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00:00One for blacks, one for whites, to take the oath.
00:03There were separate phone booths, elevators, stairways.
00:06The races were separate, all right, but they were hardly equal.
00:10Our series, the 50s, continues with the racial upheavals
00:13that beset America on its journey toward greater justice.
00:16Our program includes personal remembrances from a reporter
00:19who was in the trenches during the Civil Rights Wars,
00:22my former colleague at NBC, John Chancellor,
00:25who died soon after his interview was conducted.
00:28Join us now as the History Channel presents
00:30The 50s, The Rage Within.
00:39Go get it, Willie. Say hey, Willie, go get it.
00:41What do you mean, go get it? Man, that ball's way in left field.
00:44I don't care what field it's in. Willie, please, no, see.
00:46Say hey, say who? Say Willie.
00:49Say hey, say who?
00:53In 1954, Willie Mays hit 41 home runs.
00:57The following year, he hit 50s.
01:00He runs the bases like a choo-choo train
01:02Swings around the base like an aero plane
01:05His cap flies off when he passes 30
01:09And he hits home like a little buddy
01:12Say hey, say who?
01:14In the 1950s, Willie Mays was the most spectacular player in baseball.
01:18Once the color barrier in baseball had been broken,
01:21Mays was visible proof of what talented black athletes could do
01:25if given the chance.
01:28But in parts of the country,
01:30this all-star baseball player was less than a second-class citizen.
01:36In southern states, whites beat and murdered blacks
01:40without fear of retribution.
01:42At the same time,
01:43athletes, entertainers, and musicians
01:45were changing the very character of American culture.
01:49These cruel contradictions would spark a smoldering rage.
01:54The time had come for America to examine the color of its soul.
02:05Come on, baby, let's have a good time roll.
02:09Come on, baby, let me thrill your soul.
02:12Come on, baby, let's have a good time roll.
02:15Roll all night long.
02:18Come on, baby, let's have a good time roll.
02:29Come on, baby, while the thrill is gone.
02:36Come on, baby, let's have some fun.
02:55By and large, we remember the 1950s through images, movies, advertisements, and newsreels.
03:02In these technicolor memories, the characters are all white.
03:07The 15 million blacks then living in the United States almost never appear.
03:21I am an invisible man.
03:23No, I'm not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe.
03:27No, am I one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms.
03:31I am a man of substance, of flesh, and bone, fiber, and liquids.
03:36And I might even be said to possess a mind.
03:39I'm invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.
03:46In 1952, the book Invisible Man created an immediate sensation.
03:51Written by a young man named Ralph Ellison, the novel set the problem of race at the heart
03:57of the American character.
03:59It wasn't a black problem.
04:01It wasn't a white problem.
04:02It was an all-American problem, a problem of vision.
04:08We were much more, as African-Americans, invisible in the 50s than it's possible to imagine now.
04:13It's so easy to turn on the television and find somebody black on every channel, and turn
04:18on the radio and hear so many black Americans.
04:20In those days, it really was an event when somebody black appeared in the media.
04:24And so we have to readjust our sights and really think, where do we look to find the invisible ones?
04:44So invisible were blacks that American whites simply did not see one of the largest and most rapid internal migrations
04:51in history.
04:56Starting in the beginning of the century, and accelerating in the 40s and 50s, over 6 million African-Americans would
05:03leave the southern states to settle in the great cities of the north and west, particularly Chicago.
05:12Many were fleeing the injustice in the south.
05:16Many left because the picking jobs in the southern cotton fields were replaced by machines.
05:21In the north, the great factories and mills were desperate for workers, no matter what
05:25they're called.
05:27Cities like Chicago offered one thing the south could not.
05:30Good job.
05:35Chicago wasn't back the promised land.
05:38It was beyond the land of hope.
05:42The dreams became realized.
05:47Don't mean a thing if you ain't got that thing.
05:55There were plenty of clubs, jazz clubs.
05:58You had to know Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday just standing on the corner.
06:07So it was a world within a world.
06:11Just give that rhythm every little thing you've got.
06:16It don't mean a thing if you ain't got that thing.
06:22Chicago was a world apart from the life that African-Americans had left behind in the south.
06:27These two worlds were about to collide.
