Reading Honors Bill Russell With Select Board Proclamation

READING, MA — The Reading Select Board voted to honor hall of fame basketball player and civil rights leader Bill Russell with a formal proclamation on Tuesday.

Their 5-0 vote came just over a week after Russell died late last month. It also came decades after Russell and his family faced incidents of racism while living in Reading.

“This was a very awful thing that happened and I’m in favor of doing something we can do to try to make amends,” Select Board Member Karen Gately Herrick said on Tuesday.

Russell won 11 NBA championships as a player and a coach for the Boston Celtics. He added an olympic gold medal in 1956 and became the NBA’s first Black coach in 1966 when he took over the Celtics’ coaching job as a player-coach.

He joined the 1963 March on Washington among many other efforts and was honored with a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2011.

“We do want to celebrate his life, his impact on our community, his impact on race relations, as well as his unparalleled success on the basketball court,” Reading Town Manager Fidel Maltez said in a statement attached to the Select Board's proclamation.

Russell lived in Reading during part of his time with the Celtics. His daughter Karen Russell chronicled the racism the family faced in that time in a 1987 essay for the New York Times.

Vandals once spray painted slurs on the walls of the Russells’ home, damaging their pool table, smashing trophies and defecating in the bed Russell shared with his wife, Karen wrote, referencing one such incident.

Russell died on July 31, prompting an outpouring of grief, memories and reflection.

Locally, Maltez said community members reached out after Russell's passing to ask for some sort of memorialization. The Select Board then held its meeting this week, discussing a draft of the proclamation before them. They opted to add language saying that, in addition to celebrating Russell, Reading supports efforts to “learn from his values as he lived them.”

The Select Board’s proclamation directs Maltez to designate a day as Bill Russell Day with “appropriate recognition and ceremonies.” The Select Board will consider additional ways to honor Russell’s legacy in the coming months, the town said in its statement attached to the proclamation.

Read Reading's Bill Russell proclamation through the Select Board’s agenda packet.