me…I would do anything I could to help society, and as a Jewish fellow, I was for the underdog. I didn’t have to do that story, but I liked that story.” Before the film was released, the House Un-American Activities Committee black-listed him when he refused to give them names of possible Communists (Palca had never been a Communist himself). One additional reason the FBI reportedly investigated him was because he’d hired a relatively unknown, but apparently suspicious, actor who owned a rib joint in Harlem: Sidney Poitier. No studio would release the film with Palca’s name, so he removed it himself: he gave producing credit to his brother-in-law and assistant on the film, Anton M. Leader; he gave writing credit to Arnold Becker, his cousin, a Connecticut pediatrician. The film inspired a lot of people beside myself, including Mannie Jackson, who became the first black owner of the Globetrotters. Jackson recalls watching the movie over and over as a boy in Edwardsville, Illinois: “It wasn’t so much the basketball that intrigued me, but the story line. It was the first of the Rocky films, the achievement films, that I had seen that involved people of color.” The film still has such a strong cult following that plans are currently under way for a Broadway version, with Marques Haynes as a consultant. The film also destroyed Palca’s Hollywood career; he never made another movie. However, in 1997, the Writers Guild of America had Palca’s credits restored.
James Wong Howe and Alfred Palca made a film that reflected their own struggles with prejudice. Had they not suffered those indignities, they might never have been attracted to the story of the Harlem Globetrotters or worked so hard to make sure the movie was made, especially during a time when most white Americans didn’t want to go to the movies to see the inspirational story of black athletes succeeding. (The U.S. Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision outlawing school segregation was issued the same year Go, Man, Go! was released.) The various tributaries of history flowed together to create this film that inspired me and many others.
What about my incarceration at Holy Providence? Were the beatings that year merely a typical case of bored dumb kids picking on the nerdy egghead, or was it something more subtle and sinister? I had never claimed any extraordinary intelligence. I knew my academic ability was merely the result of a family tradition of discipline and training that extended back to my grandparents, who had come to the United States from Trinidad in 1917. They were part of the Great Migration, arriving in Harlem just as the Renaissance was starting to stir. But a clear and distinct racial hierarchy existed among blacks in Harlem at that time. Those who were born and raised in New York thought the immigrants from the South were ignorant hicks, and they thought the immigrants from the West Indies, like my grandparents, were snobbish and self-important. The average Harlem resident resented the West Indians, sometimes refusing to shop at their stores. Bob Douglas, the founder of the Rens, was from the Indies, as was William Roach, the real estate entrepreneur who built the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom, which was home court for the Rens. The department store that was initially part of the Renaissance Casino building was owned by another immigrant from the Caribbean, and he quickly went out of business from lack of patronage from local blacks. Harlemites had a derogatory word for those who strove to better themselves: dicty. (The word, commonly used during the Harlem Renaissance, appears in works by Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Arna Bontemps, Carl Van Vechten, James Baldwin, Billie Holiday, and Duke Ellington.) Were the beatings that shoved me onto the basketball court given to me with such enthusiasm as a form of trickle-down racism because they thought I was “dicty,” even if they’d never heard the word or knew I was of West Indian heritage? After all, it had only been fifteen to twenty years since the end of the Renaissance. In fact, with over half a million West Indians living in the New York City area today, sociologists have recorded similar attitudes toward them from local blacks born in the United States.
But is there a Truth beyond those facts? True, West Indian blacks tended to be better educated than the locals, but that was because many professionals, faced with discrimination and a poor economy in their homelands, decided there would be more opportunities in the United States. Being immigrants and being educated, they would emphasize education in their children. However, even when the educational playing field was level, West Indians were often hired over local blacks, implying that they were indeed smarter and better workers. It’s easy to see why Harlemites would resent West Indians: If they both came from the same background of slavery, yet one group is more successful, doesn’t that imply that the less successful group has less success, not because of racism, but because they don’t work as hard?
Two recent studies by sociologists asked that same question. They wondered why, when the local Brooklyn economy was booming in the 1990s, so many longtime Hispanic and black residents weren’t being hired, but newly immigrated Hispanics and blacks were. Interviews revealed that the employers were not discriminating against blacks or Hispanics, but against locals, whom they unconsciously associated with local crime. The farther away an applicant lived, the more likely they were to be hired. The conscious rationale of the employers was that foreign-born blacks and Hispanics were harder workers, even though there was no evidence for that. This unconscious racism justified prejudice under the guise of liking “good” blacks, even though their criteria are based on the same stereotyping as all other racism. Even blacks bought into it. Their disdain of Southern blacks as being slow and lazy was based on judging a different culture. In reality, how could men and women who worked day and night to eke out a living farming, and who had the courage to move th
eir entire families across the country to a strange new world, be anything less than hardworking and brave?
Not all tall men or women become professional basketball players. But chances are good that, with my love of sports as a child, I would probably have become one eventually. Yet, without those two character-shaping events, I might not have become the kind of player I did—nor the man I did. Go, Man, Go! inspired me to develop a variety of skills and not just rely on my height. The story of the perseverance of these young black players during the struggles of the Harlem Renaissance invigorated me to persevere in my own struggles. In 1969, the Globetrotters offered me a million dollars to play for them. Though I declined and entered the NBA draft instead, I couldn’t help but feel some sense of pride and completion at the offer. Ironically, I faced the team that helped launch my interest in basketball on September 12, 1995, during an exhibition game in Vienna against my All-Star Team. We defeated the Globetrotters 91–85, ending their unbroken run of 8,829 exhibition game victories dating back to 1971. Considering the millions of people they’ve entertained, and the thousands of kids like me they’ve inspired, they can never be defeated. That’s a Truth beyond the facts.
On the Shoulders of Giants Page 20
