Runstedtler, Theresa
Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA
Bold Type (New York)
2023
OUR SYNOPSIS: Theresa Runstedtler examines sports media’s decline narrative about the National Basketball Association (NBA) in the 1970s to show that it “tended to pit the white basketball establishment (team owners, front-office executives, coaches, sportswriters) and the pro game’s still-white fan base against its increasingly Black labor force.” Meanwhile, these Black athletes “came of age amid urban rebellions from Watts to Baltimore, the rise of the Black Power movement, and the numerous protests and boycotts that made up the ‘revolt of the Black athlete’ in the late 1960s.” (2) She argues, “As Black ball became a referendum on Black freedom, the pro game emerged as a kind of morality play about the shifting place of African Americans in U.S. society.” (3) This started in the upstart American Basketball Association (ABA) before moving to the NBA. She shows that starting in the late 1960s, Black NBA players remade professional basketball. The Black player liberation struggle encompassed contract disputes, legal battles, unionization, quarrels with white media, and more.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How did the relationship between race and professional basketball develop in the U.S.?
How have Black basketball players pushed back against racist popular media narratives?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Though exceptional in size and talent, [Kareem Abdul-] Jabbar was by no means singular in his desire to push back against white Americans’ rigid expectations of Black athletes. As African American ballplayers gained strength in numbers and greater financial clout in the early 1970s, they were no longer content to abide by the rules and customs of the white basketball establishment, whether on or off the court. Some even refused to be bound by Black leaders’ ideas of what it meant to be respectable role models for Black youths. Diverse expressions of Black identity and Black Power from political and cultural currents outside sport seemed to be seeping into professional basketball.” (133-134)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
Sam Lacy, “Jim Crow in Reverse,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 25, 1972, 20, https://books.google.com.do/books?id=MLs9AAAAIBAJ.
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Theresa Runstedtler lives in Baltimore.