06:33In the summer of 1955, a fourteen-year-old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till decided
06:39to take a trip down south to Mississippi.
06:42He traveled with a cousin, Wheeler Parker, who had grown up in the south and knew the danger
06:47of not obeying the laws of segregation.
06:50If you lived there, it was like entrenched in you, the rules.
06:54But if you didn't, you could break them without knowing that you were breaking them.
07:00In Mississippi, Emmett Till and Wheeler Parker went to stay with Parker's grandfather, a sharecropper
07:06named Mose Wright.
07:08My grandfather was a unique man.
07:10He was like the head of his house, you know.
07:14When he spoke, everybody listened.
07:16He was the man, so to speak.
07:19Once we arrived in the south by car, we went to my grandfather's house, which is in Money,
07:25Mississippi.
07:25So, we had a lot of fun, you know.
07:28You fish, you hunt, and you eat, and you sit out on, you know, by the woodpile telling jokes.
07:33You know, Emmett loved jokes, loved jokes, so he would pay people to tell jokes.
07:38Only time you would go to town is like the weekends, like we did.
07:44The town of Money was dirt poor.
07:48But for Emmett Till and Wheeler Parker, it was a place to go.
07:51The only store in town was Bryant's Grocery.
07:57Today, the store is a ramshackle monument to a brief moment shared by two people on a
08:02hot August day.
08:05Emmett Till and the wife of the store owner, Carolyn Bryant.
08:11Known as a local beauty, a crossroads Marilyn Monroe, Carolyn Bryant was alone in the store
08:17that day when Emmett Till walked in.
08:19What happened next is a mystery.
08:22According to Bryant, Till flirted with her, saying, don't be afraid of me, baby, I've been
08:28with white girls before.
08:32Emmett may have said something, or just whistled at Bryant.
08:36Whatever happened, a line was crossed that was invisible to the 14-year-old boy from Chicago.
08:43When Carolyn Bryant ran to get a gun, the boys quickly left in their truck.
08:49Emmett begged us, he said, don't tell, I call him Papa, my grandfather, Moe's right, don't,
08:53I don't want you to tell him.
08:54So we decided we wouldn't tell him.
08:56And there was a girl, but she said, you're going to hear some more from this.
08:58This is not over.
08:58I know those people.
09:00They're the kind of people, you know.
09:01She said, you're going to hear some more.
09:09Brian heard from his wife what had happened, and he called his half-brother, J.W.
09:15Mylon, who really was a huge, physically imposing, bullying man, and told him a black boy had been
09:24fresh with his wife, which was an affront to all white manhood in the Mississippi of 1955, and he said,
09:34I'll come over right now.
09:43Sunday morning, about 2.30, someone called at the door, and I said, who is it?
09:51And he said, this is Mr. Price.
09:56I want to talk with you and the boy.
10:01And when I opened the door, there was a man standing with a pistol in one hand and a flashlight
10:12in the other hand.
10:13I can't remember if I heard the knock.
10:17But I do remember them now talking to my grandfather, and they say, you got two boys here from Chicago,
10:25and we want to see the one that did the talk at the store.
10:31In my mind, I said, I'm going to die.
10:33I think the whole bed probably was shaking, you know.
10:36And Emmett just wasn't afraid.
10:37He didn't know the danger he was in.
10:39And he wanted to put his socks on.
10:40They started cursing him, you know.
10:42And he was saying, yeah.
10:43I said, no.
10:44And they didn't like that.
10:45They don't say, yeah, no to white people in the South.
10:48It was, yes, sir.
10:49No, sir.
10:49No, ma'am.
10:50Yes, ma'am.
10:50You know, his left hand.
10:52And they marched him to the car, and they asked someone there, was this is the right boy.
10:59And the other was here.
11:02And they drove towards money.
11:06That was the last time anyone saw Emmett Till alive.
11:13A few days later, a boy fishing found Till's body in the Tallahatchie River, snagged on a root.
11:21A 75-pound cotton gin fan was tied to his neck with barbed wire.
11:26His face and body were badly mutilated, but he was identified by the ring on his finger.
11:43Emmett Till's mother managed to have the body brought back to Chicago.
11:52When I went to see Emmett, every bone in my body turned to steel.
