Official Game Thread: Spurs "at" Hawks -- The MLK Day Game!

[lethalweapon3]

All around the world, same song…

 

Rosa Parks’ story moved people. Including an Atlanta-born preacher and a recent doctoral graduate new to Parks’ city of Montgomery, Alabama.

Their story, and the preacher’s oration, would move people. Including an enterprising fellow, named Eddie, who hailed from an archipelago of over 250 islands, halfway across the globe.

In the early 1970s, Eddie and his wife opened a community school on his country’s mainland, dedicated to children from his islands. Half of the day, students would learn the basic, traditional Western-style education taught in the mainland. During the other half, the pupils would gain instruction on their own traditions: culture, art, language, dancing. The curriculum mirrored the well-rounded education Eddie sought throughout his life.

As the school’s principal, bus driver, and cultural instructor, Eddie would help finance this school with his modest salary as a gardener, at the mainland state university named after the first European explorer to arrive there in 1770.

He was chatting it up with university history professors about his school, and the land he owned back on one of the islands. The profs glanced at one another with furrowed brows: Eddie doesn’t KNOW, does he?

This land is not your land. Subject to the rules brought about by English feudalism, virtually all public land in Australia is considered “Crown land” under national law. That included most of the lands Eddie, and his Indigenous island cohabitants and ancestors, had lived on, roamed, negotiated, died upon, and were buried under, for ages.

Crown land can be set aside by the Australian states for public purposes, left vacant, or reserved for future development. At any time as the state decides, that could include the properties Eddie grew into adulthood believing was his, by inheritance.

The state, and its far-reaching actors, could also exclude Eddie from setting foot on other islands, as he would soon discover while attempting to travel, and denied entry, as a research assistant for one of the university professors. “For Eddie, the rejection was devastating,” one of those professors recalled. “He was not only landless in the eyes of the White man’s law, he was an exile as well.”

Eddie used his relations at the university, and his growing knowledge of history and the law, to advocate for his fellow native citizens. By the 1980s, the emerging argument was that Eddie’s islanders held an orally based “native title” within the properties that later would be summarily deemed “Crown land” by colonials, via sovereignty and annexation.

The governing state legislature, in 1985, swooped in with a hasty answer to this concept: no, your “native title” doesn’t exist. It never existed. And, as far as our history is concerned, you don’t exist, either. This land belonged to no one that our ancestors respected when they arrived. Your people were just here on these islands, doing whatever, when our forefathers claimed it for the rest of us. We built this great country, not you. And this whole time, we have been pretty much just holding out for your people to skedaddle. Or vanish into history.

Over two hundred years of Australian governance went by before the nation was forced to come to terms with not just the human rights of Indigenous and Aboriginal populations within its bounds, but the foundational acknowledgement of their very presence. Despite the obvious uphill battle ahead, Eddie and his island neighbors, with assistance from legal advocates, took to Australia’s highest courts in order to stake their claims.

Eddie’s first major challenge, to his state’s Declaratory Act of 1985, proved successful. The state’s act was overturned, for violating the nation’s new Racial Discrimination Act, passed in 1975 as the waves of America’s civil and human rights ventures washed over the globe. The RDA eliminated the country’s decades-long “White Australia” policy, complete with a “dictation test” as a prerequisite for national entry, intended to shift the nation’s immigration demographics to one predominately British and White Western European.

The 1975 declaratory act was originally conceived by state legislators as an end-around to Eddie’s plea, in 1982, to Australia’s version of a supreme court. In what would was his first appearance before the high court as a plaintiff, Eddie sought a judgment that his island people were entitled to island property, based on those individuals’ longstanding customs and laws, pre-colonial native ownership, and their active possession and use of the land.

Eddie would not live quite long enough to get his answer, passing away from cancer at age 55. Just over four months later, in the summer of 1992, Australia’s high court ruled in favor of Eddie and, by extension, the nation’s Indigenous and Aboriginal citizens.

These inhabitants should not be treated under the law, one justice would write, as “intruders in their own homes.” The next year, Australia’s parliament passed Native Title Act 1993, officially recognizing the rights of those citizens, and acknowledging them as citizens, roughly 225 years after explorer James Cook first set sail.

