With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
We are born like this, into this, into these carefully mad wars…into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings…born into this walking and living through this, dying because of this, muted because of this, castrated, debauched, disinherited because of this, fooled by this, used by this, pissed on by this, made violent, made inhuman by this, the heart is blackened, the fingers reach for the throat, the gun, the knife…the fingers reach toward an unresponsive god…we are born into sorrowful deadliness….
—Charles Bukowski, “Dinosauria, We”
Shorty’s slim, dangly black body twisted and twirled on Roxbury’s asphalt courts. He seemed guided by an otherworldly force. As neighborhood kids, we studied and worshipped his every move. I witnessed Shorty dribble the ball along the right baseline leaning so far over his left shoulder that his torso became parallel with the ground. Without falling, he managed to tiptoe around one defender, and then suddenly, he launched off the pavement like a rocket, holding the ball with two-hands, arms and legs fully extended in midair.
As Shorty hung there, we observers stood in awe. Then almost as gracefully as he glided toward the sky, he retracted his body downward to avoid a defender who had leapt to block his shot. While this defender remained at the rim, Shorty descended to just inches above the court, his face nearly touching the ground. From this underworld he effortlessly flicked the ball off of his wrist. The rotating sphere came to life, spinning upward toward the glass above the hoop, kissing the backboard and falling into a swishing net. An “Ahhh!” swept throughout the crowd; we were mesmerized. It was as if Shorty was destined to be great with the basketball.
Fifteen years later I had not forgotten those days when Shorty seemed like a god on the court. Since then myths abounded of his fall to the perils of drugs and prison. But I wanted to speak to the man himself. Then one day as I stood on the sidelines of Roxbury’s Malcolm X Park, Shorty hopped onto the asphalt in front of me.
The Suave Life Tournament was the fifth street-ball competition of the summer in Boston’s black neighborhoods. The games were organized to honor the memory of several black youths murdered in the streets of Mattapan on September 28, 2010. On the morning of the killings, local residents discovered naked, bullet-riddled, black bodies on the sidewalks. Among the dead were a mother, her two-year old child, and two black men. A fifth young black man still lay on the sidewalk gasping for air. The Boston Globe described the horrible scene: “The bodies of two male victims were found naked, sprawled on a side street…in one of the cities roughest sections. The woman, 21-years old…had been shot in the head, and her child, she held fatally wounded. A third male also lay naked in the area…clinging to life after attempting to flee.” A ten-year-old boy who heard the shootings from his bedroom window spoke about the panic he was feeling: “It puts fear in people’s hearts.”1
A general sense of terror pervades Boston’s black neighborhoods—Mattapan, Roxbury, and Dorchester—the places where I conducted this ethnography of street basketball. According to the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts’s in-depth study, the “State of Black Boston” (2011), there is a history of underlying racial inequity in Boston that is a root cause of the subhuman living conditions faced by many of the city’s black residents.2 The report suggests that while there has been progress, Boston’s history of racial injury persists in nearly every major category of civic life and physical well-being.3
More than a fifth of Boston’s black residents twenty-five-years-old and under lack a high school diploma, and only 11.9 percent have earned a bachelor’s degree. A quarter of all Boston’s black residents are impoverished, double the rate of whites in the city. Black unemployment is the highest of any racial group—while employed blacks make $30,000 less than whites on average. Nearly half (45.2 percent) of black youth depend on food stamps, and households run by single-parent mothers represent over half (55.4 percent) of Boston’s black family types. Black residents are twice as likely to die of heart disease and more than three times as likely to die of diabetes. Black families suffer from the highest infant-mortality rates in Boston. Whereas the median asking price for a home in black Mattapan is $154,967, it is $456,837 citywide. Blacks who earn identical incomes as whites are denied housing loans twice as often. Two of Boston’s black neighborhoods—Roxbury and Mattapan—carry the burden of maintaining the greatest amount of high-cost home loans in the city.4
Poverty, racial discrimination, poor education, and disease are compounded by disparities in crime and the criminal justice system. Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan bear the highest crime rates. At least half of all reported violent crimes in Boston occur in these three areas, including 63 percent of homicides, 52 percent of robberies and 51 percent of aggravated assaults. Many of Boston’s black men and women who do not suffer literal death in the streets are disenfranchised and rendered socially invisible through incarceration. In 2010 blacks were only 6.6 percent of the Massachusetts population but accounted for nearly 35 percent of the state’s inmates. Having to endure a continuous threat of violence, bodily harm, and imprisonment has led to an unquantifiable measure of affective injury and grief in this community. The 2010 national census ranked Boston as the eleventh most black-white segregated city in the country.5
There was a picture of one Mattapan murder victim adorning the fence surrounding the asphalt basketball court during the Suave Life Tournament. After spending some time staring at his face, I proceeded to the fence opening, which defined the court from the streets. Once I stepped inside, I found myself partially underground, as this particular court is sunk below street level, in the manner of a netherworld.6 There, in the flesh, was Shorty. I noticed him immediately because he still moved his body with the style and grace of a street baller, legs and arms swinging rhythmically back and forth as if an invisible basketball dribbled between his legs.