11:59And as I began to identify pieces and bits of him, such as the few remaining teeth, such as the
12:11ear where half of it was missing,
12:14and the one eye that was left, one was gone.
12:21And the one that was left, I could tell that that was Emmett's eye because I knew the color.
12:27And Mr. Rayner wanted to know, did I want him to retouch the body if I wanted him to fix
12:35it?
12:35And I told him, no, you can't fix that.
12:38I said, let the world, I want the world to see what I have seen.
12:52To show the world what had happened, Emmett's mother displayed her son's body in an open casket.
13:15The news of the murder of Emmett Till was shocking and frightening.
13:22I think there was a feeling among most people in the black community, it's important to remember now,
13:28we're just one generation, even myself, removed from the South.
13:33There was a feeling that this could happen to a relative of any one of us.
13:39Jet Magazine ran pictures of Emmett Till's disfigured corpse, something that helped to make the Till case a national story.
13:47It's my opinion that the guilt begins with Mrs. Bryant.
13:51And I want to see Mrs. Bryant punished her husband and any other persons that were in on this thing.
13:58And I feel like the pressure should start from the President of the United States
14:03and be channeled all the way down to the township of Money, Mississippi.
14:08The spotlight now shifted to Mississippi.
14:11For the first time, Southern racism was a national story,
14:15as reporters from all over the world streamed into the little town of Sumner, Mississippi.
14:20In fact, I remember the bus didn't actually go to Sumner.
14:23It dropped you off on the road and you had to walk into the little town
14:30and there was a big sign that said, Sumner, Mississippi, a good place to raise a boy.
14:38Sumner, a good place to raise a boy. I remember it very well.
14:47Just out of college, an aspiring writer named David Halberstam managed to get an assignment to cover the Till trial.
14:53The reporters who had come down from the north were told not to hang around in Sumner at night
15:00because otherwise they were going to get picked up and possibly killed and would disappear.
15:04It was that explosive. You could just almost feel as you walked down the street
15:09that people wanted to jostle you and beat you up.
15:12I mean, you could feel the hatred etched on the faces of the local whites towards anyone who was different.
15:21You were their enemy. This was not Americans from different states together in a courthouse.
15:28This was us and them. This was a foreign land.
15:32We never had any trouble until some of our southern niggas go up north and NAACP talks to them and
15:39they come back home.
15:42Clarence Strider, H.C. Strider, who was the sheriff's huge man.
15:48The word nigger seemed to come from his mouth in every other word.
15:56A plantation owner, Strider was furious to learn that he would have to seat black reporters in the courtroom.
16:02He squeezed them all in around one small table, jagged with splinters.
16:07Strider also put Till's mother there, along with a man who came to monitor the fairness of the trial, Charles
16:13Diggs, a congressman from Detroit.
16:16Those few white people that I was exposed to were surprised, even shocked, you know, that there was such a
16:25thing as a black member of Congress.
16:26They don't know anything about anything like that.
16:29One of the deputy sheriffs said, there's a nigger congressman there that says he has a right to have a
16:34seat here.
16:34They said, what? A nigger congressman? I mean, it was just astonishing to them.
16:39I mean, it was as if their world was being turned upside down.
16:44The trial started on August 18th.
16:47Though 63% of Tallahatchie County was black, every juror was white.
16:53According to Mississippi Customs, jury service was restricted to white males over the age of 21.
17:06I remember their contempt for the process.
17:09I remember them sort of smirking and winking and sitting out on the front steps as if it were a
17:16picnic, giving ice cream cones to their children.
17:20I mean, they were enjoying it. It was their largest moment. There was no fear of conviction.
17:26The mother of the victim couldn't help but notice the love between parents and children that passed between the family
17:32of the accused.
17:34Each of them had a little boy on each knee. They both had two sons.
17:40And their mother coming behind them, wiping their brows with a claw, giving them something to drink, fanning them, leaning
17:52over to ask them if they were comfortable.
17:55The case for the prosecution was solid. Every detail of the murder, including the gin fan, was presented in court.
18:04The man who collected much of the evidence was a fearless NAACP representative named Medgar Evers.
18:13The key witness was Mose Wright, who had been hiding out since the night of the murder.
18:18When he appeared in Sumner, he was fully aware of the danger of what he was about to do.