It is an understatement to say that this decision was a landmark. The long-held notion that the entire country “belonged to no one”, later granted a Latin term terra nullius as a handy-dandy doctrine similar in intent to “manifest destiny” upon the colonialists’ arrival, was soundly rejected by the courts. Indigenous people’s rights to land, as argued by Eddie and the plaintiffs, had not been erased by way of colonization.

Looking back upon the decision in 2006, Professor Larissa Behrendt pointed to three things that made the case that bore Eddie’s name remarkable. “It overturned the notion that we as Aboriginal people did not exist; it recognized Indigenous rights to land; and it provided an example of how laws that had been used as a tool of colonization could actually be a tool of justice.”

“He was so convinced himself in the justice of his case,” Eddie’s friend and historian professor from the 1980s, Henry Reynolds, recalled. “He felt that justice must prevail. And in a way that was the most extraordinary vote of confidence in the Australian legal system. Many Indigenous people said, ‘No. It’s no use. They will never change.’ But Eddie said, ‘No, our court is just and eventually, it will prevail.’” Our court. Our land. Yours, and mine.

Around the world, we do see modern-day reverberations of well-established in-group strategy. Contain, constrain, disallow out-group members as unworthy participants of society. Doing so in expectation, if not outright hopes, that some among the disenfranchised out-group will lash out, running violently or just threateningly afoul of the laws, or at least one’s interpretations of said laws.

Such acts, alleged, true or otherwise, could then be used as lubricant to justify the relocation, or even the outright extinguishing, of the out-group. By government force, and/or by in-group citizens taking laws and policies designed to benefit them, specifically, into their own hands and arms. Via formal bombs, or firebombs.

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr., and later Eddie, dared a different out-group approach. There will be no lashing out, no physically pushing back at perceived grievances. Rather, these citizens would go about their business, while assertively, persistently yet peacefully, staking their fellow citizens’ claims to liberty and justice, for all.

These and many other activists encouraged one another to dare their governments to take the intended benefits of democracy, land rights, human rights, and capitalism, and widen the lens to see beyond the initially intended beneficiaries. This could be achieved, from within one’s own legal means, with patience, persistence, and without the pursuit of violent overthrows and seizures.

For every action, in the direction of justice, reconciliation or equality, there is sure to be an inequal and undue overreaction. Retaliation in Alabama, and throughout the American South in the 1950s and 1960s, came in short order during and after the legal successes borne by the civil rights movement. Much of it came from on high. Here’s but one example.

“The South stands at Armageddon. The battle is joined. We cannot make the slightest concession to the enemy in this dark and lamentable hour of struggle… One break in the dike, and the relentless enemy will rush in and destroy us.”

No, this wasn’t 1864. So, what is the governor of the great state of Georgia going on about? Marvin Griffin’s Pearl Harbor was Rosa Parks’ Montgomery Bus Boycott, coordinated in Alabama by Dr. King’s Montgomery Improvement Association. Griffin’s message, one (1) day after the boycott began, was a telegram to Georgia’s Board of Regents, urging them not to allow mighty Georgia Tech football to show up for a bowl game, out of state in Louisiana, against a Pennsylvania team with one (1) Black player. That’ll learn ‘em!

Parks paying to sit where she pleased was Griffin’s personal Holy War, and Pitt LB/FB Bobby Grier’s footsteps doubled as the sounds of the governor’s dike breaking. You can guess who the Dixiecrat governor, a Citadel graduate, was raised, trained, and well-paid, to believe was his relentless enemy. A riot in Midtown Atlanta ensued after Griffin’s nasty-gram stance went public, but mostly featuring Yellow Jacket student protestors of Griffin that, unlike their state’s governor, were blessed with a lick of sense.

Retaliation to Eddie’s posthumous victory came swift across Australia in the 1990s. Some of it was by fiat, engendered by lobbyists of the country’s mining and farming industries. Their organized fear-mongering, noted Behrendt, “has all the hallmarks of the hysteria whipped up by White supremacists that (Eddie’s victorious legal case) would take everyone’s backyard.”

