The great Bill Russell, born in 1934, would have received a lot of messages as a kid that told him he wasn’t worth much. He was a black kid in the American South. He was poor. He lost his mother at an early age.
Yet, as we’ve talked about before, he had a pretty remarkable father. A man of incredible dignity and self-restraint, a man who after the death of his wife, drove his kids across the country to raise them in California, trying to provide them a better life, away from the crush of segregation and hopelessness. He encouraged his kids. Together, father and sons figured out how to do things for themselves, and to remake their lives.
There, at his new high school, surrounded by new and better teachers, Russell started to really stand out as a basketball player. Once in this fresh environment, Russell had a revelation so profound he’d later describe it as an almost religious experience. “One day while I was walking down the hall from one class to another,” he wrote in his out-of-print memoir A Second Wind, “by myself as usual, it suddenly dawned on me that it was all right to be who I was. The thought just came to me: ‘Hey, you’re all right. Everything is all right.’ Over and over again I received the idea that everything was all right about me—so vividly that the thought seemed to have colors on it.”
Where did this message come from? Was it from a higher power? Was it from his subconscious? Probably all of the above. But you know where it started? It clearly started from his mother and his father. It came from his teachers—maybe not all of them, but at least one. It would have come from his coaches. It would have come from his peers, too. Enough people, early enough, swam upstream against all the negative messages that were sent out against young black men at that time, and got through to Bill Russell: They told him that he was all right. That he was *good inside,* as we’ve been talking about so much here. That there was nothing wrong with him, and in fact, everything was right with him.
What a wonderful, amazing thing for a kid to get. So much credit goes to Russell too, for hearing it, for understanding it, for articulating it back to himself. We need to make sure our kids get this same message. Because it’s hard for anyone to walk the halls of their high school. Nobody just knows that they’re all right. They have to hear it and see it and be reminded of it over and over and over again until they get it.