18:24I remember his tremendous dignity of Mose Wright and the tremendous, you know, he stood ramrod straight and he pointed
18:36at those men.
18:37And it was an unforgettable moment. You knew it was a historical moment because you knew nobody in his position
18:45had ever done that before.
18:54When the defense gave its closing argument, I remember one of the last things they said was,
19:05I know that every last Anglo-Saxon one of you will have the courage to bring back a verdict of
19:15not guilty and set these men free.
19:20After a five-day trial, the jury retired to make its decision.
19:24To give the illusion of some deliberation, the twelve men paused to share a soda pop.
19:31Only sixty-seven minutes after they left the courtroom, they returned with their decision.
19:37Not guilty.
19:42Not guilty.
19:52When that verdict came through, it was as if to say, it's open season on niggers.
20:02And the noise that went up, the celebration that went on, was unbelievable.
20:09How do you folks feel now that it's all over? Roy, how about you?
20:13I'm just glad it's over.
20:15J.W.?
20:16Hi, I'm Lou.
20:18Mrs. Bryant, uh...
20:19Feel firm.
20:26It was scary. It was like, here we are. This is, I'm an American, this is America, and this is
20:32a place where people can call a child out of a house and take him away.
20:39And he's never seen again until his body comes up in the river and he's dead.
20:46This was like the most dramatic illustration of the nightmare of what we were living with and what we had
20:54created.
20:57Two months after the trial, a journalist named William Bradford Huey paid Milam and Bryant $4,000 to tell him
21:05the real story.
21:06Because they could not be tried twice for the same crime, they agreed.
21:11In a blow-by-blow description, they told Huey how they had stripped the boy, beat him, shot him in
21:17the head, tied him to the old cotton gin fan, and then thrown him in the Tallahatchie River.
21:22At first they said they didn't plan to kill the boy, but after the way he acted toward them, they
21:27felt they had no choice.
21:29When they made this story public of how they brutalized this boy, because he would not say he was afraid
21:37of them as white people, that just turned us all along.
21:45It gave us new energy to get into, so it was a stimulant, a major stimulant, in pushing people further
21:51and deeper into the civil rights movement.
21:55In Sumner, one day after the trial took place, a young reporter for NBC Radio named John Chancellor was rushed
22:02by a group of whites, furious at the way the northern media had portrayed their town.
22:07I had on my shoulder a little tape recorder, a little portable tape recorder that wasn't connected to anything but
22:15its own battery.
22:16And so what I did was, I held up this little microphone, and I said, you can do what you
22:25want to me, but the whole world is going to know about it if you do it.
22:31Know that before you take one more step. And they stopped.
22:37The unexpected power of the microphone and the camera would be used by sophisticated young black leaders to make the
22:44struggle for civil rights visible to the entire nation.
22:51On December 1st, 1955, a seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to
22:59a white man.
23:00It seemed like an isolated incident.
23:03But what was invisible to local whites was the sophisticated network of black activists ready to challenge laws that kept
23:11the races separate in restaurants, theaters, and buses.
23:16For years, Parks and the others had been preparing for this moment.
23:22To protest the arrest, local black leaders called for a bus boycott.
23:27The response was overwhelming.
23:29Black passengers, the economic backbone of the bus system, happily walked miles rather than ride the segregated buses.
23:38The first night of the boycott, a protest meeting was scheduled.
23:41As dusk arrived, the church was filled and more than 6,000 people surrounded it to listen over loudspeakers.
23:48The keynote speaker was a new minister in town.
23:51Just 26 years old, with only 15 minutes to prepare his speech, he was nervous about stepping forward.
23:59His name was Martin Luther King.
24:02The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.
24:08That's all.
24:10We are not wrong in what we are doing.
24:13If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong.
24:19If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong.
24:28If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong.
24:35The Montgomery bus boycott had found its spokesman.
24:38No one knew it yet, but in Martin Luther King, the growing civil rights movement had also found a charismatic
24:44leader
24:45who could preach the sermon of equality to the nation.
24:48We, the Negro citizens, have decided not to ride the buses in Montgomery until we receive some justice and until
24:57we get a hearing, even if it takes a year.
25:03Angry whites bombed King's home, but it was King who was arrested for conspiracy to boycott.
25:09Yet the arrest played into King's hands.
