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Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry.

Now y'all know I live in North Carolina, but we broadcast out of New York City, so I feel like I got to take a moment to hype up the New York Knicks and their fans. Yes, they took an L last night in the first game of round two of the NBA playoffs, playing against the Miami Heat, but no worries, they're going to be fine. During round one, long-time Knicks' fan, Spike Lee was, let's say, thrilled about the team's prospects. Here he is talking to ESPN.

Spike Lee: We've been on the starvation diet, so please excuse if we're going bonkers. People were lit.

[laughter]

Melissa Harris-Perry: Last Wednesday, the Knicks knocked out the Cleveland Cavaliers in the first round, and their victory is the first playoff series win in a decade, so hats off to the Knicks and to the Knicks fans. Now today, the NBA enjoys an image of progressivism. Basketball stars like LeBron James, a former Cavalier, who of course now hoops with the Lakers, they're given space to speak their minds on the issues most important to them.

LeBron James: A lot of people use this analogy somehow of Black Lives Matter as a movement. It's not a movement. When you Black, it's not a movement, it's a lifestyle. When you wake up and you Black you-- that is what it is, for one step that someone else might have to take. We know we got to take five more steps, but it also-- what makes us strong. It makes us-- it's powerful. It makes us so unique and unified, is that we'd had so much hardships in our life, either from personal experiences or loved ones or reading history.

Melissa Harris-Perry: You can learn about some of that history in a recently released book.

Theresa Runstedtler: My name is Theresa Runstedtler. I am associate professor of history and critical race, gender, and culture studies at American University. I am the author of Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar helped pave the way for Ballers like LeBron James today. Here he is in 1974 in an AP interview ahead of the NBA finals.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar: It was very obvious that being an Afro-American meant being a second-class citizen. In that context, I wasn't really an American. Of course I'm an American. Afro-Americans have been here since the inception of this whole society, the access to all the benefits of American society has been denied to us. That has to be changed. It has to be changed soon because people's lives depend on it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: The players like Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Spencer Haywood grew up with the backdrop of the civil rights movement during their formative years, and they brought that push for equality into the NBA often to the chagrin of white owners, reporters, and fans.

Theresa Runstedtler: As Blackball became a referendum on Black Freedom, the pro-game emerged as a kind of morality play about the shifting place of African Americans in US society. A site where the contours of Black citizenship and belonging in the post-civil rights era were rehashed and reshaped.

The white-controlled business of professional basketball, much like the nation at large, had to reckon with the rising Black demands for not just equality of opportunity, but also equality of results. The supposed decline of pro basketball became a metaphor for the first decades of racial integration in America. The rules of the game had changed allowing more Black people onto a formerly white playing field, and now they were ruining everything.

Melissa Harris-Perry: All right. I want to start by actually just walking through the parts of the title of the book in order to just lay some groundwork here. It seems silly to ask this question, but I do want to hear you just give us some of this. Who is Kareem Abdul Jabbar?

Theresa Runstedtler: Well, Kareem Abul Jabar, if you can believe it, is somebody who I introduced to my students a few years ago and they had no idea who he was, so I'm glad that-

Melissa Harris-Perry: What?

Theresa Runstedtler: -we're starting off with this. I know. It blew my mind.

[laughter]

Theresa Runstedtler: He is one of the major superstars from the NBA from the 1970s through to the '80s. He had a long career. He had until recently, the all-time scoring record and was recently surpassed by LeBron James. He's a seven-foot-two center. He was also part of the revolt of the Black athlete, which was a series of boycotts and protests in the late 1960s against racism in the sporting industries.

He was a star at UCLA at the time, and then he entered the NBA as part of the Milwaukee Bucks first, and then later went on to the LA Lakers, but he's just an iconic, literally a towering figure in NBA history.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Who is Spencer Haywood?

Theresa Runstedtler: Spencer Haywood is somebody who I think is now finally starting to get his due. He was a star at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. He went there ironically when Kareem Abdul-Jabbar refused to go and protest against US racism. When he was drafted initially into the American Basketball Association which was the rival league to the NBA back in the late '60s and early '70s, he seemed like he was apolitical, but they got more than what they thought they were getting with Spencer Haywood.

He ended up challenging the powers that be in both the ABA and the NBA and took a case all the way to the Supreme Court, which pulled down and removed the four-year rule that the NBA had which stated that players could only enter the league four years after their high school graduation. It was essentially a gentleman's agreement between the NBA and the NCAA in order to make sure that they maintained control over the flow of players from the amateurs to the pros in order to suppress their salaries.

He's a huge figure. Again, I got to mention LeBron again. LeBron would not be having the kind of career that he did, coming straight out of high school if it weren't for Spencer Haywood's many, many struggles

Melissa Harris-Perry: You've begun, even in just describing who these men are, you've begun to give us the answer to this next question. How is it that they were part of, and a whole generation that was part of, as you write, saving the soul of the NBA?

Theresa Runstedtler: So, one of the things that really shocked me when I started researching the '70s, which are typically characterized as the dark ages of the NBA, so a time when players were taking drugs, when they were lazy, when they were entitled, when they were criminal, when they were troublesome. I started peeking under the hood of the car and found that players were actually protesting. They were bringing the energy of the activism from the revolt of the Black athlete of the late '60s into the professional leagues, and actually challenging a lot of the monopolistic practices of the NBA.

For example, you had Connie Hawkins who challenged the practice of blacklisting by the league, and then Oscar Robertson et al v. the NBA was a case that brought down the reserve clause in professional basketball. Essentially, the reserve clause had been a mechanism for keeping players bonded to one team for their entire career.