He laid down his gym bag on the asphalt and walked toward me. Our eyes met—but I noticed something strange. Shorty’s eyes seemed empty. I called his name: “Shorty!” “What’s up,” he responded softly, looking past me as if I were not there. “Shorty, it’s me, Onaje.” “I know,” he said, staring in the distance. “Oh,” I said, feeling as if I was speaking to a ghost of a man. “Wow, it’s been so long. Listen, man, I am writing a book on street basketball and would love to interview a legend. Do you think you’d be interested?” “Yep,” he responded. “Okay, what is your phone number so I can give you a call?” Later that evening, I sent Shorty a text message. His response was cautiously revealing: “Okay, I have a lot to tell. But only for you.” What he had to tell was almost too terrible for words.
Shorty shared his story with me as we sat on the front steps of his apartment building in Roxbury. He was born and raised in Roxbury’s Avenue projects—pissy hallways, roach infestations, filthy clothes, murderers, crack addicts desperate for a fix, and devastating poverty. His biological parents were dope addicts. His grandmother, an informal network of peers and mentors associated with local basketball, and gang members constituted his primary role models: “I never really had a relationship like with my mom. I always use to see my mom when she did come by. And my pops he was dead but he wasn’t dead. Like he was in the house, but when we did something wrong that’s the only time he said something.” He continued to describe the social and familial violence that shaped his external and internal worlds as a child.
I ain’t never really sat down and had a deep conversation with my pops or my mom. My mom’s basically doing drugs, moms and pops, you know what I’m saying? Just basically on drugs and throughout my whole life growing up.
You know growing up in the Avenue. It was kind of hard. You see like every day drug dealers people selling whatever out there. You know, it’s crazy. You got robbers, stick up kids, and at a young age I kind of like swayed away from that, tried to sway away from that. But I think as I got older it came into play, but basketball was a way out to not be in the streets.
Bourdieu uses the term “habitus” to refer to the tendency in human beings to unconsciously internalize their external environments. Born into a field of social forces, people habituate to the norms of the field, even if they are harmful to one’s self. Over time these cultural narratives shape the thoughts and feelings of groups and individuals, such that their bodies become the historical “repositories” of a culture.7 Employing sports metaphors, Bourdieu draws an analogy between this social process of internalization and an athlete’s development of a “feel for the game.” When an athlete possesses a feel for the game, the rules become second nature.8 In contexts of social violence, this second nature is so insidious precisely because marginal individuals and groups are unaware of it as such.
Shorty certainly embodied the dominant narratives of the streets. However, “basketball was a way out not to be in the streets.” The basketball court signified an alternative space of resistance to the violence of the neighborhood. Shorty substituted his “dead” biological father and mother with the loving family members he found on the court, and they schooled him in the art of the game:
I just learned from watching everybody, you know, my man Kane, my brother, my cousin, all them dudes. Dana, all them dudes that played basketball that was real tough from around my way. I learned from a couple of dudes from other projects, you know, Lewis projects, you know. Bane, I used to watch him and then my brother go at it. I used to steal moves and all that. It was only right. It’s only right, that’s how you get nicer. You just add your little twist to it. That’s what I used to just do. It was other people’s moves, I just put a little, add a little something extra.