25:12He understood that he could shame the nation by showing the injustice of its laws.
25:17From that, I think, came the essential ingredients that Martin King used so well,
25:24which was a televised morality play.
25:29The more they either arrested them or treated them harshly,
25:33the more the media liked it, the better story it was,
25:37and the more it worked into the hands of the black protesters as the rest of the nation sat and
25:44watched this morality play.
25:48We feel that we are right, and that we have a legitimate complaint,
25:53and also we feel that one of the great glories of America is the right to protest for right.
26:00I remember sitting in my living room, and I saw this man that looked so impressive coming out of a
26:07courthouse or church.
26:11And he was announced as Dr. Martin Luther King.
26:16And I thought, there's not but one place in the world for me to be.
26:20That's Montgomery.
26:20I got on a plane and went to Montgomery.
26:23Tim Black played an active role in the Montgomery boycott,
26:27a powerful marriage of grassroots organizing and articulate leaders
26:31who knew how to frame the drama in terms all Americans, particularly the media, could understand.
26:38One year after they began the struggle, the boycotters won the fight
26:42when the Supreme Court declared segregated busing to be unconstitutional.
26:47The decision rendered by the Supreme Court yesterday was a victory.
26:53But it wasn't a victory for colored folks.
26:56Don't make that victory that small.
26:59It wasn't a victory for 50,000 Negroes among governments.
27:03It wasn't merely a victory for 16 million Negroes of America.
27:07That was a victory for justice.
27:27The Till trial had been act one. Montgomery was act two.
27:31Now the stage was set for act three.
27:35A TV drama that would shame America in the eyes of the world.
27:39A drama in which children would play the leading role.
27:49In 1954, the Supreme Court decision of Brown versus Board of Education had declared that segregated schools were unconstitutional.
28:00To provide equal opportunity for all children, schools across the country would be forced to integrate.
28:08In 1957, Little Rock, Arkansas, in order to comply with the Supreme Court, moved to integrate its central high school.
28:15Starting slowly, the local school board chose nine African American students for their excellent grades.
28:34This popular resentment did not escape the notice of Orville Faubus, the governor of Arkansas.
28:39Seeking re-election, he would find a dramatic way of courting the segregationist vote.
28:44He was not a racist. I don't think he was motivated by any kind of animosity toward blacks.
28:52On the other hand, he was expedient. He used the race issue when it served his purpose.
28:58But equally important, and in some cases perhaps even more important, was what I always used to define as the
29:04Ain't no son of a bitch gonna tell me what to do syndrome.
29:09Units of the National Guard have been and are now being mobilized with the mission to maintain or restore the
29:19peace and good order of this community.
29:23Faubus used the force of the Arkansas National Guard to prevent any black students from entering Central High School.
29:35Afraid of potential violence, the NAACP called back the black children who were supposed to attend school that day.
29:43But one girl, Elizabeth Eckford, didn't have a phone. She went to school alone.
30:17In 2016 in 2018 in San Priel.
30:26A white woman intervened and managed to escort Elizabeth Eckford to a nearby bus, but TV
30:33viewers around the country had been horrified by what had happened to the young girl.
30:41President Eisenhower tried to reach a compromise with Faubus, but when Faubus called off the
30:48National Guard, he left the explosive situation in the hands of a few local police.
30:56When the students managed to sneak into school through a back entrance, the white crowd turned
31:01on a black reporter outside the school.
31:28In the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the United States promoted the justice of the
31:33American way.
31:35Now, to a watching world, American ideals seem little more than a sham.
31:43That night, President Eisenhower addressed the nation.
31:46Our enemies are gloating over this incident and using it everywhere to misrepresent our
31:52whole nation.
31:53We are portrayed as a violator of those standards of conduct with the peoples of the world united
32:00to proclaim in the charter of the United Nations.
32:05Mabuul can not be allowed to override the decisions of our courts.
32:17Eisenhower ordered the invasion of Arkansas by units of the 101st Airborne Division.
32:24The Army had instructions to maintain order and to secure the safety of the black students
32:29while they attended school.
32:32To Orville Faubus, it was a replay of the Civil War.
32:36We are now an occupied territory.
32:42In the name of liberty, we hold so dear.
32:46In the name of decency, which we all cherish, what is happening in America?
