When I was a kid, I devoured biographies of sports stars, and as-told-to autobiographies, one of which was Bill Russell's Go Up for Glory. You can see from the book's cover photograph why he blocked so many shots, as back in those days there were a lot of Caucasians in the NBA and by rule they were not permitted to leave their feet. Today, almost the only thing I remember of the contents was a conversation the young Russell had with a hotelier in, I believe, South Carolina. This would have been in the mid 1950s. Russell had been invited to play in some kind of collegiate all-star game and was going to arrive before most of the other players. He called the hotel to make sure this wasn't going to be a problem—South Carolina, mid 50s, he's Black (but a rising athletic star), he wasn't sure of the drill. "Oh, no, no problem at all, Mr. Russell," he's assured.
He decides to push the envelope. "Can I use the swimming pool?" he says. A pause and then, "Well, yes, but we'd appreciate it if you could be inconspicuous." In the next sentence, Russell considers how he, a 6-foot 10-inch Black guy, is going to be "inconspicuous" at the hotel swimming pool in Carolina.
The other thing I remember is that Russell's high school basketball teammates in Oakland, California, included future baseball Hall of Famer Frank Robinson. Kids used to play all the sports. Russell was a champion high jumper in track and field.
The history of segregated swimming pools enjoyed a renaissance on social media this week after top Trump staffer Mercedes Schlapp compared, contemptuously, Joe Biden to PBS kids' show icon Mr. Rogers (Schlapp, in her tweet, misspelled his name "Rodgers"). Biden supporters embraced the resemblance and the implied contrast with Trump. Soon #MrRogers was trending on Twitter. Kind and calm: what's wrong with that? One contributor to the hashtag appended the below clip from a 1969 episode of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." At the time, many public swimming pools, and especially kiddie wading pools, were still segregated, no longer by law but by longstanding practice—de facto as opposed to de jure, as the scholars say.
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