In reality, Shorty added more than “a little something extra” to his game. By the time he was fifteen years old, he was an emerging basketball legend in Roxbury. His style on the court was uncanny and unscripted.9 Think of the way a speedskater lunges from side to side across the ice. Picture one arm swinging high in the air as the same leg dashes forward. Put the ball in his right hand and let it cross over smoothly from right to left as it sweeps the ground low before coming up high on the other side. Now imagine Shorty’s feet skating between muscular defenders as his body glides across the concrete rubble. His dribble, like the rhythm of his life, was full of incredible highs and breathtaking lows.
Shorty’s father enlisted him in the drug game as a child, forcing him to buy crack for his family. He hated school because of the unwashed clothes he was often forced to wear to class. Plus what would school teach him about surviving the projects? He was hungry and broke. The shame of buying crack for his parents rotted away his self-esteem. He began using drugs to bury the pain and developed a visceral sense of “nobodiness”: “I didn’t really have the support. I was in high school like I didn’t have no clothes that whole time, from like high school on. I started selling drugs. You know what I mean? I started drinking, smoking weed, just not caring. I think high school was like the turning point of my life.”
Shorty’s high school administrators treated him like a commodity, forging his grades so that they could ship him off to play ball for a predominately white and wealthy high school. The journalist William Rhoden suggests that impoverished black males are often viewed as the “raw materials” of white schools and businesses seeking to benefit from their poverty and “natural” athletic talent. Informal local and national recruiting systems, which he refers to as “conveyor belts,” then funnel black bodies from the streets to the halls of the white elite.10
Shorty experienced more shame and isolation at his new school, eventually returning to Boston aimless and depressed. As a high school dropout, he gradually turned into one of the most active drug dealers and thieves in Avenue projects. At eighteen years old he was incarcerated:
But after that situation, I came back to Boston. I ended up catching a case. I ended up catching an armed robbery case, and I probably was like I want to say eighteen at the time. I caught the case and I thought I was going to get off, but I ended up doing two years from that case and when I got out I was kind of lost. Like what am I going to do, you know? I mean, there was a couple of other people like trying to help me out like, “yo, get you into community college, ROTC,” but once I got out, it was like, I stuck with it for a little while and I just went back to what I normally do, which was sell drugs, carry guns, because the environment that I lived in. I was kind of dumb. It wasn’t like I needed to be out here selling drugs or whatever, but it was a time where I didn’t have certain things that I wanted. I wasn’t trying to get no job. I didn’t even know how to do it. I was so young.
Shorty recognized the role of his environment (poverty and institutional racism) in contributing to his incarceration and unemployment, but he also subconsciously blamed himself for going to prison for several years between 1999 and 2012. By the time we met, he had been released from jail, but his feelings of personal humiliation remained palpable. When he was relaying his experience of prison, his face grew distant again, like on the day we met at the basketball park. He glanced downward. His voice trailed off. He did not finish sentences. He could not express his pain in words so he pointed toward the back of his head.11 He touched his skull with his finger as he struggled to talk, and for some reason his gesture made my stomach hurt: “Being locked up, it took a piece of my mind, like it did something, like I ain’t come out like I’m great. I don’t know how to explain it. Like it took a piece of my mind like it’s almost like, like, it kind of made me look bad…” His voice trailed off again. This was the absent presence behind Shorty’s eyes that I felt haunted by earlier on the playground. It was eerie in its ability to escape words. He kept pointing toward the back of his head as if trying to touch an invisible wound. He had been hurt in a psychological sense, in prison, but there was a spectral dimension to his sense of injury that was hard to name.
As I thought about Shorty’s invisible wound, it reminded me of a dream I had while conducting research for this book. I had fallen asleep while sitting in my dormitory room at Boston University. In the dream I had been born again and again, each time as a black man from a previous generation. But every time that I grew to maturity there was a white man standing there to murder me. So I kept dying, one black person after another, so many selves, all distorted through the mirror of history—always at the mercy of the other. Then finally, piercing the veil of time, I suddenly arrived face to face with myself, standing there in its nakedness. This self was something inconceivable to the other. In the act of dying and being reborn, I had been making jest of him all along. He could not kill me at last. I awoke, startled. I felt thankful to have witnessed something that the other could not misappropriate.