Some of it arrived by in-group backlash. People who would not have known Eddie from a can of paint brought paint to desecrate his gravesite, one day after his formal burial. Vandals painted swastikas and slurs on his tombstone, also removing a bronze bas-relief portrait of Eddie. Again, there would be no violent response. His family and the Indigenous community would proceed with his reinterment, this time accompanied by a traditional ritual once reserved for Island kings, a ceremony that had not been conducted there in over eight decades.

Eddie’s story moved people not only to repercussion, but to reinvigoration. Indigenous populations across the globe were able to see lights at the end of the long tunnels toward justice, wheresoever they resided. His successful court ruling spurred a commemorative day in the Islands held annually in his honor, along with a week where Australians across the nation celebrate Indigenous history and culture while committing to reconciliation.

The push to acknowledge and celebrate Indigenous tribal members (e.g., Project 562) and native land rights (e.g., #LandBack) remain present-day movements that build upon the advocacy brought forth in Australia by Eddie, and by Aboriginal activist and soccer star Charlie Perkins. Their movements carried forth the tireless efforts of folks, like King and Parks, who faced violence and harm at every turn and, without resorting to retaliatory violence, dismissed it all.

While adversaries dig in their heels fighting to keep their present worlds framed with the tint of the past, heroes of social change prove capable of focusing on the world ahead, even if they’re not going to be around to benefit from it. No matter the forms of government, no matter the sources of power, King laid out a roadmap to encourage ordinary citizens, like Eddie Mabo, to nudge each nation to “live up to its creed,” making citizens themselves extraordinary in the forward-thinking process of pursuing justice.

“This movement is a movement based on faith in the future,” King would say of the activism he led in his 1961 speech, “Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience.” “It is a movement based on a philosophy, the possibility of the future bringing into being something real and meaningful. It is a movement based on hope.”

Movements move people. Eddie’s paved the way for Indigenous and Aboriginal citizens across Australia. Obviously, people including Eddie’s surviving family, one of whom will be on the State Farm Arena floor this afternoon, as your Atlanta Hawks face Gregg Popovich’s San Antonio Spurs (3:30 PM Eastern, TNT, 92.9 FM in ATL).

In North America, days before tipoff at the 2014 NBA Finals, as the Spurs prepared to face the hyped-up Miami heat, Coach Pop had another important event in mind as he huddled the Western Conference champs together in front of a video room projector. Eddie Mabo appears on the screen. “Anybody know what today is?” Teammate Aron Baynes, a fellow Aussie, knew the answer right away.

“I had no idea Pop was going to do it,” recalled Patty Mills, then in his third season with the Spurs, when his head coach urged his teammates to learn the story of Eddie, Mills’ grand uncle. “I had no idea he even knew about (Mabo Day, June 3 in the Torres Shire), but for him to bring that up in a meeting before the NBA Finals, just to give everyone a heads-up, was very special.”

Patty’s father was at the university conference back in the early 1980s when his uncle, Eddie, first made his compelling case for Indigenous land rights. “We’re all like, ‘Go for it,’ Benny recalled. ‘We all know it’s your land, even if the state denies it.”

Patty’s parents knew a thing or two about their unacknowledged rights. His mother and her siblings were children forcibly removed from their parents during what was known as the Stolen Generations. As adults, the parents met in Australia’s capital, while working together for the federal government on Indigenous affairs, and they would organize a basketball club for Indigenous girls and boys. Born in the capital of Canberra, Patty would begin dribbling with this club at age four.

The first Australian of Indigenous heritage to play in the NBA, Patty’s hoop journey was also paved by another uncle. Danny Morseu, a Torres Strait Islander, played in Moscow 1980 and Los Angeles 1984, the first Indigenous basketball player on Australia’s Olympic team.

Sport is often the first means by which in-groups come to acknowledge the existence, and value, of out-group members. Beyond skin-deep measures of physicality, the ability to play with and against one another toward desired objectives allows people to observe other’s personalities, spirit, heart, sportsmanship, humanity. Their families, their hopes and dreams, their commonalities. It’s often why adversaries of justice, rolling down like waters, would perceive desegregated sport as the quintessential break in the dam.

