For the last 14 months I have researched and interviewed a
variety of sources for the book Balls of Confusion: race, basketball and the
chaos of 1972.
Every black person I asked to interview, except for one, was
more than cooperative. I found the opposite with whites. The issue of race will
turn conservative white’s defensive, most immediately.
On Facebook I was told
by one white man that my insights proved I was “a liberal racist POS.” His
friend piled on and said that I had made a racist and degrading post when I pictured
a black friend and I sharing a fried chicken dinner (you can’t make this stuff up).
Both said that the race card needed to be retired and I was the real racist as
I saw my friends as black and white as they viewed their friends as friends.
Looking at each’s face book friends list, each with over 1000 friends, I saw
not one black face.
“Never,” was the 1950’s and early 1960’s battle cry of the
white rednecks and KKK members in Missouri that fought integration. Over a
ten-year slice of time framed by the years 1962 to 1972, a historical
equivalent to the blink of an eye, it all changed. I watched it unfold right
before my wide-open youthful eyes. Blacks and whites now went to school
together, played on the same little league teams and high school football and
basketball squads.
My mother said it
seemed like small steps of acceptance, but for one of fair mind who had lived through the years
of Jim Crow, she found it spiritually uplifting. “When I worked at the bank (in
the 1950’s),” she told me several years before she passed away in 2018 at the
age of 88, “we had a colored girl who worked with us. Once a year the Bank
would buy tickets and we would all get on at the bus station and go to a
Cardinal baseball game. She could not
sit with us at (the) game or on the bus, so she didn’t go. I never
thought it was fair but I never spoke up against it, either. But things got
better. It always does. Right just takes time.”
But, change will almost always be met with resistance. In my
mother’s time, “Never,” the white demonstrators would chant, waiving their
menacing ax handles. “We shall overcome,” sang the protesters in response.
Today, the new protest mantra of the times is, “hands up, don’t shoot.” The
mostly black voices of anger collide bitterly with the Make America Great Again
movement. History may not always repeat itself, but in this case it sure does
rhyme. But, Mom was right, history always belongs to the voices of those who
sing the righteous songs of protest. It just takes time.
I will not quibble with the many African-Americans I spoke
with while researching this book who feel we have a long way to go. Nor those
who claim we are not moving fast enough. But we are learning, of that I am
sure, even if we are learning late.