Watching Shorty’s sullen face, I wondered if he would ever wake up from his living nightmare. His mind, body, and spirit seemed to bear the toll of living in a poverty-stricken and racialized world. He struggled to tell me that his beloved grandmother and his close friend Kane had both died while he was in prison. Shorty had been prohibited from attending their funerals, so their deaths represented a double loss. They were gone, but he was unable to see them into the next world. Shorty explained that the day I spotted him on the asphalt he was there to finally mourn Kane. Immediately following his release from prison, he went to the court to release his sorrow for Kane through his jump shot:
I only came up to the park just for him. That’s the only reason why I play. You know what I’m saying, that’s the only reason why I said I was playing. I said, yo, you know, because he died when I was locked up so I was like yo, when I come home this summer, I’m balling. I ball for him, you know, he would have wanted it. So that’s why I came up there and balled. You know, I don’t, you don’t normally see me at the park.
So I did that on the strength for him, man, because we all was nice. He was watching me. I came out, hit a three, first shot of the day, hit a three, then hit a two like, he had me, he was holding me down, like go ahead, and we only played a half. I could see myself. I was about to get real loose. I was about to. I was amped.
Shorty recognized the movement of his body, the turn of the ball through the net, and the orderly succession of plays as signs of a reunion with Kane on the asphalt. In the process of remembering Kane, Shorty began feeling alive again, “loose” and “amped.” His inclination to use the basketball court as a place of mourning caused me to reconsider the standard view in the literature, which says that “hoop dreams” are primarily motivated by status and social mobility. After our conversation, I never saw Shorty again on the asphalt. There are still days when I wonder if he has returned to some darkened penitentiary or, worse yet, joined other black ghosts, dead and unseen, haunting Boston’s inner city landscapes. Toward the end of our conversation I looked down at Shorty’s body and pointed to the black ink drawn across his leg: “Why do you have the letters ‘LOL’ tattooed on your leg?” I asked. Shorty looked at me and then down at his flesh: “It means Last Ones Left,” he remarked. Shorty literally embodied the injury of exile, left behind in one of America’s greatest cities.12
HOW DID WE GET HERE? RELIGION, BASKETBALL, AND RACE
Boston’s inner-city basketball courts are a repository for the suffering of its black communities. But how did we get here? How is it possible that a white minister from Canada invented a game capable of serving the existential needs of black youths toiling under racial and economic oppression? Remarkably, at its inception, basketball was conceived as a practice motivated by religion, though one geared for white men, who were battling against the moral and physical challenges of American urbanization. Nevertheless, black churches and organizations eventually adopted the sport, layering its religious dimensions with a critical cultural perspective.
Muscular Christianity and the Invention of Basketball
The convergence of religion, health, and sports in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a central role in Dr. James Naismith’s invention of basketball in 1891. A Presbyterian minister and physical education specialist born in Ontario in 1861, Naismith found himself at the center of powerful changes in American religious ideology, economic life, and cultural attitudes toward the body, race, and masculinity. In the autumn of 1890 Naismith enrolled in the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) Training College in Springfield, Massachusetts, in order to realize “other effective ways of doing good besides preaching.”13
Springfield’s YMCA Training College was part of an American Christian movement dedicated to addressing the moral and physical dangers associated with the industrial revolution. “Muscular Christianity,” as the movement was known, regarded physical health as a vital component of spiritual well-being—and this theological tenet became one of the central underpinnings for a Christian athletic response to urban decay. Rejecting Puritan concerns over the body’s capacity to corrupt the soul, muscular Christians viewed physical prowess as an expression of God’s glory. Following his senior year at McGill Theological Seminary, Naismith quit formal ministry and transferred to the YMCA Training College, becoming immersed in the new movement.
The historian William J. Baker suggests that muscular Christianity was also a response to the “feminizing tendencies” of the church and fragile notions of white masculinity in nineteenth-century America. As white women became more prominent in middle-class society and the church, white men laboring in urban factories could no longer define their manhood based on outmoded western frontier narratives. Muscular Christianity’s convergence with athletics paved the way for urban white men to remain manly while staying connected to the church: “amidst the complexities of urban life, and during the last quarter of the century another kind of male dominance, athletic prowess, became a central feature in the definition of manliness. In North America, much more than in Britain, the YMCA played a crucial role in that transformation.”14
Unfortunately, however, the YMCA and early proponents of muscular Christianity discouraged black Americans from participating in the new physical-culture movement. As blacks migrated en masse to Northern cities to escape the terror of Jim Crow in the early 1900s, they also discovered that the YMCA’s mission to “develop ‘the whole man—body, mind and spirit’ ”15 did not apply to them. Although YMCA leaders advocated a Christian brotherhood fully committed to exercising the human body as God’s temple, they simply did not recognize black people as full persons. YMCA leaders often subscribed to America’s antiblack policies, proposing that blacks should be “separate but equal” within the organization. Although no evidence exists that Naismith himself excluded blacks, basketball’s early association with the YMCA implied that the game was solely for the edification of white souls.
