Why is it That Racial Progress Always Meets with Such Fierce Backlash in America? Because the Backlashers Know They Are Losing

The death of a Black basketball coaching pioneer this week paralleled the return of Michelle and Barack Obama to the political scene. What their stories have in common.

It’s probably safe to assume that many of the biggest fans of NBA basketball these days had never heard of Al Attles before he died this past week at age 87. Attles, who became the Golden State Warriors’ coach when he was still a player and led them to their first NBA championship in 1975, is a largely forgotten figure in the history of the game, despite his legacy as a pioneer for Black coaches in professional sports.

Growing up as a Bay Area sports fan, I remember Attles well as kid, leading his Warriors while dressed in classic 1970s attire of leisure suits, wide-collared shirts and turtlenecks. And growing up as a white kid in the 1970s, I also remember the impact it had on me to see a Black coach leading a predominantly Black team, something that is still relatively rare in professional sports a half century later.

By sheer coincidence, I recently became reacquainted with Attles while reading Theresa Runstedtler’s excellent book “Black Ball: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Spencer Haywood, and the Generation that Saved the Soul of the NBA.”

Attles figures prominently in the book as one of the generation of Black players and coaches that transformed professional basketball in the 1970s and gave Blacks a voice off the court to match their skills on it. That was never more true than during the 1975 NBA Finals, when Attles and K.C. Jones of the Washington Bullets became the first two Black head coaches to square off in a North American professional sports championship. Attles’ Warriors swept the heavily favored Bullets, 4-0.

Though the NBA struggled with sinking ratings and on- and off-court controversies during much of the 1970s as white fans came to terms with the growing Black dominance of the sport, Runstedtler points out in the book that the ’ 75 Finals generated strong television ratings as American viewers, only a decade removed from the battles over Jim Crow segregation that defined the 1960s, watched this watershed moment in racial progress in American sports, with two Black men leading both Black and white players on the sport’s biggest stage.

I was particularly taken by the anecdote Runstedtler shares about the scene at San Francisco International Airport when Attles and his Warriors returned triumphantly from Washington with the NBA championship trophy, as recounted by a Black Bay Area sportswriter at the time.

If there are still some who think white youngsters can't relate to black heroes, let them look at some of the camera footage shot at San Francisco airport Sunday night. For a club with two black coaches, ten black players and two white players, over 8,000 people turned out, 95% of them were white youngsters.

I was too young in 1975 to be one of those white youngsters reveling in the Warriors’ championship, but a few years later, I would be among the ones who could relate to and envy those basketball heroes, watching the Black coach draw up plays at the Coliseum Arena or on the television screen, then trying to emulate his Black players’ skills at recess on the school playground, playing against white, black and brown schoolmates.

If one didn’t know better (and I certainly didn’t), America was entering a period of post-racism bliss in 1975, with the George Wallaces and Bull Connors cast to the dustbin of history. At least it probably seemed that way by that scene at SFO after the NBA Finals, and the fact that Attles had just become the second Black coach (after the legendary Bill Russell) to lead a professional sports franchise to a league championship — and the first to do it with a predominantly Black roster.

Of course, it wasn’t to be. As we now know, racism was still alive and well in 1975 America, as it is today, and the watershed of two Black coaches vying for an NBA title would be more an aberration than a symbol of groundbreaking change. The next time two Black coaches would square off in the NBA Finals would be 2024 — 49 years later. When Attles retired from coaching in 1983 to move up to the Warriors’ front office, he was replaced by a white coach, then another, then another, then another — across the league, white coaches would continue to dominate the top rungs of a sport increasingly dominated by Black players for decades to come, just as they would in professional football as Black players came to dominate that sport as well.

In fact, one has to wonder if the sight in 1975 of two Black coaches vying for basketball’s greatest prize on national television was just too much for many Americans to handle — and whether it contributed to the white backlash against racial reckoning, and progress, that would largely color the politics of sports and society in the 1980s and beyond.

That thought was deepened by the speeches given by Barack and Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention this week as I reflected on how their years in the White House — as the nation’s first Black president and first lady — spawned another racial backlash that helped Donald Trump ascend to the presidency in 2016, riding the tide of white nationalism and white grievance, and racist dog whistles, that he so successfully tapped into. To be sure, not everyone who voted for Trump was motivated by racial resentment and grievance; but a large number were, and continue to be, and he couldn’t have won — or remain relevant today — without them.

Michelle Obama’s powerful speech included these words about Trump that particularly resonated with me:

His limited and narrow view of the world made him feel threatened by the existence of two hardworking, highly educated, successful people who also happened to be Black.

I imagine that millions of white Americans who tuned into the NBA Finals a generation earlier had the same reaction to seeing Attles and Jones draw up plays and direct their players on the court. Unlike many of the hot-tempered white coaches who berated players and officials from courtside during the era, they were known for their refined mannerisms and decorum — a stark contrast to the popular culture depictions of Black males during that era — and today.

As Runstedtler put it in “Black Ball”:

Defying stereotypes about African American men’s inability to command respect, they carried themselves with quiet aplomb. Their low-key demeanor was all the more striking when placed against the backdrop of rising calls for a return to harsh discipline and law and order in pro basketball and beyond. Sportswriters often praised loud, irascible and authoritarian white coaches, such as Dick Motta of the Chicago Bulls, as examples of old-school character and leadership. They were supposedly the ones who could bring the increasingly lazy and overpaid Black players back in line. But Jones and Attles took a markedly different approach to the role of head coach.

Sort of like the hardworking, highly educated, successful couple who would arrive at the White House a few decades later. On Election Night in 2008, as millions of Americans of all races and ethnicities celebrated Obama’s historic election, it was easy to believe that the demons of the past had been conquered. Just as it was surely easy to believe the same when Attles and his Warriors arrived to cheering white fans at SFO in 1975.

But the demons were still there. They had only gone silent, waiting for the opportunity to re-emerge. And re-emerge they would, both in the sports world, where the Colin Kaepernicks and Lebron Jameses would be vilified as unpatriotic and ungrateful for taking stands against racial injustice, and in the political world, where white nationalists, neo-Nazis and “anti-woke” conservatives would relish again having a president who looked, and more importantly thought, like them.

But this shouldn’t be taken as a sad essay with a sad ending. Quite the contrary. I was one of those white youngsters of the 1970s and ’80s who had the opportunity to grow up with Blacks and watch their successes, whether in my hometown or on the national stage, free of many of the societal stigmas that infected previous generations. It helped make me who I am today — an imperfect person with his own blind spots and history of mistakes on issues of race and equity, but one who was better capable, in the dream of Martin Luther King Jr., to see my fellow Americans for the content of their character, rather than the color of their skin, than any generation that had come before me. The Al Attles of the 1970s and the Barack Obamas of the 2000s — and the Kamala Harrises of the 2020s — helped me get there.

And I wasn’t alone. Not by a long shot. The backlashes are only fierce because the people behind them know that more and more Americans are refusing to see the world through their lens of bitterness, resentment, anger and fear — and that is a truth they simply can’t handle.

RIP, Coach Attles. What you taught your players on the court made you a basketball legend. But what you taught white youngsters like myself about America and race was your greatest legacy. It was the lesson our generation needed most.