Spinning the Globe (34 page)

The Harlem Globetrotters were ballplayers, not activists, but they were
out there
in America every day, crisscrossing the country, traveling on every highway in every state, stopping for food and gas, checking into hotels, and trying to buy a cold beer after a tough game. If any blacks had their fingers on the pulse of America, it was the Globetrotters. They felt it every day. And if a change was coming, they would sense it first.

What they saw, however, was disheartening. They were among the most celebrated black men in America, so one might expect their treatment to be better than the norm. And while the ball games were going on, it was. By the mid-1950s, they were beyond the point where local teams might try to rough them up or local refs try to cheat them out of a win. In fact, by that time they seldom played local teams, as they were usually bringing both their opposition team and the ref with them. The last egregious incident of racial prejudice affecting a game had occurred in 1952, when the president of LSU refused to let the Trotters play on campus, but there had been no other incidents since.

In the South, however, there were still many places that refused to let blacks and whites play each other, so the Trotters would have to play another black team, such as the Kansas City Stars or Chicago Brown Bombers. It was sometimes hard to tell where the demarcation line was on a map, as the rules varied from city to city and state to state. In 1954, for instance, the Trotters were allowed to play white teams in Savannah, Raleigh, and in Spartanburg and Greenville, South Carolina; but had to play black-on-black in Memphis, Atlanta, and Miami.

In Jackson, Mississippi, segregation was carried to such an extreme that when the Trotters played the Brown Bombers, no white people were allowed to be in the building. There was even a black referee and scorer, and the sheriff guarded the door to keep whites at bay. In Birmingham, the Trotters still played a day game for a white audience and a night game for blacks. Atlanta was slightly more progressive, as whites and blacks could watch the same game, but blacks had to enter through a side door and sit in a segregated balcony.

Once the game ended, however, the Trotters’ fame provided no buffer against racial discrimination. They may have been the “Fabulous Magicians of Basketball” while the game was going on, but they were just like any other Negroes once it ended. W. E. B. DuBois described the phenomenon of “double-consciousness,” in which African Americans are always aware of being American
and
black, no matter what they’re doing. For the Globetrotters, it didn’t take long after the final gun sounded to be reminded.

In Jacksonville, Florida, they tried to get a room at a nice downtown hotel, but were refused. The next morning, on their way out of town, they saw in the local paper that “Judy, the Bowling Chimpanzee,” who once appeared on the television show
I’ve Got a Secret,
was staying at the hotel that had turned them away. As Tex Harrison recalls, “They gave the Bowling Chimp the biggest suite and all the bananas she could eat, but they wouldn’t let us stay.”

There were many times when the Trotters were prohibited from eating or sleeping where they wanted, which was demeaning, but not inherently dangerous. But there was one forbidden object that could get you killed if you were even suspected of desiring it: white women. In one southern town, shortly after Johnny Kline joined the team, he and Inman Jackson were selling programs before the game. When an attractive white woman walked by, Kline eyed her as she passed. Inman Jackson started sweating and looking around nervously.

“What’s wrong?” Kline asked innocently.

“Listen,” Inman said gruffly, “down here, if we see ’em coming, we don’t see ’em leaving.” Just as he taught every rookie how to do the Globetrotters’ ball-handling tricks, Inman was teaching Kline about the social customs of the South.

But racial prejudice was not limited to the Deep South. Chuck Holton, who had lived in the North all his life, was shocked to find that a hotel in Indianapolis wouldn’t let the Trotters stay. “I remember that vividly,” he says. “Ducky Moore, our business manager, came out and said, ‘We can’t stay here.’ I looked up at the neon lights and it was the Abraham Lincoln Hotel. I thought, ‘Abe, where are you now?’”

“You didn’t have to go down South to find prejudice,” says Charlie Primus, from Detroit, who played five years in the mid-1950s. “There were places right here in Detroit that wouldn’t serve blacks.” In some ways, the discrimination in the North was more insulting, because it was unexpected. “I found the worst prejudice in upper Michigan,” recalls Vertes Zeigler. “Silent prejudice is worse than straight-out prejudice, because down south they’d have a sign [No Colored Allowed]. But if you go in a place and you sit there and sit there, and nobody’s looking at you, and finally they come and say, ‘I’m sorry, but the management doesn’t allow us to serve coloreds,’ I’d tell them, ‘We didn’t come here to eat no coloreds, you got any food?’ Now if they’d had a sign—I’ve got a pocketful of money—I wouldn’t have gone in there.”