Racial Uplift Through Bodily Exercise
Despite separate-but-equal status within the muscular Christianity movement and the YMCA, black Americans enthusiastically formed their own physical-culture clubs with the express intent to use bodily exercise to empower the race. While many white men adopted muscular Christianity to cement their status above lower classes, blacks turned to physical culture to assert their humanity and to attain racial equality.16 Despite meager finances and very little recreational space, blacks eventually established their own clubs so that “by the early twentieth century they had created a virtually autonomous African American YMCA.”17
The Alpha Physical Culture Club of Harlem became arguably the most influential organization to transform Naismith’s game into a black cultural art form of spiritual and political resistance in early-twentieth-century America. This section is greatly indebted to the research of historian Claude Johnson, who notes, “Jamaican-born brothers Gerald, Conrad, and Clifton Norman…founded the Alpha P.C.C. in 1904. Their establishment of the club made the Norman brothers the forerunners among blacks of what was then the brand new physical fitness movement. They were also at the root of the early evolution of basketball among people of color in the United States.”18
The Norman brothers were distressed by the exclusion of blacks from muscular Christianity and the YMCA’s recreational facilities. Conrad Norman stated in exasperation: “Although there were seventy thousand colored people in New York at the time, and the big city fairly teemed with athletic clubs of all kinds…there was not a single one devoted to colored people.” However, due to their education and disciplined upbringing in Kingston, Jamaica, the Normans understood the vital connections between exercise, physical health, and well-being, particularly for an oppressed people. By 1904 they developed a program to educate the race on the merits of physical exercise as a means of survival and liberation. Conrad defined the mission: “We were helping our race by fortifying the bodies of our people in this, the struggle for existence, where only the fittest survive.”19
Black churches were instrumental in fostering the mission of the Alpha P.C.C. through the new game of basketball. The Alpha P.C.C. began its operations in a “church house on West 134th Street in Harlem” and stood on the same street as St. Philip’s Protestant Episcopal Church, “at that time…perhaps the most prestigious African-American church in the country.” Father Everart Daniel, the newly appointed assistant minister of St. Philip’s, was a close friend of the Normans and shared their mission to utilize sports as a buffer for black youths challenged by the dehumanizing effects of a racially divided city. Father Daniel borrowed from the Alpha P.C.C. model and turned St. Philip’s community ministry program—then a bible-study group for young black men called the St. Christopher’s Club—into “one of the most powerful forces in African-American athletics.” The Alpha P.C.C. and St. Christopher’s Club, along with two other black athletic clubs, the Smart Set Club and the Marathon Athletic Club of Brooklyn (affiliated with St. Augustine Protestant Episcopal Church, another black congregation), created the first organized black basketball teams in the country within a few years of each other. These four clubs—except for the Alpha P.C.C., which played the following year—participated in one of the first ever formally organized basketball tournaments between black teams, in 1907.20
Soon other black churches followed suit and formed their own basketball teams, such as the St. Cyprian Athletic Club, which was “the sports arm of the newly established St. Cyprian Episcopal Church,” in 1908. The pastor’s son, the star of the team, became Columbia University’s first black basketball player and later the pastor of St. Martin’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. Describing the dissemination of basketball throughout the black community in religious terms, Claude Johnson suggests that black churches “helped spread the ‘gospel’ of basketball further among African-Americans, particularly among West Indians.”21 From the beginning, black churches and clubs fused a religious ethos of ultimate worth and community uplift into the game.
