MLK Game Thread: Magic at Hawks, 01/21/2019

[jayu70]

I'm really looking forward to lw3's write up!!!

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[jayu70]

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[lethalweapon3]

The newest owners of the Atlanta Hawks could not have picked a more inopportune time to announce they were bringing NBA professional basketball to the heart of the Deep South.

Just two years prior, a major-league baseball team announced its departure from Milwaukee to Atlanta, and the receiving city responded enthusiastically, convening a parade to celebrate the club’s pending arrival.

Could you imagine, before even tossing a ball, the Hawks getting anything close to a welcoming reception, like THIS?

http://www.atlantatimemachine.com/downtown/braves_parade.htm

Running off blind faith and tax dollars, the city had just finished constructing a multi-purpose sports venue with no promises as to when a major tenant would arrive. You could imagine the glee when the NFL and the AFL began fighting each other over who would be first to have an expansion team ruling the gridiron there.

Mere months after yet another parade that feted the baseball players on opening day, 54,000 packed into Atlanta Stadium to watch Big Tommy Nobis chase those dastardly Rams around the field. Basketball, then-Georgia governor Carl Sanders and developer Tom Cousins surely surmised, must be the next logical step.

Unfortunately for them, they had waited too late to surf the sports fanfare wave around Atlanta. Less than two years later, there would be no parades in this city, no honorary arenas, and hardly any excited fans. It was now 1968. And, man, oh man, this town, this nation, was going THROUGH it, jack!

For Gov. Sanders and Cousins, it had to feel like the meme of Community’s Donald Glover showing up at the apartment with pizzas, only to discover all hell had broken loose.

The bigwigs prepared to make their grand announcement, that the NBA’s championship-contending Hawks had been purchased and were on their way to town from St. Louis, hopefully this time to stay, on May 2 of that year. Well, forgive the people of Atlanta for neglecting to roll out the red carpets, guys. After all, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was just assassinated a few weeks before.

Because somebody felt a Nobel Peace Prize winner and the nation’s most prominent orator of the day was getting a little too big for his non-violent, pacifist, activist britches, our city had just buried and continues to mourn its most well-renowned, if not universally well-regarded, native son. Meanwhile, his alleged killer remained at-large. I’m sorry, sirs, you were saying something about some Hawks coming to town?

It didn’t matter if you were a successful business heir, the city’s Chamber of Commerce leader and future Mayor. It didn’t matter if you were the brother of an assassinated president, a member of the nation’s most prominent political family, and a front-runner for POTUS yourself. If you kinda sorta allied yourself with MLK, you were under constant threat of getting the gat, too.

Robert Francis Kennedy’s untimely death, shot two months after King’s demise, became just another slice in the Dagwood sandwich of bad news that few Americans were eager to chew. Throw in riots, a nastily contested political convention, riots, uglier war coverage, and more riots, and the “good news” about the Atlanta Hawks could not even reach the top of page 16, in either the Atlanta Constitution or the Atlanta Journal.

https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/398289711/

With formerly sports-starved city leaders now distracted, their hands suddenly entrenched in their pockets, where would these Hawks play? Until Cousins could get his development scheme in order, Alexander Memorial Coliseum, the 12-year-old arena constructed by Georgia Tech, Mayor Ivan Allen’s alma mater, at the edge of their campus, was an obvious short-term solution. The year before, the state’s athletic association hosted the first integrated high school hoops tourney there.

The school prided itself on being the first Deep South college, in 1963, to admit black students without waiting for a judge to twist their arm, defying a state law that threatened, “an immediate cut-off of state funds to any white institution that admitted a black student.”

There was little on-campus resistance to the students’ enrollment, save for the rabble-rousing Klan, who marched down North Avenue and to the school president’s home with picket signs in futile umbrage. Despite Atlanta civic leaders’ professed progressivity to the outside world, the sentiment against non-whites and whites doing much of anything together prevailed in Tech’s surrounding neighborhood.

