Jim Cash has witnessed the fight for social justice from the front lines. For decades.
When the Celtics limited partner speaks of the Civil Rights Movement, it is with a depth of knowledge and experience dating back to growing up in Fort Worth, Texas, and to his role as a trailblazer. In May 1965, James I. Cash Jr., became the first African-American to accept a basketball scholarship in what was then the Southwest Conference, signing on at TCU.
As a 6-foot-6 center, he would go on to average a double-double in points and rebounds in each of his three varsity seasons (freshmen were ineligible by NCAA rule), become an Academic All-American in his last two years and finish runner-up to Elvin Hayes, Don Chaney and Houston in the 1968 Midwest regional. These days, he’s the nice man with the warm smile and engaging pregame conversation on the Garden sideline on certain Celtic nights, but make no mistake, James had game.
He’s also had a dishonor roll of indignities visited upon his life.
“I literally had a police escort to get in the University of Arkansas gym for the freshman game,” Cash says in a conversation with the Herald this week. “And for a long time, I actually hated the University of Arkansas because of that experience.”
It’s the start of a longer story that ends on a far brighter note, because every tale with Dr. Jim Cash ends on a brighter note. He maintains an indomitability that is utterly remarkable considering the history he’s seen and lived — but perhaps not surprising when one takes into account that he serves on the boards of major corporations and is professor emeritus at the Harvard Business School, where he was senior associate dean running the MBA program.
So while he sees the images of Black people dying at the hands of law enforcement and shudders at the inhumanity, he is heartened by the widespread response from the larger populace.
“Because I’m old enough at almost 73 to have lived as an emerging adult through the Civil Rights revolution in the ’60s,” Cash says, “it’s interesting to me to think about the parallels and the contrasts that are unfolding today versus then. And the thing that jumps out at me most is the composition of the groups that are protesting. This issue has been around forever, long before 1965, so there’s no difference in the underlying issue. But the fact that there’s more visual evidence is without a doubt one of the big distinguishing factors. I guarantee you when people saw the images of what was happening on the bridge in Selma and other things in the mid-’60s, that’s what energized a large number of people to participate that otherwise might have been fairly passive.
“A big difference between the Civil Rights Movement of that era and what’s going on today, for me, is the composition of the folks who are protesting. I would say everything I was involved in was 80 percent Black in the ’60s, and as I look at the composition of the groups that are protesting today in our streets, I’d say it’s flipped. I have been so blown away by how broad ethnically, gender-wise, the composition of the protests has been. It’s one of the things that gives me great optimism about what might be sustained, even though it takes a very long time for real change to occur. I don’t think you can effect real change quickly, but when you get the kind of broad participation and shared understanding that is illustrated by what’s going on today, you know there’s an underlying movement that will play out in local arenas all over the place. It won’t be uniform, but it will be headed in the right direction.”
While the scope of the protests is greater globally than at most other points in history, the fact is there have been times of heartfelt outrage in recent years that have not yielded the necessary solutions to racial inequality. Again, Cash thinks this is different.
“It is so interesting to me that when President Obama was elected so many people became very passive and decided that underlying racism in our society had been dealt with,” he says. “It’s been clearly shown that that was not the case, and more importantly again, there’s now visual evidence that gets people from the point if questioning and debating and wondering how widespread it is and what the severity of the problem is to almost like they are experiencing it themselves… It’s so visual that it causes a whole bunch of people to actually want to listen and hear. I’ve talked to a large number of corporate executives over the last several weeks, and the one thing that is very clear to me is they all have gotten to a point where they have come to understand that there are people in their workforce that they had worked with for years and thought they understood and knew the people, but didn’t understand what those folks were experiencing as a result of the underlying racism that exists. So that is starting to happen in a very dramatic way. A whole range of people are at a point where they really want to understand much better than they realize they did before what the experience is for people of color in this country.”
It was an experience very early in his college life at Texas Christian that taught Cash the value of seeing situations through. Upon deciding to major in math, his initial meeting with an assigned academic counselor was… insulting.
“He was stunned, first of all, that a basketball player on scholarship would major in math, but he was also stunned that an African-American, then referred to as Negro, would major in math,” Cash says. “And his honest comment to me was, ‘Are you sure you want to do this? You know you people aren’t good in this discipline.’ My first instinct is I wanted to rip his arms off his body, but my high school coach, my parents and everybody had prepared me for the fact that I was going to run into a lot of people who hadn’t been exposed to African-Americans before. I was going to have to room with a guy who had never interacted with an African-American before. But the thing that is fascinating about this counselor is that, as my season started to unfold and you do the kind of traveling that you do as an athlete, he worked tirelessly to make sure that all my assignments were communicated to me, and as I worked to close the gap between my athletic life and my academic life, this guy went way overboard to help.