The greatest disparity in how the Globetrotters were treated came in Europe. On the European tours, where the State Department was promoting the Trotters as exemplars of America’s treatment of blacks, Abe put the Trotters up in the same four-star hotels where he was staying, such as the Hotel Claridge on the Champs-Elysées in Paris. But it was entirely different when they returned home. In the old days, Abe had allegedly walked out of a few hotels if they wouldn’t let his players stay, but in the mid-1950s, when the Trotters began touring heavily in the Deep South, he did not challenge the Jim Crow customs. Abe was powerful enough, and the Trotters were popular enough, that he might have been able to pressure hotels to integrate, but he didn’t try.

During the 1954 summer baseball park tour, one Trotter unit played twenty-four straight games in the Deep South, starting in Miami and working its way through nearly every state of the old Confederacy, including Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky. Abe scheduled
doubleheaders in every city on the tour, but the Trotters always played a black team (the Chicago Brown Bombers), while two white teams (the Hawaiian Stars and Boston Whirlwinds) played the second game. In most of the towns, even Miami, they played two segregated games—one for white audiences and one for blacks.

After the games were over, the white and black players went to separate hotels. And sometimes the Trotters and Brown Bombers didn’t get a hotel at all. In Tallahassee, Florida, for instance, the white teams stayed at the Floridan Hotel, the favorite haunt of state legislators, while the black players slept in a dormitory at Florida A&M University. In other cities, the Trotters had to stay in private homes, sleeping on roll-away beds or couches, or in community centers.

Abe’s timidity in challenging segregation cost him with his players, in terms of respect, and it even cost him good players. One of the reasons that Chuck Cooper and Earl Lloyd gave for signing with the NBA, in 1950, instead of with the Trotters, was the disparity between the hotels for the Trotters and their white opponents. “Saperstein had his players staying in dirty, roach-infested holes in the wall,” Cooper would later say, recalling the months he spent with the Trotters. “I used to point this out to the Globetrotter players…. For doing that I got the reputation as a troublemaker.”

Hall of Fame coach Clarence “Big House” Gaines, the second winningest coach in NCAA history, who spent forty-seven years at Winston-Salem State University, had a number of players who signed with the Globetrotters. He would sometimes call Abe to recommend a player, but on a couple of occasions, when Abe sent a contract to sign, Gaines tore it up and never even told the player. “[He] treated them pretty much like animals,” Gaines says today. “Didn’t pay them much, didn’t give them money for meals—it was a hard life.”

In Cincinnati, the Globetrotters had to stay in an old, dilapidated hotel that was like something out of a horror flick, with creaking stairs, spiderwebs, broken windows, and bats flying everywhere. The players would enter the rooms armed with insect spray, and douse the mattresses to kill the bedbugs. The Foster Hotel in Indianapolis had half-inch cracks in the windowsills, and mattresses that were only two inches thick, and players would climb in bed with their clothes on, to keep from freezing. Some black hotels had so few rooms that
the Trotters had to sleep four players to a room, stretched out sideways across the beds. In other hotels, the beds were so lumpy, or the stench in the rooms so bad, that players would rather sleep in the bus. One night in Kentucky, they actually slept in a slaughterhouse, and woke up to the screams of hogs being butchered.

If the players wanted to go out after a ball game, they found Jim Crow waiting for them around the corner. In Abilene, Texas, Johnny Kline and some other players decided to take in a movie, but were escorted to the “buzzard’s roost,” high in the balcony. “We sat so far up we could barely see the screen,” he wrote in his memoir.
*

In the face of these indignities, the Trotters pulled together and made the best of their circumstances. They developed their own secret code to deal with prejudice. They called black people “rocks” and whites were “you-alls.” If a restaurant refused to serve them, they’d say, “We’re going Dutch tonight,” which meant going to a grocery store and buying Vienna sausages and cold cuts. When racist hecklers were giving them a hard time in Birmingham or Montgomery, they’d give each other a special nod as they lined up for the Globetrotter baseball routine, and the pitcher would “accidentally” bean the heckler in the head with the ball.

