The Harlem Globetrotters and Tennis Star James Blake

h/t Dave Miller:

Fred “Curly” Neal (left) admires Meadowlark Lemon’s adroit ball-handling in the CBS Sports special, Harlem Globetrotters: The Road to Mexico. CBS/Getty Images

"Globetrotters Louis Dunbar, Ovie Dotson and Jimmy Blacklock were stopped by Santa Barbara, Calif.,  police in November 1983 during a robbery investigation only because they were black.

 They testified they were returning to their hotel from a downtown shopping trip to prepare for a game the evening of Nov. 13, when police stopped their taxi and they were forced out of the car at gunpoint, handcuffed, searched and detained for about 30 minutes.

 They were stopped in connection with a $300,000 heist at a jewelry store in nearby Montecito earlier that day in which at least one person was killed. They were released after the shop owner told police they were not the robbers. The famed, all-black comedy basketball team had just arrived in town after a two-month tour of the Far East and Australia."




And this:


"From one team member to the next, the Globetrotters who played during the Jim Crow era can share stories of their struggles. Curly Neal, a Globetrotter from 1963-1985, is one of the most recognized team members. He was awarded the Legends honor in 1993 for making a major contribution to the success and the development of the Globetrotters organization. He penned an op-ed piece for USA Today in which he recalled one of the multiple racial incidents the team experienced: 

 “I can still remember hearing the story from the great Tex Harrison. Fifty-nine years ago, the Harlem Globetrotters had just played in front of 18,000 fans in northern Florida — most of them white — and tried to grab a bite to eat at a restaurant. The restaurant wouldn’t let the team in. Wouldn’t serve them. They went to a hotel next. They were turned away. Later, they found out that a performing chimpanzee sponsored by a local bowling alley got a big fancy suite.” 

 Sweet Lou Dunbar, who joined the Globetrotters in 1977 after playing in the semipro league with the Houston Rockets, said black families would house the team when they couldn’t find a hotel. But Globetrotter Hallie Bryant, who received the Legends distinction in 2009, remembers having to resort to extreme measures when the team couldn’t find a hotel or black family in Nebraska. 

 “When the team played in a Nebraska town that only had ‘white hotels,’ the team had to sleep in the county jail; players often had to bunk together in unheated quarters,” said Bryant, who spent 27 years in the organization as player, official spokesperson and director of team personnel. And with separate hotels for black and whites, the Globetrotters had to double up on games because audiences were logistically segregated. 

 “They had to play for two different audiences; for the white audience and [then] they had to go across the track and play for the black audience,” Dunbar said. While the Globetrotters were treated as second-class citizens at home, overseas, they were treated like royalty."



Retired tennis star, James Blake:

Retired tennis star James Blake in an appearance on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon opened up about a scary run-in he had with police while he was on his way to the U.S. Open in 2015.

"I was waiting for the car to take me to the Open and just waiting outside my hotel when an officer ran up and just ran into me, slammed me into the wall and threw me on the ground, handcuffed me and had me in custody for about 10 to 15 minutes without me doing anything," Blake told host Jimmy Fallon. "I was standing there just ready to get to the Open and they said I looked like a suspect. Turns out, the suspect was for a credit card scam they were running. Nothing violent. No reason, in my opinion, to necessarily tackle someone."

Blake — who had 10 career singles wins and climbed as high as No. 4 in the world rankings — said the officer pinned him down to the pavement and put his knee in his back while he was being handcuffed and instantly told him, “Shut your mouth. Put your arms back.” “

At that point, it's 2015, there were still already plenty of signs in the media, plenty of cases of police violence of Black men and women being killed or harmed by the police,” Blake said. “So, my first thought is back to the conversation I had with my dad, back to all those instances and my first statement was, 

‘I'm complying 100 percent. Whatever you say, I'm complying 100 percent.’ “Because I know I don't want to be a stat and everything else can be figured out afterwards, you know, any legal battles, their mistake in identity. Whatever it is, it can be figured out later. But, you just comply. “It's really a sad situation. It's really a sad state of affairs that there has to be that set of rules and every black man in this country pretty much knows those — that you have to be completely emasculated. You have to do whatever they say.”