Five blocks south of the Coliseum was the United States’ first public housing project, Techwood Homes. As noted in Richard Rothstein’s excellent book (that I cannot put down), “The Color of Law (2017),” the federal government razed a low-income, integrated neighborhood of 1600 households known as The Flats (Tech still uses this as a nickname for the campus proper), to build 600 housing units that opened, for lower-middle-class white families only, in 1935.

Segregated, “separate but (un)equal” housing for middle-class black citizens was built adjacent to Techwood years later, but the publicly-funded entrenchment of policies disallowing integrated living continued for decades to come. Techwood Homes would not integrate until 1968, coincidentally, the year the Hawks were coming to town.

Three blocks west of the Coliseum was the Southern-cuisine eatery called The Pickrick. Its owner, Lester Maddox, used his restaurant as his political soapbox, decrying Brown v. Board, drawing disdainful political cartoons for the local newspapers, willfully defying the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and filing an unsuccessful lawsuit to skirt the new law.

Maddox’s “Pickrick Drumsticks” (axe handles, kept at the entrance for him and his preferred patrons to use), became the handy resistance tools of choice, more than just symbolic ones, to fend off his restaurant’s “agitators” (black Tech students, who dared to enter and request service, and any of their supporters).

When Maddox lost his lawsuit, rather than comply, he closed the Pickrick but tried to re-open an eponymous, club-style “cafeteria,” open only to Georgians who were “acceptable,” in his ever-so-worthy eyes. After another federal court order showed nobody was falling for his tricks, Maddox closed the restaurant outright, blaming the President and “communists” for his plight. But he was far from through.

The whole time, Maddox was building his national brand as a populist, segregationist political candidate. His efforts culminated in 1966, when he bested a state senator named Jimmy Carter to force a runoff, and later won the Democratic gubernatorial primary. His longtime nemesis, Sanders, begrudgingly insisted on unified party loyalty behind the nominee.

By the time the Hawks arrived in 1968, MLK was deceased, RFK was deceased, the nation was as embroiled in domestic turmoil as anyone living could recall. And the dude who fought off black would-be patrons with pickaxe handles was well into his term as Sanders’ successor, as the happily-elected Governor of the great state of Georgia.

Governor Maddox was endorsing his disaffected Alabama segregationist colleague George Wallace for President, while threatening to personally raise back from half-staff the State Capitol flag for a man, in King, that he deemed, “an enemy of our country”. The climate in the Peach State was less than ideal for pro hoops, panned at the time by its detractors as the “jazz” of sports, staffed with wannabe-unionizers running to-and-fro in short shorts. And, if you thought things were going rough for Atlanta’s well-heeled sports owners…

When Team USA gold medalist and NBA All-Star for the reigning Western Division regular-season champs, “Pogo Joe” Caldwell, Marvin Bagley III’s future grandfather, arrived that summer of ’68 at Atlanta’s Holiday Inn downtown, he and his family were greeted with something less cordial than a marching band trumpet. “Hey, n*gg*rs!”, was the shout emanating from a car of local yokels at the Caldwell family, before screeching oh-so-courageously away.

So it goes, in ex-Mayor William Hartsfield’s “City Too Busy to Hate,” the place St. Louis player-coach Richie Guerin lauded at the time of the announced move as, “a very progressive, fast growing and, equally, fast-developing city.” Joe’s sister offered up a matter-of-fact reminder to his star sibling of his lot in life: “Well, you’re in the South now, brother.”

Despite suiting up for the more locally palatable baseball team, Hammerin’ Hank Aaron understood the dichotomy quite well. Atlanta’s eventual home run king was originally apprehensive about the relocation from Milwaukee, a matter in which he, like most professional athletes, had little choice. Yet Aaron found Atlanta to be, “a fine city. I like it here. The only thing I find wrong with Atlanta is that it has the word ‘Georgia’ stuck on its end. If that word was ‘Minnesota,’ ‘Iowa,’ ‘New York,’ etc., it would be the greatest.”