In addition to the blessings of the black church, the visibility of black players’ bodies as they moved across the court accounted for the rising popularity of the game. According to Johnson, the Alpha P.C.C. basketball team (also referred to as the “Alpha Big Five”) attracted close to 1,200 fans per game in 1910, largely because players on the court embodied the aspirations of the community: Fans often identified with their neighborhood teams; players’ abilities were viewed as heroic feats of character and moral virtue; women attended games in large numbers, and players entertained them during and after games; games generated significant amounts of money for those involved; and black basketball contests were seen as representations of racial achievement. Johnson expounds on this final point: “Since they felt that the club’s success was also the race’s success, the bigger picture was always kept in mind. When the Alpha Big Five played basketball it was about much more than just the game—it was about community building and racial self-esteem. The young club—as well as the athletic competition in general and the game itself—began to be seen as providing African Americans not only with an easily understood model for how to face challenges, but also with a source of inspiration and pride.”22 In this sense, basketball emerged within the black community as a stylized cultural model of spiritual and political transcendence.
As the black basketball subculture gained notoriety across the country so did the desire to capitalize on the commercial potential of the game. Bob Douglass, another Caribbean visionary and astute businessman, fought to organize the first black-owned all-black professional basketball team in the United States in 1923: the New York Harlem Renaissance Big Five (otherwise known as the “Harlem Rens”). Douglass realized before others that economic interests would have a profound impact on the game’s evolution. He also believed that black basketball teams had to organize themselves professionally to compete against the best white teams in the country.
Douglass’s grand vision for a professional black basketball team coincided with the explosion of black expressive culture during the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Rens’ home floor, the Old Renaissance Ballroom on 138th Street and Seventh Avenue, symbolized a synergy of black art forms in sports, music, and dance.23 In this singular space, jazz musicians, dancers, and basketball players took the floor on the same night, expressing a shared desire for freedom through call and response, improvisation, and rhythmic beats. First, the Harlem Rens raced and spun across the floor and flew through the air to the rhythm of the ball against the hardwood. Then the hoops were removed and bands swung to complex layers of jazz notes as dancers shook waists, jumped over shoulders, and clapped hands throughout the night. In Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s documentary On the Shoulders of Giants, William Rhoden describes the activities at the Old Renaissance Ballroom: “I thought it was so cool because it just represented such a confluence of black culture, this confluence of dance and athleticism. All of it right there in that one building.” For many, these performances served to encourage spiritual connections among blacks in ways similar to Sunday worship ceremonies. The son of Harlem Rens’ star player, John Isaacs, described the spiritual ligature produced through the games: “It’s like asking what did the Black Church mean to Harlem, its connection.”24
The Rens’ rootedness within the black community inspired the team to endure hardships on behalf of the race. From 1922 and well into the 1940s, the Rens “barnstormed” across the country, playing games against all-white teams, even in the South. They played almost 130 games a year to make a living, traveling long distances between contests due to the paucity of integrated hotels. They were verbally and physically assaulted by white onlookers and referees; scorekeepers cheated for the opposing side. Nevertheless, the Harlem Rens continued to sacrifice their bodies between the lines because they viewed each victory as an indictment of white supremacy.
Black ballplayers’ efforts to topple white supremacy had gained momentum by 1939, when Chicago hosted the first ever World Professional Basketball Tournament. The Harlem Rens and Harlem Globetrotters (the other famous black professional team during this period) were both invited to participate.25 When the Harlem Rens won the tournament, competing against the best white professional teams in the country (the Harlem Globetrotters won the following year), it was an important symbolic victory. The Rens’ victory paved the way for William “Pop” Gates, one of the team’s stars, to integrate the National Basketball League in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson made his Major League Baseball debut.26 Kareem Abdul-Jabbar refers to the Harlem Rens as “the greatest basketball team you never heard of” because of their unmatched influence on the game but relative erasure from the history of sports in the United States.27
THE UNDERSIDE OF VICTORY AND THE EMERGENCE OF STREET BASKETBALL IN U.S. CITIES
The integration of college basketball and the NBA was part of a larger struggle for civil rights in mid-twentieth-century America. Black Americans experienced unprecedented successes in the struggle for justice and equality, and black athletes played a significant role in the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, their achievements also resulted in unintended consequences for blacks at the bottom of the social ladder. As the civil rights movement came to an end and the black middle class expanded, opportunities and access for poor and working-class blacks actually declined. NAACP president Benjamin Jealous has put the problem succinctly: “We got what we fought for, but we lost what we had.”28
The sociologist William Julius Wilson offers a compelling explanation for the rise of a black underclass in the United States following the civil rights movement. Wilson suggests that the persistence of historical patterns of racial discrimination, major economic changes, and demographic shifts have produced black inner-city neighborhoods “plagued by massive joblessness, flagrant and open lawlessness, and low-achieving schools…. Consequently, the residents of these areas…have become increasingly socially isolated from mainstream patterns of behavior.”29 These changes fostered an absence of middle-class role models and values in communities where there was once visionary leadership and a shared ethos of racial uplift. Today “the streets”—an alternative set of role models, institutions, and values that arose out of this vacuum—have become one of the primary contexts in which black youths are socialized in U.S. cities.30 As one black athlete explained to me during an interview: “We were raised by the streets.”