In addition to that, they changed the way that basketball was actually played in the professional leagues. A lot of us assume that basketball was always a game of dunks and behind-the-back passes, trash-talking, crossover dribbles. This was something that was born on the playground courts in Black neighborhoods and professional players who came to dominate the league in the 1970s brought that style of Black basketball onto the courts.

Melissa Harris-Perry: As you begin to describe, "Oh, when I started looking at the '70s and basketball and these presumptions," what drew you to it? Why this subject of study?

Theresa Runstedtler: Well, I'm a contrarian and my students know this about me. I like to find particularly racial mythologies that we hold close and try and flip them on their head and figure out, is this really the truth or is it not. I initially had started this project by looking in the 1980s, in particular in 1986, at the death of Len Bias.

Len Bias, of course, was a major, major star coming out of the University of Maryland. However, he died of a cocaine overdose before his career could even start shortly after his death. He was actually mentioned when Ronald Reagan passed his 1986 Anti-Drug Act. I was always curious about why he, in particular, a Black basketball player, somebody who died of a cocaine overdose became this emblematic figure and a kind of argument for punishing drug offenders.

What I saw was actually a backlash against the players for actually gaining more power and dominance in professional basketball.

Melissa Harris-Perry: We're taking a quick tee. We're talking about the NBA and how the players of its past opened up space for the current group of superstars. It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. Theresa Runstedtler is the author of Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA.

There is a endogenous relationship between our most beloved and profitable sports and our culture and the questions of race and of gender that it feels like being worked out in what is presumably a game that isn't about those things but is somehow always about those things.

Theresa Runstedtler: Absolutely. One of the things that I wanted to accomplish with this book was to show that there never has actually been a time when players didn't have an opinion on things that they always had critiques of the system, they always were fighting back against the powers that be, particularly within their sport, and saw that, especially in the era of the 1970s, as connected to these larger fights for civil rights and Black power.

They understood their importance as symbols of upwardly mobile young Black men who, due to their immense talent, had this stage on which to perform not just basketball, but also a new identity of politics in motion.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Politics in motion, it's that swagger factor? I'm thinking even of the NCAA Women's Tournament this year and the attempt to police a young Black woman presenting in these ways on the court that are somehow deemed as unacceptable and disreputable when it's in her body. I want to build a bridge between your soul savers of the 1970s and some of this on-court swagger we see in this moment by going to the best decade of all, the '90s.

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Theresa Runstedtler: That's my decade too, so I can't argue.

Melissa Harris-Perry: That's just me X-gening all over this place, but can we talk about Allen Iverson?

Theresa Runstedtler: Absolutely. I was actually part of the Raptors Dance Pak back in the mid to late '90s when Allen Iverson was a huge star. For us as teenagers, 20-somethings who were coming of age, he just embodied everything that hip-hop culture was, the swagger, the confidence, the ease with which he faked people out on the court, and how he moved off the court. He was really an icon for us at that time.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I so remember what happens with Iverson in that transition from high school to college when he's in a regular young people fight, but it gets criminalized in this way that almost pulls down his capacity to have a college career.

Theresa Runstedtler: Yes, absolutely. I found actually very similar situations with other players in the '70s where-- for example, somebody like Connie Hawkins who innocently was talking to Joe Molinas who turned out to be a mastermind behind the gambling scandal at that time, didn't really have any real connection to him other than asking for a loan at one point which was subsequently paid back by his brother.

He actually ended up getting completely kicked out of the NCAA, blacklisted from the NBA, and spent many, many years trying to have a career. He ended up finally getting into the NBA after they settled his lawsuit. You can see how that trend continued with somebody like Allen Iverson. He got marked as a troublemaker and when he came into the league, of course, everybody was commenting, particularly mainstream white sports media was commenting on his work ethic, how he dressed when he was off the court, the chains, the puffer jackets, the baggy jeans, the cornrows, the taps.

All things that now we actually celebrate in the league, back in the mid to late '90s, this was something that was transgressive. I think what the NBA has realized over the years, and it's almost like the players are pushing it, pushing it, pushing it to recognize more and more aspects of Black culture. The league is always trying to maintain those guardrails around what is an acceptable expression of Blackness. You definitely saw that with Allen Iverson and all of his trials and travails during the 1990s.

Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering if there are, in this story of Black ballplayers and the notion of how to engage the league and shift the league, if there are other folks situated who maybe aren't the players but are critical to making what these players are trying to do in the league successful.

Theresa Runstedtler: With Spencer Haywood, one of the things that he does that was somewhat unusual at the time was he hired an agent. Geez, that's so much a part of the industry now. At the time, players used to go into the team owners' offices and negotiate without legal representation. We can imagine how that went when you're talking about teenagers and in the case of Spencer Haywood, he wasn't even the age of majority at that point.

The agents are definitely part of that. Of course, like any other category of folks, some are good, some are bad. That was a key change in the '70s in terms of ensuring that players had access to representation so that they could negotiate on a more level playing field. I think the other group of folks that I'm thinking of are the players themselves in their union.

The National Basketball Players Association or NBPA became a well-oiled machine under Oscar Robertson from the mid-'60s into the early '70s where, previously it had been largely the province of white players, white stars but when Robertson came in, he wanted to make it a more democratic union. He organized everyone from the last player on the bench to the biggest stars and made sure that they were an organized force to be reckoned with.

I think another pioneer in the '70s who really laid the groundwork for more sports administrators of color is Simon Gourdine. He was the highest-ranking Black sports administrator. He wanted to honor the players and make sure that the relationship between the league and the players was a productive one rather than a combative one.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Theresa Runstedtler, thank you so much for joining us today and for walking us through this really extraordinary history and story.

Theresa Runstedtler: Thanks so much for having me. I always enjoy an opportunity to talk about basketball and, of course, Allen Iverson.

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