It would be reductionist to talk about the late Bill Russell through only the prism of some of the worst, ugliest things that ever happened to him. After all, Russell—who died Sunday at 88— was, and still is, the greatest winner in the history of major professional American sports, and a barrier breaker in every sense of the word.
The reality of Russell’s legacy as a human is that you can’t fully sum him up without understanding the incredibly racist current he swam against in the 1950s and ’60s, even while being the greatest to ever play his sport to that point in time, and eventually becoming the first Black coach in NBA history.
This was a man who led the Celtics to 11 championships in 13 seasons, yet had an enormously complicated relationship with the fans in Boston. Large swaths of the area’s media and fans had pegged the city’s first Black sports star as surly, due to the fact that he initially turned down his induction into the Hall of Fame and his longtime refusal to sign autographs for fans. (The autograph detail was even cited in a file the FBI kept on Russell. The file called Russell “an arrogant Negro who won’t sign autographs for white children.”) In 1963, in the midst of the decorated title run, Russell returned to his suburban Boston home from a weekend trip only to find that it had been broken into and vandalized, with racial epithets spray-painted onto the walls, and his beds defecated on.
