Under the light of an incandescent lightbulb illuminating the inky sky of Oakland, Califonia, a young Paul Silas played basketball with fellow future Celtics great Bill Russell, his brother Charlie, and his cousins Fritz and Aaron Pointer in the sweet heat of a late summer evening. On the sidelines, the Pointer sisters — still a decade away from being The Pointer Sisters — were enjoying the show.
Basketball played at 18th and Adeline’s DeFremery Park in the early 1960s was the axis their world revolved around. It was a quiet but poignant testimony of what the families who had migrated to Oakland in the 1940s built for themselves as they fled the brutal, institutionalized repression of Jim Crow in the southern United States.