32:55Eisenhower were calling out the Federal troops.
32:57The beginning of a real aid and assist to the modern civil rights movement.
33:02Because it put the federal government fairly behind the desires and efforts of black citizens.
33:10First time anybody could think of that.
33:15Somebody cared about us.
33:17Somebody cared about protecting our rights.
33:19Somebody cared about black citizens.
33:24Every day, the soldiers escorted the children to school in a convoy of jeeps mounted with machine guns.
33:38You know, this is a group of nine teenagers and we get out of this station wagon.
33:45They have cleared the street.
33:46We're surrounded by a cordon of soldiers with bayonets drawn marching up to the front of the steps.
33:55You had, you know, it was an overwhelming moment.
33:59They are in the school now.
34:01The students will be still on the steps up there.
34:06Television had reached its mobile stage.
34:10It could take you where you could not be, which is the most important thing about television, and show you
34:16things you could not see.
34:17Everyone would get up in the morning and turn on the television.
34:20We got television now.
34:22Turn on the television and see what happened in Little Rock.
34:25Before TV, racism had been invisible to most whites.
34:30Now, as sets across the nation tuned in to the Little Rock story, Americans saw their moral scars exposed by
34:37a new group of reporters.
34:39John Chancellor of NBC News reporting from Little Rock.
34:43I must say, I was very pleased to see the 101st Airborne marching down that street.
34:50I hated the feeling that I was taking sides, but every reporter has a heart, and mine just soared.
34:58I saw not just the troopers coming down the street, I saw the Constitution of the United States coming down
35:06that street.
35:09These new reporters are not just reporters, but on a story of this moral intensity, John Chancellor and the men
35:17like him are, in fact, modern-day prophets.
35:22And he might as well be saying, as the film is rolling, this is a sin, this is a sin,
35:28this is a sin.
35:35The drama of Little Rock continued on throughout the year.
35:40Despite military guards in the hallways, the nine children endured insults, cruel pranks, and assaults.
35:47But by June, one senior, Ernest Green, did receive his diploma in a ceremony attended by Martin Luther King.
36:02No less a mild, entertaining figure as Louis Armstrong, the great trumpet player, made the statement that the United States
36:11can't take care of those little children, to hell with the United States.
36:20Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.
36:26He had been hiding himself.
36:29He had been invisible.
36:31His real self had been invisible.
36:33And suddenly he becomes visible, as the real Louis Armstrong.
36:37Not all could play trumpet, but he could be a man.
36:51Bill Russell raged against his invisibility, the skills that most people couldn't see, and the humanity they wouldn't recognize.
36:59He wanted to be seen, not just as a player, but as a man.
37:04He would do these superhuman things at times during games, that only a guy that needed to win, I mean,
37:13down deep in his guts, needed to win, would do.
37:19Bill Russell was born in Monroe, Louisiana, in 1934.
37:24As a young boy, he was smart and unusually sensitive to the world of the Old South.
37:30I am the black king.
37:34I'm the ball caught in your hand.
37:37At the age of nine, Russell and his family left Louisiana and became part of the great black migration to
37:43the north and to the west.
37:45The long train ride to Oakland, California made a big impression on the young Russell, whose lifelong fondness for trains
37:52was linked to a sense of possibility, stirred by his journey out of the south.
37:58In Oakland, Russell saw basketball as a way to move on up to a better life.
38:03As a senior, he impressed local scouts who offered him a scholarship at the University of San Francisco, where the
38:09team was known as the Dons.
38:20The University of San Francisco in the early 50s was not a big basketball power or program.
38:26They didn't have their own gym. They were called the homeless Dons.
38:29And Russell's scholarship was not a great deal.
38:33He had to wash dishes and work in the cafeteria and have a job while he was there.
38:37So they were not a perennial power by any means when he walked on the campus.
38:42Russell quickly adapted to college life.
38:45As a star basketball player, he was idolized on campus.
38:49It was a heady time.
38:52Then the team took their first trip down south to Louisiana.
38:57Number four on the USF team was Casey Jones.
39:01One player on the team had never been south.
39:04Gene Brown, raised in San Francisco.
39:07And we were having fun with this, the blacks and white players.
39:10We were having fun with the slave thing, with the sitting in the back of the bus thing.
