“As long as you have black athletes making it to the top and then shutting up like Uncle Willie Mays, or like Jesse Owens or Joe Louis, well, then, athletics has done very little for the black community. It has helped black individuals to delude themselves, this is all. But when you have people speaking out like Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson, you begin to feel the importance of sports to the black community. When you have people like Satch Sanders going out and getting a million-dollar grant from the Federal Government to revitalize housing in the black community of Boston—well, they didn’t give it to him because he was some Joe off the street, but because he was Satch Sanders of the Celtics and because he had made himself a public figure and had access to the white man’s media and public-opinion forces.”
—Harry Edwards, quoted in Part 1 of Jack Olson’s outstanding cover story, “The Black Athlete—a Shameful Story”, Sports Illustrated, July 01, 1968
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