by Doug Merlino
Eric has one move that almost never fails. He gets the ball out beyond the top of the key and dribbles with his right hand. He begins to drift to the left, as if he’s floating. Suddenly he breaks right and darts past the flat-footed defender, driving the lane and shooting or dumping the ball off to a teammate. Sean and Maitland stand near the basket, two gawky figures with their arms up, waiting for a pass. Willie Jr. is the point guard, a surrogate for his dad on the court, directing everyone to their positions with his left hand while he dribbles with his right.
When I get my chance for a few minutes at the end of the first half, I mill around outside the key and occasionally wave my arm in the air. Tyrell and Willie Jr. will not pass the ball to me unless they are in dire trouble. I am not tall enough to post up under the hoop but lack the ball-handling skills to play on the perimeter. The one thing I can do fairly well is shoot the outside shot—the product of innumerable hours practicing by myself on the hoop at home—but whenever I actually do touch the ball, I get so nervous that I’ll screw up that I pass it right away, always looking to give it back to Eric.
The game isn’t close—the other team is outmatched by our speed and full-court press. We’re cruising toward a win. Myran nails a jump shot from way outside. Sean posts up, takes a pass from Willie Jr., and then spins and banks it in. JT sneaks around our opponents and steals a rebound.
Then a member of the other team misses a shot. Maitland grabs the rebound and whips it out to Tyrell, who takes off downcourt on the fast break. He drives toward the hoop from the left side of the key. A player from the opposing team comes in to cut him off. Tyrell, a few feet from the hoop, picks up the dribble, transfers the ball from his left hand to his right, and holds it out to the kid like a waiter offering a tray of appetizers. The defender freezes up—his jaw drops and he stares at the leather sphere floated right under his nose. The din of the game—parents chattering, shoes squawking, coaches yelling—subsides. And then the moment passes. In one seamless motion, Tyrell slides the ball back to his left hand and lays it in. Those of us on the bench fall over ourselves whooping and laughing.
Things go bad in our second game. Our opponents, who must have scouted us, easily pick apart McClain’s trapping defense, moving the ball upcourt with sharp passes before we can lock in on them. McClain cajoles from the bench to no avail. The referees make a few questionable calls and Randy Finley loses it in the stands. “Come on, ref! Where was the foul?”
Myran and I languish at the end of the bench as the team comes apart, falling behind by twenty points. Tyrell and Willie Jr. hog the ball, firing up wild shots that are way off the mark. Sean is winded, walking up and down the court, hands on his hips, hanging his head, and sucking air. After he misses a shot, Eric thrusts his head down into his hands, shakes it from side to side, and stomps back up the court before finally looking straight up at the ceiling and muttering in disgust.
I wish that McClain would put me in the game, though I know I could do nothing to change the outcome. Of the other white kids on the team, Maitland gets special attention from McClain because he is Randy Finley’s son, Sean because he is six feet two inches tall and McClain thinks he can toughen him up enough to become a force in the middle. I fall through the cracks—a quiet kid without any special skills. I’m here for racial balance.
We get blown out. McClain and Finley both stalk out before us, angry with the team and incensed with the two white refs, whom they believe called the game against us because of our racial composition. I’m surprised at how quickly the other team exposed the inadequacies of our game plan, leaving us with no backup.
We grab our bags, follow into the parking lot in silence, and pack into the van. The ignominy of our defeat soon gives way to jokes, chatter, and capping as we ride back. Eventually we make it to Seattle, where we split up. The white guys head back to their homes in the northern or eastern suburbs; the black guys return to Central Seattle or the South End.
Black Seattle/White Seattle
In the spring of 1986, Willie McClain and his family lived in a small, white A-frame house on a sleepy street in Central Seattle. If you showed up on a weekday afternoon, you’d likely find a scene like this: In the TV room—which wasn’t big enough to fit much more than the couch and the McClains’ large-screen, projection television—JT might be down on the carpet, playing with Dwayne, the McClains’ three-year-old son. Myran, Tyrell, and a kid named James Credit would be sprawled on the sofa, joking and watching videotapes of The Warriors and The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh. Sometimes they listened to music—that spring, a demo tape put out by an underground Seattle rapper named Sir Mix-a-Lot was getting a lot of play in the house. Upstairs, Damian and Willie Jr. bashed into each other as they tried to dunk a Nerf basketball through the hoop hung on the back of the door of Little Willie’s bedroom. Diane McClain, Willie’s wife, would be in the kitchen, the largest room in the house, cooking up tacos, hot dogs, or spaghetti. All the boys ate a lot, but Myran had an especially large appetite. After the kids had their fill, JT always made sure to help wash the dishes. As the McClains intended, the afternoons had the feeling of an extended family getting together. “They never fought each other,” Diane McClain says of the boys. “Everyone was just really close.”
In the late afternoon, Willie McClain Sr. arrived home from work—he’d just gotten a job as a playground supervisor and bus driver for a Christian elementary school for African-American kids. The boys at the house were his guys. He’d started coaching most of them in 1979, when they were seven. He considered himself a surrogate dad for Myran, Damian, and JT, who had no fathers at home. “I told them what they could and could not do, plain and simple,” he says.
