>> Next, to how that same struggle took place on America's backetball courts.

In her new book, a professor of African-American history details how black basketball players were pivotal in the transformation of the game.

>> Professor Teresa, thank you so much for talking with us.

>> Thank you for inviting me to come on.

This book is a history of professional basketball from the '50s through the '70s.

Why this title?

>> This is in terms of the transformation of basketball over the course of the '70s.

Just thinking about the blackballing of players and the exclusion of them from the week.

Also, the ways in which the team owners who were all at that time made sure they kept control over their labor force.

The fact that there was a transition.

Also, the fact that people are so used to seeing these players as many corporations now.

>> Spencer Haywood was kind of a mover and shaker in this new generation of black players.

He was the first ever hardship draft.

The NBA for a long time had been the only game in town.

In order to compete with the NBA, they created something called the hardship because -- hardship clause.

They can draft underclassmen out of college even if they haven't used up all of their college eligibility because at the time, the NBA had this draconian four-year rule.

Which prevented players from the college ranks or even the high school ranks to go into the draft.

Spencer Haywood took advantage of the situation, to his competing against each other and he managed to get a contract with the Denver Rockets of the ABA.

He supposedly had a million-dollar contract.

Your contract is probably not worth what they said it was worth in the media.

He ended up going to an agent.

The contract was actually fraudulent in a lot of ways.

They promised things that just would not pan out.

Rather than staying in that position, he tried to renegotiate the contract.

What is important to understand in the context of the 1970's is that you did not have a lot of leverage as a black basketball player going into talks with a white team owner.

You did not have a lot of leeway to say I am in the midst of my contract but I want to renegotiate it.

He ended up suing or counter suing the Denver rockets.

And then turns to the Seattle Supersonics of the NBA.

The NBA did not say come on in, come on and play.

They prevented him from playing.

If they did not have that pillowcase and the chutzpah to challenge the entire white basketball establishment, people like Lebron James would not be where they are today, they would not be able to enter the league on their own terms.

>> Talk about the style and aesthetic.

One of the things the ABA did was give the players more freedom to play the way they might have played growing up.

Street ball style.

Talk about how that was perceived.

>> Black players used the availability of positions in this new league to come to dominate the game.

In some respects, the ABA, you think of Dr. J, Julius Irving, bringing that kind of playground -- we're talking about the aerial play, we are talking about trash talking which we have been talking about a lot lately.

With LSU and the women's game recently.

All of that was brought to the game in the context of black players really flooding the professional ranks at that time.

They did that in spite of the powers that be.

>> You talk about the fact that the '70s were sometimes referred to as the dark days.

We can obviously unpack all the levels of that but can't talk about why it is referred to that way?

>> The 1970's are often is forgotten time of NBA history.

The '70s were really key.

An age when players were getting into trouble.

When they were becoming more entitled, when they were getting lazy, when they were using drugs, when they were fighting on the court, when I started to see all of these narratives about the league's decline.

Contesting the power of the owners, there was this kind of backlash against their efforts to change the game and so they got painted as trouble, as troublesome players.

>> Len Bias, a highly sought after recruit, he did die from a cocaine overdose.

It was very traumatic.

Do you not think it was reasonable to trace that back and see how this happened?

What do you think about that?

>> It is interesting that you go to him because this project, the book I wrote actually came out of the prehistory of his story.

He was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1986 and died of a cocaine overdose.

All of the sudden, his image became almost weaponized by President Ronald Reagan and the Republicans were trying to push through legislation and the war on drugs.

You have the 1986 antidrug drug act which brings in all of these punitive measures that help to ramp up mass incarceration in the United States.

I was wondering why is it that he as a basketball player beyond just his individual tragedy as somebody who took drugs, why did he become the symbol that drove all this legislation?

One of the things I found in going back through the 1970's was the various efforts to really paint the drug problem in sports as an African-American problem.

In the fact that these guys were so hyper visible only led to more and more discourse about the fact that these guys were making too much money, they were living the fast life and out of control.

It became a microcosm of larger things happening in U.S. society.

Quickly other thing you talk about in the book was professional sports media play such an important role during these decades.

You say it's practically a character in your book.

Can you just talk a little bit about that?

>> What is so interesting is this critique of the white media was actually coming from the players themselves and then also coming from black independent media.

Because they were outlets at that time for example, black sports magazine which was a black run, black-owned sports magazine targeted at black fans and they also noted the fact that white sports journalists tended to uncritically repeat the press releases of the team owners in the league without actually digging into whether or not they are really going out of business.

Our player salaries actually making these teams go out of business?

Is it really true that 40-75% of the L.A. Times piece in the 1980 said -- is it true that 40-75 percent are on cocaine?

There was no sort of unpacking of that.

Yet you find all of that unpacking, deconstruction critique happening amongst the players themselves and also in black media.

>> Do you think there was ever a reckoning in the field of sports reporting about the role they may have played in shaping perceptions of these athletes?

>> I feel like a lot of the same narratives keep cropping up now in terms of if you look at the way they describe this new generation of black quarterbacks.

If you look at the racial discourse around the women's NCAA final as this racial contest between Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, we see these narratives still being replayed and repurposed for a new era.

One of the things I think I try to do in the book was to say, hey, if we systematically analyze what people were saying in the context of that time, one can see a pattern here.

>> People remember in the wake of the death of George Floyd and also in the wake of Colin Kaepernick, the former quarterback, it became a huge story.

Kneeling during the national anthem, it was this huge issue in the NFL, players were kind of put on the spot like are you where us or not with us on this?

It just seemed like it was a very different era for the NBA.

Do you agree?

It does not seem to have been as seismic in the NBA.

>> I think the NBA, because of those earlier struggles in the '70s, it is a league where the players have a large degree of individual and collective power.

This is one of the most powerful unions in professional sports.

The rosters are much smaller than those in the NFL so there is a difference from sport to sport in that case.

Because the players have been so active and have always talked about their own labor struggles as being connected to wider struggles, for African-American rights and labor rights, that they have this already long-standing tradition since the 1970's.

Arguably even earlier than that of calling out various forms of racism.

If anything, I think they have pushed the NBA to become a much more progressive league because they realized they have to acknowledge the power of the players and away the NFL seems to be able to still control the narrative.

You have someone like Colin Kaepernick who does this protest and the NFL turns around and basically blackballed him.

That would be hard to have happen in the NBA because of all of these antitrust cases from the earlier time that pointed out blackballing, the four year rule, unfair reserve clause, they did it extremely publicly and they did it collectively and it was everyone from the bench player right up to the superstars.

>> Do you think there is a way in which the struggles of the NBA has affected the culture at large?

You make a compelling case.

Without Spencer Haywood, you say there would be no Lebron.

There would be no Dr. J without Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

Do you think that generation of players -- do you think they had an impact beyond their sport?

>> Absolutely.

I think they became icons of a new, kind of more defiant black masculine identity.

One that said we are going to take control of the situation, we're going to figure out how to fight this.

When Oscar Robinson is the name associated with the lawsuit against the NBA that brought down the reserve because, when he was testifying, he understood this was a struggle in which they could not back down because everybody was watching.

I think the hyper visibility of these guys helped to inspire a continued wave of racial activism at that time.

They begin these icons.

I think we overlook that when we talk about the black freedom struggle.

Thank you so much for talking with us.

>> Thank you.