“What that actually taught me is you don’t pay attention to what people say, you pay attention to what they do, because what I’ve discovered in life is there are a lot of people who know how to be politically correct and they know how to be very token, but they aren’t going to do anything that’s really going to help people of color or people from poor socio-economic environments. That guy taught me a really good lesson. So when I hear somebody like Drew Brees and the controversy that his comments causes, I want people to say things like that — especially if they’re people who in their hearts are really good people and need to get to another level of understanding and exposure so that they can move to a different place. I fully believe that Drew Brees is going to be more of an activist — and he was already a good guy, but he’s going to be more of an activist as a result of what he just went through than he would be if that hadn’t happened.
“I would hope that lots of other people looking at him would not artificially put up a barrier against him, because it really an issue of people just not being exposed and not knowing. It’s one of the things I really try to get young people to understand. There are going to be people that are going to say really hurtful things, and what you have to sort out is was it intentional or was it because they were dumb and just not exposed?”
It’s a message he has imparted to the Celtics on several occasions. He’s developed relationships with some of the players, though most of his communication now is with Brad Stevens. The coach asked Cash to take part in the process as the Celts were fashioning their response to the controversy the developed when Colin Kaepernick took a knee during the national anthem to bring attention to racial inequality and police misconduct against people of color. Cash discussed his experiences integrating the SWC, but focused on “what really counts when you want to make a difference as opposed to symbolic gestures that don’t really change the trajectory of the lives of the young people that you really want to help.”
The club then set up events that brought local police and young people together. “To me, it was an outstanding program,” says Cash. “It’s really hard to deal with the problem at the scale it exists across the country, but there’s no reason not to be able to deal with it in whatever sphere of influence that you have in your immediate surroundings. That’s been my message to the guys when I’ve interacted with them individually, as well as when I’ve had the opportunity to go in and talk to them as a group.”
Jaylen Brown understood the situation well before meeting Cash, and he’s made his voice heard on numerous occasions prior to leading a recent protest march in Atlanta.
“I am so proud of Jaylen,” Cash says. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of that young man, not only in terms of the quality person he’s become, but how he is setting the stage for life after basketball, which is what I talk to so many of the young men about. He’s been so active. He’s a very special guy.
“As awful as what we’re going through is, it takes this type of circumstance to really deliver a level of consciousness on a broad basis so we can make a difference over the time that’s required to really make change.”
Change. It’s one of Cash’s favorite topics. Though he’s had a number of laurels on which to rest — SWC Hall of Fame, number retired at TCU, etc. — he is more about what comes next.
But on occasion he likes to reach for the timeline as an illustration of hope.
In 1994 at the NCAA Final Four, Cash was among the NABC silver anniversary honorees from his class, along with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Jo Jo White, Mike Krzyzewski and George Thompson.
“The fascinating thing is the team that won that year was the University of Arkansas,” Cash says. “They had Nolan Richardson as the coach, and they started five Black players. So in my lifetime I had seen the evolution of needing an escort to get into the gym to the University of Arkansas winning the NCAA with a Black coach and five Black starters.
“But let’s roll forward even further, and I am the lead director at Walmart, the world’s largest corporation by revenues. Guess where Walmart has its annual meeting every year, where they invite 13,000 people? The University of Arkansas basketball arena. So for the last four years I was on that board, I go into that gym and I think back to the old gym, Barnhill Arena.
“So anybody who tries to convince me there hasn’t been change and improvement, I don’t buy that. Has there been enough? No. But I have great confidence because of all the people that caused ’94 to happen with Nolan Richardson and then laid the foundation for my experience while I was on the Walmart board.
“All those people that did what they needed to do to make those things happen is what’s unfolding now. I can’t tell what it’s going to be or when, but at some point in time, some young person today is going to have the opportunity to be in a position that we can’t imagine. And my guess is a whole range of young people are going to have a very different world, because right usually wins out over the long term. It’s not an easy journey, but we get there. And we get there because people don’t get deterred by the hurdles.”
James Cash is one of those people. Jaylen Brown and Marcus Smart are others. The relay continues.