At its sociopolitical extreme, ‘Atlanta’ was Allen, King, Hartsfield. ‘Georgia’ was decisively Maddox. All of those leaders were raised, educated, and came of age in Atlanta, Georgia. ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Georgia’ were tugging the state’s rising metropolis, and the “New South” as its economic center, in divergent social directions. Its newest black pro athletes, from Felipe Alou to Pogo Joe, from Aaron to Walt Hazzard to Ken Reaves, were getting stretched to their human limits amid the fray.

Sure, they were welcomed, to an extent. Helping citizens of the Atlanta area, or the larger United States, puff out their chests with some unified sense of civic pride over their athletic feats and accomplishments was one thing. But, but, going to schools together? Sharing seats on a bus? Rubbing elbows at a lunch counter or a watering hole? Laying around swimming pools and beaches? Near “our” wives and daughters?

That stuff might fly in Wisconsin or New York, maybe. But you’re in The South now, “brother.” Echoing anti-abolitionist views from a century before, the “concerned” citizens’ compelling arguments against all this here race-mixin’ and minglin’ pointed in a singular, “threatening” direction: You all know what this will lead to…

Seaborn Roddenbery would be a way-too on-the-nose name for a cartoon villain. But this was, in fact, the name of a Georgia congressman. The cigar-smoking Mercer University grad only made it to age 43, in 1913, before succumbing to cancer, but not before making it his life’s mission to stop blacks and whites from marrying. Of all the hills to die on, this little lump of red clay was his.

“Intermarriage between blacks and whites is repulsive,” Rep. Roddenbery (D-GA) doth declare, “and averse to every sentiment of pure American spirit. It is abhorrent and repugnant to the very principles of Saxon government.” “Seaborn Leghorn” was particularly aghast at the proclivities of Jack Johnson, who was knocking boots with ladies of a different color, when he wasn’t so busy knocking fools of all stripes out the box.

The prized pugilist was enjoying his second “intermarriage.” Johnson’s boxing triumphs, atop his extracurricular exploits, had many celebrating black fans, and even random folks, subject to the business ends of embittered mens’ bullets, nooses, and rocks -- the “Good Ol’ Days,” as those of Gov. Maddox’s ilk might imagine it. The fraternizing freedoms of Johnson, and other black citizens of Roddenbery’s day, would be enough to curdle the cream in his coffee, were he not so horrified over the notion of such liquids ever sharing a cup.

The congressman from Middle Georgia continued his pearl-clutchery over interracial marriage, spewing, “It is subversive to social peace. It is destructive of moral supremacy. And, ultimately, this slavery of white women to black beasts will bring this nation to a conflict as fatal as ever reddened the soil of Virginia or crimsoned the mountain paths of Pennsylvania.” Clearly, decaf didn’t make it across the shores in time for poor Seaborn!

Did I forget to note this speech was on the floor of the U.S. Capitol? And that House members often applauded when Roddenbery raised the subject, which was almost every chance he got, mere months before he died in office?

Roddenbery was not merely riffing racist rhetoric, but also issuing a “Great White Hope” missive of his own: a bill, to introduce America’s Next Constitutional Amendment. This one would “forever” prohibit interracial marriages nationwide, invoking the notorious “one-drop” rule to define applicability, and engulfing the states where such weddings were already legal.

That “already legal” distinction is relevant because, in the decades that followed Roddenbery’s term in office, only 18 of the nation’s 48 states either declined to have, or refused to enforce, “anti-miscegenation” laws. While his proposed Constitutional amendment never made it out of the U.S. Capitol building, numerous state laws were proposed. Those laws already on the books remained intact, if not reinforced. And, by 1948, the most strident enforcers of such laws were the Southern states.

“Virginia is for Lovers,” became a popular bumper sticker. But it was not so much the case for Richard and Mildred Loving. In exchange for being sentenced to prison, the Lovings were ordered by law to vacate their own state, for the next 25 years, for the felonious crime of falling in love and marrying one another. As if Virginia were the Garden of Eden. When Mildred became pregnant in 1958, the couple had fled to Washington, D.C., to wed and evade Virginia’s eugenics-fueled, Roddenbery-inspired 1924 state law, one that reinforced policies informally in place since the colonial days.