At thirty-two years old, McClain was pulling his own life together. The need for change had been hammered into him a few years earlier, when he’d showed up to coach a basketball game with a hangover. “I was out of it,” he says. “The kids ended up coaching themselves.” When JT and Eric asked him what was wrong, McClain found that he didn’t have a good answer. The realization hit him: “You got to get yourself together, or you’re going to pass on your lifestyle to your sons.” He didn’t want his boys or the players on his team to waste their talents like he believed he had squandered his.
Church was one thing that kept him grounded. Coaching was another.
McClain’s team played in the local community league, formally known as the Central Area Youth Association but universally referred to by reciting its four initials one at a time, C-A-Y-A. The great majority of players in the league were black.
The Central Area, a roughly four-square-mile patch of land tucked between the downtown business district to the west and the waterfront mansions on Lake Washington to the east, was the historical heart of black Seattle. Most of the African Americans in the city—blacks made up around 10 percent of Seattle’s population of five hundred thousand in 1986—lived in the neighborhood or those stretching out directly south of it.
Willie McClain loved basketball for the beauty and precision of the game, but youth sports invariably mixed with racial concerns. When CAYA teams played outside the league, it wasn’t unusual for every opposing player to be white. McClain had sometimes given up home basketball games and driven his kids out of the Central Area to compete, because coaches from the wealthy suburbs east of Seattle, across Lake Washington, wouldn’t bring in their teams to play in the Central Area. McClain knew that it would be useless to appeal—his complaints would go to white league administrators who would just find a way to back up the suburban coaches.
Separation between blacks and whites was nothing new for McClain. Having spent the first years of his life in Mississippi, McClain knew there were places where racism ran much hotter. But like most African Americans in Seattle—which has long prided itself as a place with smoother race relations than the rest of the country—he found himself on the periphery of the city’s economy.
…
From its beginning, in November 1851, when a small grou
p of settlers led by a twenty-nine-year-old surveyor from Illinois named Arthur Denny sailed into Elliott Bay, Seattle has been a place where people come to pursue their passions and economic interests at a remove from the rest of America. As long as you don’t mess with anyone’s livelihood or raise too much fuss, Seattle—out on the wet, northwestern edge of the country—will likely meet you with a tight-lipped smile, a bit of small talk, and then get on with things. For its minority populations, says University of Washington historian Quintard Taylor, Seattle has long presented a paradox: While much of the city espouses liberalism, that rhetoric has been “juxtaposed against the reality of discrimination.” This is a place, after all, that named itself in honor of an Indian chief even as the local tribes were being efficiently—and sometimes violently—removed from the land.
From its inception, Seattle has ridden waves of economic boom and bust. Within weeks after trudging ashore, the Denny Party got to work cutting down trees near the water and shipping the timber on boats headed for San Francisco, then surging with Gold Rush money. In 1852, Henry Yesler, newly arrived from Ohio, built a steam-powered sawmill, and the town—really just a logging camp on the shores of Puget Sound—was off and running.
Of the handful of blacks who settled in frontier Seattle, the one who would have the most lasting influence was William Grose, who landed in the muddy, waterfront village of whitewashed clapboard homes in about 1860. Born in Washington, D.C., Grose had sailed to China and Central America with the navy, passed through the gold fields in California and British Columbia, and had worked as a ship’s steward before coming to Seattle. On his arrival, Grose, then in his midtwenties, took a job at the grill of a saloon lunch counter. At six-foot-four and more than 400 pounds, he soon became known as “Big Bill the Cook.”
For its first few decades, Seattle was a rough-hewn town with an economy centered on logging and Yesler’s sawmill. Most of the business was controlled at the top by the pioneer families, who had divvied up the choicest land among themselves when they founded the town. It was a live-and-let-live kind of place—for example, even though he was a religious teetotaler, Arthur Denny managed to look past the numerous local establishments that gave workingmen the chance to booze, whore, and lose their money gambling.
Amid all this, blacks in Seattle had more freedom than in most other parts of the United States, even in the West. Oregon, at the time, denied blacks voting rights and prohibited them from settling. While other western states passed laws that prohibited interracial marriage, Washington Territory did not enact any overtly discriminatory statutes. But while blacks did not face a lot of outright harassment, neither did they have much political or economic power. Barred from labor unions, African Americans found themselves at the bottom of the job market, working as janitors or laborers, or, on the more prestigious end of the scale, cooks, porters, chauffeurs and, in several cases, barbers. Robert Dixon, for example, a black barber from Virginia who arrived in 1865, opened a shop downtown where he cut the hair of city fathers such as Arthur Denny (black barbers often did not serve other blacks during business hours for fear of putting off their white customers).