39:18And we were laughing and joking about it.
39:21But as soon as the plane landed in New Orleans and we stepped off the plane into the lobby,
39:27all of a sudden this great cloud came down and this frown came on the black players' faces.
39:33These signs up there, whites only, blacks only, the water fountains.
39:39Gene Brown had to go to the restroom.
39:41He came back crying because he saw the signs up there.
39:43We were upset about this atmosphere, of you're less than a human being.
39:51We stepped on the court that night and you saw this scowl on Bill Russell's face,
39:57which indicated to everyone else that, okay, this is what it's about.
40:03We are going to tear this team apart.
40:06And we went out and just murdered the other team about 20, 25, 30 points.
40:32Let's go, let's go, let's go.
40:34No one had ever seen a player like Bill Russell before.
40:38He was a big man who ran.
40:40His defense was so good, it became an offensive weapon.
40:43Though his shot was gawky, he was so fast and so smart, he was still a big scorer.
40:48I remember the Chief with Jack Nicholson in one floor of the Cuckoo's Nest.
40:52And Nicholson would station this gigantic Indian man down beneath the basket and say,
40:56Chief, catch the ball, put the ball in the basket.
40:58That's the way the game was played.
41:00And he had these behemoth guys under the basket.
41:02They weren't very mobile.
41:04It didn't matter.
41:05They were taller than everybody else and could score.
41:07Russell comes in and a guy who was also tall, who's very mobile, very quick.
41:12And he changes their shots.
41:14Their shots are blocked all of a sudden.
41:15These guys are surprised.
41:16This man's blocking their shots.
41:18You block shots.
41:19You get the rebound.
41:20Then behind that comes a fast break.
41:22And that's the first time I was involved in a fast break was at USF.
41:32Every minute I put these down.
41:36My reason was everywhere.
41:38After one early loss in his junior year, Russell made sure that the Dons never lost again.
41:45They won 55 games in a row and two national championships.
41:49At the end of his senior year, Russell's extraordinary success led to speculation.
41:55What pro team would he play for?
41:57The Harlem Globetrotters cutting keepers in Madison Square Garden.
42:00A little wizardry in the pre-game workout.
42:03At a time when the NBA was mostly white,
42:05a novelty team called the Harlem Globetrotters drew many of the most talented black college players.
42:11So the Globetrotters made Russell a good offer.
42:14He wasn't sure he wanted to play the clown.
42:19Bill was insulted by the fact that the general manager of the Harlem Globetrotters chose not to speak to Russell
42:24himself.
42:25He talked to his coach.
42:26And Bill found this very insulting.
42:29And that was it.
42:31Red Auerbach, the coach of the Boston Celtics, respected Russell's intelligence.
42:35He signed him because he saw what others did not.
42:38Russell was a new kind of player for a new kind of game.
42:43At the time, the Celtics had a great ball handler named Bob Cousy.
42:46They had a good outside shooter named Tom Heinsohn.
42:50But they needed somebody to get them the ball, to play defense and rebound.
42:55The missing piece was Bill Ruff.
42:57Jim Danny to the rescue.
42:59Jim Danny to the rescue.
43:02Jim Danny to the rescue.
43:05Go Jim Danny.
43:06Go Jim Danny.
43:07He complemented the skills that we had in place completely.
43:10He added a dimension to the game.
43:13Shot blocking that had never been witnessed before.
43:20At six, nine and a half or whatever, he was literally as quick as a cat.
43:24And he caught everyone by surprise.
43:26The entire basketball world, the NBA, the Celtics.
43:31And as I say, the result was, you know, 11 championships in 13 years.
43:39Go Jim Danny.
43:40Go.
43:45He was one of the greatest competitors, maybe the greatest competitor I ever saw play.
43:49For whatever psychological reason, he needed to be the best.
43:53He would actually get physically ill before ball games.
43:58That's how important in his life playing a basketball game was.
44:02Russell would vomit before the big games.
44:04And that was the deal that they couldn't go out of the locker room until Bill had done his thing
44:08over in the stall.
44:09Some felt that Russell didn't really enjoy the game.
44:12For him, it was a mission.
44:14A way to release a deep rage within.
44:18I think the source of the anger is the racial issue.
44:21The disrespect shown human beings because of their color.
