HONORING DR. KING
Knicks look back at the great civil rights leader as the 50th anniversary of his assassination nears
WILLIS REED WAS driving down the Van Wyck Expressway on April 4, 1968 when he heard on the radio that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. Reed, whose Knicks had been eliminated from the playoffs by Wilt Chamberlain and the Philadelphia 76ers three days prior, was just 25 years old. The news was personal, and it rocked him.
“I was heartbroken, shocked. It’s like somebody in your family just got killed,” recalls Reed (r.). “To me, he felt like he was part of how I felt, like he was a part of my family.” “That was a tough time for me to have learned that,” says Reed. It’s still a raw subject for Reed as he goes back to that April 4 evening back in 1968 when King was gunned down at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, now 50 years ago. Before he was an NBA MVP and a two-time champion with the Knicks, Reed was a black child growing up in Jim Crow Louisiana in a town called Bernice, just a 15-minute drive south from the Arkansas border. A tiny town of fewer than 2,000, then and now, where racism and segregation were as much a part of daily life as breathing. “I didn’t think Bernice was a racist town, or that the people were pure racists. They weren’t mean people, but it was just a way of life,” says Reed. “We didn’t go to the white school, we went to the black school. “We didn’t go to the white church, the Bernice Baptist Church, we went to the New Hope Baptist Church. “That was just the way things were, and you understood that.”
King’s movement showed many people — Reed included — that a status quo of discrimination and subjugation could change.
“He was an admired and beloved man, especially to the black community, the black race, and he was a great orator. One of the things I wished about him, I wish I would’ve been able to speak like him, and obviously I never learned that talent, but he was an inspiration,” says Reed, now 75. “We went through it, ‘How could this happen, why did this happen?’ And I think it had a very — in my heart — it had a very strong feeling when he was killed. … I don’t know how much more he would’ve accomplished but I think he had a great impact and I’m happy that we honor him the way we do. I just wished he lived longer and probably done more, because he was a committed man — and we find that when people are committed to causes that are not popular to others, sometimes those people become victims.”
Reed’s teammate on the Knicks, Walt Frazier, also grew up in the racist south, Atlanta, where he was forced to learn basketball on a dirt playground because it was the only facility available at his all-black school.
Even after Frazier became an NBA superstar, he encountered racism in the way he was treated by airline stewardesses, and in the way the league’s owners enforced an unwritten quota system.
“Being in New York I didn’t really experience it that much. New York was very liberal. But when we went to other cities — especially down South — you could tell. People were treated different,” says Frazier. “They had a quota system in the NBA. You had to have a certain amount of white players.
“Not so much New York or Boston but some of the other Southern cities, like (New Orleans and Atlanta) when Pete Maravich was playing for them.”
Still, Frazier said those Knicks never participated in Civil Rights marches or protests, unlike Celtics activist Bill Russell. Frazier said Reed would’ve had trouble with a peaceful demonstration — the foundation of Dr. King’s
movement — if it was met with opposition.
“Willis wasn’t the kind of guy to go do a sit-in. Because Willis said if somebody hits him, he’s going to hit them back,” says Frazier. “So we just gave our support, but we didn’t go down and protest.”
Frazier shared his perspectives and experiences to the current Knicks in January when the team, including executives Steve Mills and Scott Perry and head coach Jeff Hornacek, visited the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, the site where Dr. King was assassinated by white supremacist James Earl Ray. The motel, in the years after Dr. King’s death, was converted into the National Civil Rights Museum.
One of the many exhibits allows visitors to sit next to a statue of Rosa Parks on a recreated vintage city bus, a scene that moved Frazier.
“I used to ride the bus that they had in the museum in Memphis. (The current Knicks players) didn’t know, I was sitting on the bus in the back seat,” Frazier said. “So it was a museum to them but a revelation to me about life and how far we’ve come and where we are now.
“So I saw it in a completely different manner than those players did.”
The Lorraine Motel has become a popular spot on NBA roadtrips since the Grizzlies arrived from Vancouver in 2001, with players making the trip to pay their respects and learn about the life and times of Dr. King. For this latest trip, the Knicks stood in the exact spot on the hotel balcony where King was killed, the players able to see with their own eyes the bathroom window where Ray was pointing his rifle. It had been off limits in previous visits. “To stand on that balcony is a chilling feeling,” says Jarret Jack. “And you can look right across in the window where they said the person that killed him was standing. It was a chilling and crazy experience.
“It’s one thing for somebody to tell you based on something they didn’t experience, it’s another for somebody to tell you first-hand. It was such a monumental time in history.”
For Lance Thomas, being on the very spot where Dr. King was slain was equally sobering.
“It was like, ‘This is where it happened,’” says Lance Thomas. “It’s hard to take in.”
For two Knicks legends who lived through it, that moment 50 years ago — on that balcony — prompted “devastation and shock,” says Frazier. “Couldn’t believe it.”
But it’s also a reminder that progress is possible on the back of one committed person.
Says Reed: “I hope everybody understands what this man gave up and how he sacrificed to be willing to try to make America a better place to live.”