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Tom Orsborn: Pop after asking "what will it take" for politicians to enact stricter gun control laws: "We got two young black guys in Tennessee who just got railroaded by a bunch of people I would bet deep down in their souls want to go back to Jim Crow. And what they did is a good start."
His on-court play would eventually take a back seat to his beliefs off of it when he converted to Islam and stopped standing for the national anthem, sending shockwaves through the sport. “I became a Muslim and I began to read more than I’ve ever read before,” he said. “But as I’m reading, you know, whether it’s foreign policy, domestic policy, I’m seeing America’s hand in so much corruption. And then I’m looking also at the history of this nation. Slavery and Jim Crow and segregation, right? I can’t reconcile standing up for this symbol, right? I just can’t.”
Bill Russell: There’s the kind of strange that means peculiar, perverse, uncomfortable and ill at ease. Now that’s the kind of strange I’ve known my whole life. It’s the kind of strange Billie Holiday sang about when she sang, “Southern trees bear a strange fruit. Blood on the leaves and blood on the root,” referring, of course, to the then common practice of the lynching of Black people. It’s the kind of strange that has dogged America from the beginning. The kind of strange that justified indigenous genocide in the name of “civility.” It’s the kind of strange that built a country out of the labor of that “peculiar” institution known as slavery. It’s the kind of strange that justified Jim Crow, mass incarceration, police brutality, and the inequities that persist in every facet of the Black American experience.
Having grown up in the Jim Crow South, Lloyd was prepared for the harsh words and intimidation he would face early in his NBA career. In some ways, he used the vitriol of the spectators to fuel his competitive fire. “Those fans in Indianapolis, they’d yell stuff like, ‘Go back to Africa.’ And I’m telling you, you would often hear the N-word,” he recalled during an interview with Sixers.com in 2008. “My philosophy was if they weren’t calling you names, you weren’t doing anything. You made sure they were calling you names, if you could. If they were calling you names, you were hurting them.”
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