Returning to the Commonwealth, their home was raided within weeks, and they were arrested in the dark of night. The cops were hoping to catch the pair “in the act,” since interracial premarital copulation was also illegal. But authorities had to settle for illegal cohabitation charges, insisting the Loving’s D.C. marriage license was invalid in their place of residence.

After pleading guilty, attempts by the couple to comply with the judicially-directed ban from their home state was fraught with practical challenges, like visiting family members, and they initiated a legal journey that took nearly a decade to resolve.

Favoring the plaintiffs, the Loving v. Virginia decision by the Supreme Court justices dropped in the summer of 1967. The ruling that categorically struck down anti-miscegenation laws nationwide (and cohabitation laws, like Florida’s, struck down just a few years prior) generated quite a bit of anguish throughout the 1960’s South, where the Hawks were about to more deeply plant their flag.

For many Southerners and others, this was the definitive last-bastion -- encoded, willfully enforced supremacy, the “freedom” to deny others’ freedoms for the sake of “order” -- struck down by the highest court in the land. They were free to cling to views regarding who should court who, among consenting persons of legal age. But they were no longer able to back those views with police officers enforcing, and judges upholding, American state laws.

Among the “concerned citizens”, their notions of people “coming together” was getting taken a tad too literally. They placed blame at the feet of the civil rights leaders of the day for America slipping down, if you will, this slope of letting freedom ring in the form of wedding bells.

While he was not quoted directly on the Loving case, Dr. King was queried about the ensuing “controversy” around a black NASA employee and Army reservist who successfully offered his hand in marriage to the daughter of the sitting (Georgia-born, Atlanta-educated) U.S. Secretary of State.

The White House worried about the nuptials, once they became public, becoming a point of contention harming the administration’s tenuous relationship with Congress, the President going so far as to check with Georgia U.S. senator Richard B. Russell about the predicted reaction.

For a nation sinking itself deeper into wars across the Pacific, with Cold War threats of going nuclear across multiple seas, this was the kind of phobia, over a half-century after Roddenbery’s passing, that was still palpable in 1967. Two people, of different ethnicities, falling in love and getting hitched. Oh, the horror of it all.

Referencing the leaked news about the carefully shrouded exchange of vows as, “a mighty fine thing,” King calmly explained: “In a democracy such as ours, anyone of any race should be able to marry another person of a different race.” That the marriage in "question" involved family of a war-time policy opponent of King's mattered not in his objective eyes. While this opinion was unnerving to the FBI, who was keeping tabs on King’s movements, relationships and commentaries such as this, this was no new evolution of thought for the civil and human rights leader who helmed from Atlanta, Georgia.

“In a truly integrated society, interracial marriage should be legal,” quipped King, in a newspaper article printed on New Year’s Day of 1960. “This is not a true problem, since individuals marry, not races.” We celebrate “Dreams” that Dr. King eloquently espoused. But much of what he argued for, succinctly, was the unshackling of things that should have long been “Realities.”

Re-iterating that last point regarding the Secretary’s family in 1967, in what would be the final full calendar year of his life, only added to his perilous stature as a human target. “I’ve always said, individuals marry, not races.”

King would not live long enough to see the fruits of his advocacy in this regard. Particularly, not at the western geographical edge of the fights by some to salvage some measure of exceptionality to laws supporting social equity.

Texas Tech, which beat Georgia Tech by two years in admitting black students, albeit to avoid the growing threat of legal punishment, gave out its first athletic scholarship to a black prep athlete in 1967. The tumult over the who, when, why, and how to desegregate through policy was ebbing yet still smoldering by the late 1970s in Texas, where Rayford Young and Candice Nachtigall were born.

Born in Lubbock, Candice as a child relocated several times with her family, before they settled in the nearby Texas Panhandle town of Pampa in the early 1990s. It was there, in high school, where she met a local star athlete named Rayford. The two fast became googly-eyed sweethearts as, at the risk of putting too fine a point on it, they now could.