44:27And he just has total disdain for civilization being in this mode.
44:32I mean, not respecting a person for being a human being.
44:36In cities like St. Louis, which were still segregated, where they couldn't get service in a coffee shop,
44:43and where there were a lot of racial taunts when he played, he always played his best.
44:50As it happened, the Celtics met the St. Louis Hawks for the title in Russell's first year.
44:55For Russell, it was an opportunity to prove something to St. Louis and the country.
45:01The series came down to a seventh and final game.
45:04With only a few seconds remaining, one of the Hawks streaked all alone toward the basket to win the game
45:10when Russell performed a superhuman feat.
45:13Russell went by me like I was standing still.
45:17He ran the length of the court faster than they could make one long pass and a dribble, one dribble
45:25to the basket.
45:31Russell blocked the shot.
45:36Russell finished with 32 rebounds and five blocked shots.
45:40In the celebration afterwards, teammates shaved off Russell's goatee.
45:45He was a very rare athlete, where stats didn't mean anything.
45:49He made his teammates better.
45:50And the teammates, I don't know what they thought of him off the floor, away from the game,
45:54but I think when they were playing the games, they all loved Bill Russell.
45:58Russell loved playing for the Celtics, but he did not like the city of Boston.
46:02At first, the only black player on the team, he felt that fans revered him as a player,
46:07while they denied the humanity of ordinary African Americans.
46:11It was a northern city, but there was an undertow, a cultural undertow of races that he must have found
46:19odious,
46:20and he kept himself apart.
46:22He acted as if he was in a foreign country, and maybe he was.
46:26In one ugly incident in Boston, thugs broke into Russell's house and scrawled the word nigger on the walls.
46:35And a lot of Boston people don't understand that this truly did happen,
46:41and he never mentioned it, because he didn't want to let those people know that they had hurt him that
46:47much.
46:47We saw, within our unit, the complete Bill Russell.
46:53Once he stepped outside of that unit, on a plane, on a train, in a hotel lobby, he would pull
46:59the shade.
47:00Off the court, Russell refused to meet the expectations of fans and reporters.
47:05He rarely agreed to interviews, and over the years, he infuriated fans by refusing to sign any autographs, ever.
47:13One day, when I asked him to sign a picture, because I wanted all of the players that I had
47:18played with to sign an autograph.
47:21And he refused. I didn't take that too well.
47:26I said, hey, I can understand you're not signing for everybody else, except that I'm different.
47:30You know, I'm a teammate.
47:32And he stuck to his gun. He just wouldn't sign.
47:35Real pain. He wouldn't sign.
47:36Bill Russell believed that the autograph was not worth anything.
47:41Really, really what the whole encounter was, was for a person to meet another person.
47:48And he would shake their hands, and he would spend more time talking to them, but he wouldn't give them
47:54the autograph.
47:55Because by giving them the autograph, the meeting was not the meeting of two people.
48:03Russell led the Celtics to 11 championships in 13 years.
48:07He had changed the game of basketball, and he had let everyone know that was not nearly enough.
48:15I think the entire generation that he belonged to was more activist.
48:22The country was paying attention.
48:24This was a great theater of integration.
48:27These men were proud, they were college educated, they were extremely articulate.
48:35Bill Russell's a very articulate man. He writes very well.
48:39And they had something to say.
48:41And they were superior citizens, and they were angry.
48:45In 1963, Medgar Evers, the man who had done so much to collect the evidence in the Emmett Till case,
48:51was murdered by a white supremacist.
48:54In a demonstration in Boston, Bill Russell turned out to make a public declaration of his outrage.
49:00Later, he went down south to protest the murder of three other civil rights workers.
49:04In August, he was at the forefront of Martin Luther King's march on Washington.
49:12America was still divided into black and white worlds.
49:15But now, there was a difference.
49:18Both were beginning to see each other more clearly.
49:21The invisible had become visible.
49:23I have a dream.
49:28My four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color
49:36of their skin, but by the content of their character.
49:39I have a dream.
49:41I have a dream.
49:53Bill maintained his strict no-autograph policy, but he had a change of heart in 1994.
49:58He agreed to sign autographs in Boston, charging fans $495 for his signature on a basketball.
50:05The take for four hours' work, $150,000.