Holcombe Rucker and the Rise of Street Basketball
Within this emerging context of black urban exile, street basketball began to develop as a major cultural force among black youth. Just as black basketball fused with Harlem Renaissance jazz, dance, and civil rights in early- and mid-twentieth-century America, street basketball grew out of an “in your face” ethos of a young hip-hop generation increasingly frustrated with urban decay and social abandonment. The playground became a new locus for the convergence of black expressive culture in hip-hop, with rap music, break dancing, and a “go hard or go home” style of basketball often performed simultaneously on the same court. (One example of this confluence is DJ Cool Herc, one of the founders of rap music, who earned his nickname “Hercules” from his rough style of play on the basketball court.)31 Although street ballers embodied the previous generation’s belief that basketball was more than just a game—it was a mode of resistance—they did so within a new context of unprecedented street violence and the collapse of black social and institutional buffers (church, school, family, and so on).
Holcombe Rucker, a black World War II veteran and recreational parks director in New York City, set the spiritual tone and political agenda for the game on the playground. Following in the tradition of his athletic ancestors, he attempted to hold his first tournament in the late 1940s in St. Phillip’s Church, which doubled as a community center. Stories abound regarding Rucker’s passion for instilling discipline, love, and hope in players who faced police brutality, broken homes, and street violence. Vincent Mallozzi’s oral history of the Rucker Tournament chronicles Rucker’s ability to influence disinherited black men, such as the time he cried in front of his adolescent athletes to offer them a different model of masculinity and respect. One of his former players reflected on that moment with Rucker: “We were all tough kids from the streets. We had never seen a grown man cry before…. It was a lesson in discipline and respect that we would never forget.”32
As the Black Fives era of segregated basketball teams came to an end in 1946, Rucker began organizing one of the first street-basketball tournaments in the country, between Lenox and Fifth Avenues on 138th Street. Rucker designed tournaments with little money, actually borrowing equipment from tournament players. Moreover, like his predecessors in the physical-culture movement, Rucker barnstormed with his teams across New York City, competing against Irish and Italian players and anyone else who would play them. Rucker moved his tournament to 128th Street and Seventh Avenue, at the St. Nicholas Houses playground, in 1949. Ingeniously, he expanded the tournament to include a professional division in 1954. By including pro players, Rucker turned his tournament and playground (which moved again to 130th Street and Seventh Avenue) into what became known as the “Mecca” of street basketball—a hallowed ground where basketball pilgrims trek to solidify their place in the annals of the game. Before moving the tournament to its current location at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue, Rucker began matching black professionals against street ballers in competitive play, showcasing legendary talents such as Wilt Chamberlain, “Dr.” Julius Erving, Joe “Helicopter” Hammond, and Pee Wee Kirkland.
PEE WEE KIRKLAND, STREET VIOLENCE, AND THE SPIRITUAL ESSENCE OF STREET BASKETBALL
Pee Wee Kirkland’s rise to legendary status in Harlem’s street-basketball scene in the late 1960s and 1970s speaks volumes about basketball’s changing role in the black struggle for dignity and place in the aftermath of the civil rights movement. A story that reads like an earlier edition of Shorty’s, Kirkland’s journey underscores the significance of playground basketball as mode of release and transcendence in the streets. Kirkland acknowledges that his role models did not consist of educated black visionaries such as the Norman brothers, Bob Douglass, or even Holcombe Rucker. His world was dominated by other figures and personalities commonly associated with today’s inner cities: hustlers, gangsters, pimps, drug dealers, rappers, and athletes. These men and the terror of the streets they occupied shaped the context in which he played basketball at Rucker Park. Kirkland explains: “I remember being at Rucker and girls that I would have had towels and, under the towels, had sawed off shotguns. I mean it was real, the way Pee Wee Kirkland lived, ’cause I lived a double life. So when I left Rucker, I went to another world, the world of crime, the world of survival. It wasn’t about basketball.” Rucker Park in this sense, represented two opposing poles of Kirkland’s identity—at once a refuge and a site of violence.