They maintained their unbridled mutual affection while Ray went on to attend Texas Tech on an athletic scholarship. As a leading point guard in the Big 12, Ray’s breakout junior season coincided with the news that Candice was pregnant. Her mom and their relatives helped take care of Baby Trae, including at the college arena during Red Raiders games. After Ray’s collegiate years wrapped up and it became clear his future would not be in the NBA, he committed to becoming a pro overseas.

Staying together, the Young family eventually moved to Norman, Oklahoma to be closer to Candice’s side of the family, also allowing Ray to accept a job offer from coach Kelvin Sampson to become a grad assistant at the state’s flagship university. It’s here where Baby Trae grows into Ballboy Trae. Together, father and son worked under Sampson, a Lumbee Native American whose father, ironically, participated in a famous tribal revolt (Battle of Hayes Pond) in North Carolina to chase away Klansmen protesting against “mongrels” and “half-breeds” in 1958.

Along the way to Norman High, OU’s Ballboy Trae becomes enamored with the Griffin boys, including a freckle-faced upstart named Blake. Much of Blake’s height and hops likely came from his 6-foot-8 Afro-Haitian father, Tommy, who starred at Northwest Oklahoma State and coached his boys, Blake and Taylor, in high school. The freckles come courtesy of his mom, Gail, and many of Blake’s most positive attributes can be credited to the rearing by both parents.

After Blake reaches the big-time, the emerging NBA star holds a basketball camp back home, and Young Trae is there, front-and-center, soaking it all in. “[Griffin] was talking about a lot of people don’t ever get the opportunity to come out of Oklahoma and play at the highest levels,” Young recalled. “So, I remember him talking about how you can do good things, coming out of Oklahoma.” Good things, indeed. Young followed Griffin’s footsteps into college and, now, as a lottery-pick phenom in the NBA.

Without familial love and commitment, young men like Trae and Blake, would have had a hard time pursuing and achieving many of their childhood dreams. Without hard-fought changes to American law, spurred on by civil rights leaders advocating for a more open society, fine young men like Trae and Blake don’t even get to come into being. Not in this corner of the planet. Because, “pure American spirit,” naturally.

Even for a kid born in the distant territory of Hawai’i, the ability to be conceived and raised by a loving pair would have been perilous, in any of the nation’s 48 states, whether he came into existence or not.

“In many parts of The South,” recalled the 44th President of the United States, “my father could have been strung up from a tree for merely looking at my mother the wrong way; in the most sophisticated of northern cities, the hostile stares, the whispers, might have driven a woman in my mother’s predicament into a back-alley abortion – or at the very least to a distant convent that could arrange for adoption.”

“Their very image together,” the future President noted in his memoir of his parents, “would have been considered lurid and perverse, a handy retort to the handful of softheaded liberals who supported a civil rights agenda.”

If the opposing “anti-miscegenation” crowd had their way on just that issue alone, Trae Young would not exist. Either that, or he would be an “illegitimate” newborn under the discerning, disdainful eyes of the law, his parents spending the ensuing decades seeking cover for him and themselves, from neighbors and strangers who would wish them ill, and probably harm.

One of Trae’s idols, Blake Griffin, would not exist. His native state, Oklahoma, had banned persons “of African descent” and “any person not of African descent,” assuming the authorities knew how far back descent goes, from marrying in 1908. Blake’s former teammate, Austin, the offspring of Griffin’s former NBA coach Doc Rivers, who married his college sweetheart while he was the Hawks’ star point guard in the 1980s? Fuhgeddaboutit.

Speaking of coaches, one young lady from Pennsylvania named Melissa might not exist. Her powers of personal persuasion, as an orating high school student council president, once had the school’s visiting U.S. President playfully remark, “I’m glad I never had to run against her for anything!” If certain influential people in our halls of Congress had their way back in the day, Melissa would never even be around, and someone else would have to sweep a bright young man off his feet to become the future Mrs. Lloyd Pierce.

