A matter of justice
Iam proudly reporting today from a front-row seat at Friday night’s affirmative-action ceremony of the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame.
It just goes to show that affirmative action can be a matter of justice rather than welfare.
This Hall of Fame has long been, with a few sporadic exceptions, an insiders’ club for old white athletes and glory-days Razorbacks. Blacks and women have been left out primarily because the insular voting membership never thought of any context beyond the coziness of the club.
But, on this night, four of the eight inductees are Black, and one of those is a woman. The essence of the evening gets expressed by white-establishment master of ceremonies David Bazzel. When presenting the tribute video for inductee Freddie Scott, Bazzel says the question is why in the world this eloquent, elegant man of 70 is only now getting into the Hall of Fame.
The reason is known. It is that Scott personified the formula for going unappreciated historically in Arkansas, being Black, small-town and residing in Massachusetts, Baltimore and Detroit when performing his exploits.
From Grady and then all-Black Pine Bluff Southeast High, this speedy, skinny kid went away in 1970 to play receiver for Amherst, a Massachusetts college not covered on Arkansas sports pages.
I’m told he wasn’t even on anyone’s list of awareness until last year when he moved in as a neighbor of Hallof-Fame sportscaster Steve Sullivan, who got a rich quick neighborly load of Scott’s background: At Amherst, he made Little All-American with a personal best his junior season of 62 catches for 12 touchdowns. Then he played for a decade in the NFL, first for the Baltimore Colts and then the Detroit Lions, catching 262 passes for 4,720 yards and 20 touchdowns. Along the way, long before he showed up on the Arkansas Sports Hall of Fame radar, he was inducted into the College Sports Hall of Fame.
Grady and Pine Bluff are every bit as much Arkansas as Little Rock and Fayetteville. Touchdown passes caught in the NFL by an Arkansan routed through Amherst count for the same six points per that Treylon Burks’ one rookie-year touchdown reception counted last year for the Tennessee Titans.
Not everything must oink to matter. It was a travesty not to have known of Freddie Scott for decades. But, upon acquaintance, it was appropriate to race him to that podium at the first opportunity.
I call that affirmative action because that’s precisely what it is— classic affirmative action to correct ignorance, neglect and injustice.
Also inducted was a Black woman basketball star from Morrilton, three-point sharpshooter Shekinna Stricklen, who averaged 13.5 points a game over four years playing for the late legendary Pat Summitt at the University of Tennessee. Then she played in the WNBA for a decade. One year she won the WNBA three-point shooting contest. Once, on a night with lots of family members down from Arkansas, she hit eight three-pointers in a game in Dallas.
She is now going to try to lift opportunities for young women at Sylvan Hills High School, where she will coach basketball.
Also inducted were two Black stars out of Little Rock Central—University of Arkansas defensive lineman Jimmy Walker, who said he’d begun to think he’d need to break a window to get in, and basketball star Fred Allen, who said he had been told two decades ago he’d never get in because “he didn’t wear the red and white.”
As a state representative, Allen delivered a speech the last week of the recent legislative session against a blessedly defeated bill to declare all race injustice ended in Arkansas and do away with any and all affirmative action policies and practices.
It would have been a much-lesser evening without Walker and Allen, neighbors as Little Rock kids in the ’60s, for reasons including that they gave the best speeches—Walker for candor laced with humor about being a late and unlikely recruit to the Razorback defensive front and Allen for truth laced with poignancy about living much longer with cancer than an oncologist predicted.
It was altogether a feel-good night, overdue in a state seeming by its prevailing politics to be hell-bent on going back in time.
It’s important to take note that this Hall of Fame has taken steps forward before on race and women, then a step back the next year.
But my host at the front-row table told me “this class seems special.” May it remain so.
May the signs of new sensitivity and progress carry over to next year and the years beyond until we right all known past injustices and resolve to move forward committing far fewer.