I’d come to Rucker, after staying up all night long, and still have to score 30, 40 points. But when I got to Rucker, for that moment and that time in my life I was able to forget the life of crime. I was able to forget the streets. I was able to forget the drugs. I was able to forget everything for that particular time in my life. It was like magic.
Kirkland suggests that only God could design a place like Rucker Park, which exposed black men’s greatness in the sludge of urban degradation: “It’s God that designed that. That ain’t man’s design. Rucker is a place that God designed to expose greatness.”
It wasn’t corporate, it was real, man, and it’s something I love. Man, I wouldn’t be alive today if wasn’t for street basketball. That’s how guys saw it back then. It was in your blood. You felt it. It was in your spirit. It wasn’t just a paycheck. It was for real, man. It was in your heart and in your soul and that’s the essence of street basketball, man.33
Kirkland’s devotion to street basketball as a physical exercise, which saved his spirit, is certainly in line with Naismith’s original vision for hoops. However, when Naismith invented the game, he could not have imagined downtrodden black males dancing on the asphalt to establish an ultimate connection with themselves and the universe. Yet Kirkland reports that sometimes his interaction with the crowd of black onlookers and his intense focus on the game would take him to an-Other time, beyond his current difficulties:
The crowd would just take me there. I remember one time I was on a fast break and I was fixin’ to throw it down, but my mind was so obsessed with the crowd and wanting to rock the crowd I ended up going behind the pole coming back to the foul line, just re-rocking again and went and when I went to the basket instead of laying it up I flipped the ball like this here under my arm like that and a guy named Larry Cheetah grabbed it, hit it on the backboard twice and then dunked it. The crowd stood up. That’s what I’m saying about Rucker. It’s essentially a show time, but we took show time to another time.34
Kirkland’s double life in the streets eventually led to the forfeiture of an NBA contract with the Chicago Bulls and several years of incarceration. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overlook the role of basketball in Kirkland’s life as a source of meaning, stability, and spirit, which fosters his “continued struggle for a more liberated existence.”35
Basketball emerged in late-nineteenth-century America as a white male Christian response to the industrial revolution. Its inventor, James Naismith, recognized the value of physical exercise as a mode of mental catharsis and spiritual edification, which countered the effects of city life. However, black Americans migrating to Northern cities to escape Jim Crow segregation were turned away from the recreational facilities of the YMCA. Black pioneers in exercise responded by forming their own physical-culture clubs with the support and blessings of black churches. Shortly thereafter, the black community transformed the game of basketball into a stylized expression of spiritual and cultural transcendence that shared similarities with jazz music and Lindy Hop dance. This basketball subculture exploded onto the national scene in the 1940s due to the dogged efforts of all-black teams such as the Alpha Big Five, Harlem Rens, and Harlem Globetrotters. Black athletes could not longer be excluded from national basketball leagues.
In the wake of American integration in sports and other social arenas, however, a sharp class and intergenerational divide emerged within the black community. As the black middle class vacated inner cities, economic opportunities for poor and working-class African Americans also declined. At the same time, the black church, black family, and other institutional buffers that had served to mitigate the effects of persistent racial discrimination began to deteriorate in urban communities. The streets filled this vacuum, emerging as one of the primary socializing institutions of black inner-city youth. Street basketball (in addition to rap music, break dancing, etc.) rose up as an athletic response to social abandonment and urban violence, especially among black males, who began to view the basketball court as a refuge from the cruelty of the city. Although predominately white corporate interests have attempted to turn their stylized expressions of struggle into products of economic consumption, playground basketball remains a vital source of feeling and meaning for black youth living in urban exile, which it remains for those playing in Boston’s contemporary inner-city basketball world.