Eldrick Woods would not exist, not in America, and if he had, the best he could ever hope to do over at Augusta National would’ve involved caddying, valet, or tending bar. If Kent Bazemore was allowed by the old hand-wringers to do anything at Asheville’s Biltmore Estate, the last thing would be placing a ring on the finger of anyone like his dear wife, Samantha.

Back at Texas Tech, their record-breaking collegiate quarterback who, less than two years after getting drafted, might win NFL MVP and, yesterday, fell just short of a trip to Atlanta to compete for Super Bowl glory? Poof! Not happening.

Who’s going to stand in between former Maryland center Essence Townsend and her boyfriend, the equally towering Alex Len, to tell them who they can or can’t date? Who’s the sad-sack Texan who would’ve had to saddle up to Dallas’ iconic NBA player (no, not you, Luka), to offer up the bad news about his bubbling romance with a bright, lovely Kenyan-Swedish lady? “I don’t know what liberties you all allow with the women folk over there in that country of yours… GERMANY (!!!), but we do things a little differently around these here parts, Dirk. No way-tzki!”

Bringing a kid like Aaron Gordon into this world? Yeah, that would be a “no,” dawg. Even Aaron’s father, who was black and Native American, would have been born of “illicit” means under old Louisiana law. And, hold up… what’s this, Trae? Existing as a human on this planet is a tough enough pill for some to swallow, but now you’re engaged, too… to one of “our” precious OU cheerleaders? Don’t you need to beg the gummint to say, “We Shall,” first, before asking if she’d say, “I Do”? Way to rub it in, Trae.

On this special Martin Luther King, Jr., national holiday, Trae Young and his Hawks, who happen to be celebrating 50 years here in Atlanta, host Aaron Gordon and the Orlando Magic (3:00 PM Eastern, Fox Sports Southeast and 92.9 FM in ATL, NBATV, Fox Sports Florida), in a match featuring two clubs from the wildly successful National Basketball Association, at State Farm Arena, a downtown venue whose seats and many accommodations are open to any soul who bothers to buy a ticket.

Every single element of that prior statement would have Lester Maddox choking on his Drumstick, and Seaborn Roddenbery writhing in his grave. If they and the folks in their camp had their way, Sanders’ and Cousins’ newly acquired Hawks of 1968 would not have lasted five years in this state, nevermind fifty.

Instead, the right guy from Atlanta, the right fellow from Georgia, got human rights right at the right time. It is he who rightfully gets an honorary national holiday, today, to celebrate his memory and his undying, unifying legacy.

Atlanta Hawks fans: enjoy life, enjoy one another’s company, and enjoy this game.

Let’s Go Hawks!
~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

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[jayu70]

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[lethalweapon3]

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[Robo_Claw]

damn wish i was going, the MLK matinee game is my fave reg season to attend.

[graymule]

LW3 - Thank you. Great,

[DirtybirdGA]

Nice history lessons.

[jayu70]

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[jayu70]

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[graymule]

Seems that we're fairly healthy. Should be able to put up a good fight today. End our home stand with a victory!

[ducler]

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[Spud2nique]

Great game thread lw3! Much needed on a day where I have personally received verbal racism.

Basketball is just a sport. Racism is real life. Let’s be better. Happy MLK day all!

GO HAWKS!

[jayu70]

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[kg01]

Why am I getting the freaking Knicks postgame show on my Atlanta Hawks Siruis feed??!

ETA: If this isn't rectified, I have to do the sensible thing and quit my job to go home to watch the game.

Yes, I'm working on MLK day. What's wrong with that picture?

[jayu70]

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[jayu70]

Why am I getting the freaking Knicks postgame show on my Atlanta Hawks Siruis feed??!

ETA: If this isn't rectified, I have to do the sensible thing and quit my job to go home to watch the game.

Yes, I'm working on MLK day. What's wrong with that picture?

Me too and I'm not happy.

[kg01]

Crisis averted, people. I got the Holman now.

*whew* Thought I was gonna have to move in with @spud2 if I'dve quit my job. Eh, maybe I'll still move in with him.