Part of the reason for the city’s relative tolerance was that there just weren’t very many blacks around to discriminate against. In 1880, African Americans numbered just nineteen of thirty-five hundred people in the town. At the time, the primary targets of racial animosity in Seattle were American Indians and Chinese. Indians, who had lived in the region for centuries, were generally viewed as savages. Hatred of the Chinese, who were recruited to the Northwest to build the railroads, exploded in February 1886, when unionized white workers—who accused the Chinese of undercutting salaries—rampaged through Seattle’s Chinatown and forced Chinese to the docks, where two hundred were loaded on a steamer and sent to San Francisco. Within a month, almost all of Seattle’s Chinese had been deported.
During this time, William Grose did well. In 1876 he started a restaurant downtown called Our House, and later opened a barbershop and a three-story hotel near the waterfront. An amiable man, he was well known in town—a magazine drawing of a crowd at an 1882 lynching of three accused white murderers shows Grose standing near sawmill owner Henry Yesler. That same year, Grose, whose businesses made him Seattle’s wealthiest African American, paid Yesler $1,000 for twelve acres of land in the northeastern section of the city, a couple of miles from the waterfront. At the time, the land, along East Madison Street, was a wooded area still populated by bears. After Grose started a farm and built a home on the property, he began to sell off parcels to other African Americans. By the 1890s, the area was developing as the center of Seattle’s “respectable,” middle-class African-American population, gaining it the disparaging nickname “Coon Hollow.”
William Grose died in 1898, and Arthur Denny followed the next year, both having made their fortunes. By this time, Seattle had established itself as the primary city on Puget Sound. As the town’s residential patterns began to emerge, wealthier whites moved away from the area downtown to outer neighborhoods. Near the waterfront around Jackson Street—what is today known as the “International District” or simply “Chinatown”—lived Asians and poorer blacks, in the city’s red-light neighborhood, home to brothels and residential hotels. Over the coming decades, the Jackson Street area and the East Madison neighborhood—two communities separated by a couple of miles and a class barrier—would grow toward each other as more African Americans arrived in the city and filled in the middle, forming the Black Central Area.
In 1900, African Americans made up 406 of Seattle’s population of eighty thousand, a minuscule but unsurprising number. Most African Americans at the time—7 million out of 8 million—lived in the South. The majority worked in the fields, as hired hands or sharecroppers, tending cotton and sugarcane. The federal government’s post–Civil War Reconstruction efforts had been beaten back, replaced with Jim Crow segregation, the Ku Klux Klan, the loss of voting rights, and economic subjugation. Lynching became a popular entertainment for white southerners, with large crowds of spectators coming out to gape and enjoy themselves as black men—“strange fruit,” as Billie Holiday later sang—hung from trees. In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court stamped its approval on the separation of blacks and whites, ruling that laws permitting segregation “do not necessarily imply the inferiority of either race to the other.”
In response to the postemancipation plight, the seminal black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois wrote that being African American meant living with the “double consciousness” of being both black and American, of trying to survive in a society that views you as inferior because of your color. “The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” Du Bois wrote. “He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.”
Du Bois grew up in Massachusetts and graduated from Harvard. A founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, he believed that civil rights legislation and political action were needed to advance the place of African Americans. He thought that a black vanguard—the “Talented Tenth,” in his words—could set an example. As Du Bois saw it, the success of the Talented Tenth—really, the educated, black elite—would pave the way into society for the rest of black America to follow.
Du Bois’s beliefs ran counter to those of Booker T. Washington, the country’s most influential African American. Washington, who had been born a slave, headed the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational school that taught blacks skills in trades such as agriculture and carpentry. Instead of demanding rights from whites, Washington advocated that African Americans focus on themselves first. “It is at the bottom of life we must begin, and not at the top,” he said in an 1895 speech that became known as the “Atlanta Compromise.” “The wisest among my race understand
that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremist folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing.”
Washington, in effect, endorsed segregation: “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers,” he said of blacks and whites, “yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”
Du Bois attacked Washington’s approach, arguing that accommodation without civil rights and a path to higher education would cement the status of African Americans as an inferior class. It was a battle of ideas that would set the framework for arguments about black advancement in American society for the coming decades—whether to demand rights through the political process, or to look inward and concentrate on self-improvement within the black community without regard to white America. More than a century later, as I would learn when speaking with my black teammates, the tensions between the two positions remain unresolved.
Just as Seattle’s first black community was coalescing around William Grose’s land in the East Madison neighborhood in the 1890s, my great-grandfather Giovanni Merlino was conscripted into the Italian Army. When my grandfather was a kid, Giovanni used to show him the scars from bullet wounds in his shoulder and his side he’d gotten after he was sent to fight in Ethiopia. One day, the Italians—about twenty thousand troops in my great-grandfather’s telling—met a massive force of Ethiopians, who attacked from all sides. Before long, the Italians were in a panicked retreat. My great-grandfather survived only because his comrades carried him off the battlefield after he’d been shot. It’s impossible to say for certain, but given the details and the time he was in Ethiopia, Giovanni was probably describing the Battle of Adowa, which happened on March 1, 1896. The Ethiopians routed the Italians that day, derailing (for a time) Italy’s ambitions to conquer their country and keeping it the only nation in Africa free of colonization.