And it wasn’t all bad. To be fair, they resented not having a choice, but sometimes they
preferred
staying in black hotels because it was a much hipper scene. The Watkins Hotel in Los Angeles was the hub of the West Coast jazz scene, and Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, and Billie Holliday were often staying there. When they got to a new town, they would seek out the black neighborhood, asking a local black resident, “Where’s the Zone?” The food in Paris and Rome was enjoyable, but they couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago, where the fried catfish at the Pershing Hotel would make a grown man beg for more. And Skippy’s restaurant in Cleveland had the best short ribs, ham hocks, greens, and biscuits of any place on earth.

The Globetrotters would not notice a significant improvement in hotel accommodations in the South until the late 1950s, and even then it was sporadic. In some cases, they broke the color line them
selves, becoming the first African Americans to integrate hotels in a number of cities. “We broke lots of racial barriers,” says Tex Harrison. In Norfolk, Virginia, for instance, Harrison caught a cab and told the black cabbie to drive him to the local Holiday Inn. “You work out there?” the man asked. When Harrison told him that he was a guest there, the cabbie was incredulous.

In their own way, the Globetrotters helped break down some of the fears and stereotypes that many whites had about blacks. “Just to see black players out there on the court caused people to be less anxious and have less bigotry,” says former player Hallie Bryant. “And once they got to meet you, they saw that you were not that different than they were. So laughter helped break down barriers.”

Almost imperceptibly, the world
was
changing. The civil rights movement would soon explode across America, challenging all the conventions of the social order. But for the Harlem Globetrotters, the changes were coming painfully slow, even in their own organization. Abe was an innovator in many areas, both in basketball and business, but in the realm that was most demeaning to his players, he would sit on the sidelines, waiting for others to act. The Harlem Globetrotters’ bus kept rolling across America, and throughout the Deep South, but the Freedom Riders were not on board.

By the midpoint of the decade, the NBA was opening up new opportunities for African American ballplayers, and the best players in the country were being drafted by the league. Abe’s monopoly on black talent was gone, but the Trotters were still the most successful basketball team in the country, so Abe had the financial resources to compete for players with any NBA team.

In 1953, the New York Knicks drafted Walter Dukes, a six-foot-eleven consensus All-American from Seton Hall, in the first round. Knicks coach Joe Lapchick and owner Ned Irish were counting on Dukes as the big man they needed to win the NBA crown. What they hadn’t counted on, however, was Abe Saperstein. Irish had offered Dukes approximately $12,000 for the five-month NBA season and thought they had a deal. But Abe reportedly offered Dukes $2,000 a month (albeit for a much longer season) and convinced him
to sign a one-year contract. At Dukes’s signing ceremony in New York, Abe carted in three thousand silver dollars in a wheelbarrow, a clever publicity stunt that the photographers loved. He immediately shipped Dukes overseas, to catch up with the European tour; later that summer, Dukes played on the outdoor baseball park tour as well.

The following year, Abe showed the same flair in signing a famous white player, the legendary Bevo Francis, who still holds the NCAA single game scoring record of 113 points. Francis, who some say was the best pure shooter of all time, had averaged 46.5 points per game in 1953 for tiny Rio Grande College in Ohio, which had only ninety-two students. After the school expelled Francis for missing too many classes, Abe signed him—and his coach, Newt Oliver—to a one-year deal. This time, at the signing ceremony, Abe hauled out a bushel basket filled with four thousand crisp dollar bills. He told the press that the package deal was worth $30,000, but that was an exaggeration, as Francis made only $10,000 and Oliver’s annual contract was for $8,000. That summer, Abe showcased Bevo Francis on the baseball park tour, playing for the Boston Whirlwinds.
*

After these successes, Abe turned his sights on the most acclaimed college player in the country, Bill Russell of the University of San Francisco. In 1954, when the Trotters played the Cow Palace in San Francisco, he invited Russell to sit on the Trotters’ bench as a special guest, and a local paper reported that Russell was “nearly convulsed with laughter on several occasions.” Russell had two more years of college eligibility remaining, but Abe was already starting to court him.