Australians who would otherwise have grown to disregard, and disrespect, and dismiss people like Patty have instead spent the past quarter-century cheering him on, from FIBA contests, the Nike Hoop Summit and the NCAA’s St. Mary’s College into the NBA, where he began his international pro career 15 years ago. Perhaps most recently, as a flag bearer of the Australian National Team in Tokyo 2020, and as a member of the nation’s first men’s basketball Olympic medalists. His 42 points versus Slovenia earned the Boomers a bronze, in his fourth Olympic voyage with the team.

After his breakout in 2014’s Finals, in particular the clinching Game 5 as the backup to Frenchman Tony Parker, Patty would get to celebrate on the stage, proudly wrapped in the blue-and-green flag representing his Torres Strait Islanders. No matter which corner of Australia one hailed from, Islander or otherwise, their hopes, dreams, and pride became tethered to him.

There was little surprise, the first MLK Day after Mills’ Spurs won their 2014 NBA title, that Patty stood before the audience of gleeful Spurs fans, one of four Australian NBA players sharing San Antonio’s court that day, to address the global importance of this American holiday. He urged the crowd to salute King’s legacy and his teachings. “My strong belief in Martin Luther King, Jr., is the also the same as Eddie Mabo,” he told the postgame media. “Those two guys are very close together. They both share the same message around the world, here and in Australia.”

Faced with institutional, generational adversity, the Mabo and Mills families could have grown insular, and taught their children to despise those who see them as relentless enemies. Instead, they made names for themselves as relentless petitioners, transforming their worlds and doing so within their legal means, and most importantly with a spirit of love. “Love is the only force,” King would famously state, “capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”

This year’s theme at Atlanta’s historic King Center is, “It Starts With Me,” named after a children’s story written by Martin’s daughter, Bernice. It emphasizes a truth that resonates no matter where you come from, or for what and for whom you stand.

“A social movement that only moves people is merely a revolt,” King wrote in his groundbreaking 1964 book, “Why We Can’t Wait,” on the heels of his 1963 Birmingham jail essay, and his watershed speech during the March on Washington. “A movement that changes people and institutions is a revolution.” Moving forward based on hope, rather than entrenching himself in hopelessness and despair, Eddie kickstarted a revolution, one that his family, like King’s, carries forward as a legacy to the present day.

A good, righteous, effective movement can move people, from anywhere, in positive, emotional, and perhaps spiritual ways. It can have a global impact, while making meaningful differences at finite, community levels. How such movements begin to move you, and the institutions and people you hold dear, is entirely up to you.

 

Let’s Go Hawks!

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

The birth home is still open today, despite the recent arson attempt:

Events around town, at the Atlanta History Center and elsewhere in the region:

~lw3

[AHF]

Special thread today.  Thanks @lethalweapon3!

[Spud2nique]

Just now, AHF said:

Special thread today.  Thanks @lethalweapon3!

Ya he gives these an extra ummf and attention while history droppin on us!

I dig lw3, thank you and happy MLK sir! 

[JayBirdHawk]

As always @lethalweapon3 - love the history lessons.

 

 

[shakes]

If MLK was a basketball player I guarantee he would've made hard cuts without the ball and busted his ass to get back on defense.

 

 

[bird_dirt]

Dang, lw3, I appreciate you. 
 

Also, why do I get the feeling that lw3 is doing his best to keep squawkers from starting riots in the streets? 
 

Remember kids, as dark as things seem now in Hawks-land, brighter days are ahead. “This could be achieved, from within one’s own legal means, with patience, persistence, and without the pursuit of violent overthrows and seizures.“

 

Only question is, who’s our Rosa Parks? Who’s our Eddie?

[HawksNWaffles]

 

 

[lethalweapon3]

Eddie Koiki Mabo-related weblinks:

https://libguides.jcu.edu.au/mabo-timeline

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabo_v_Queensland_(No_2)

Patty Mills: Spurs point guard, Indigenous Australian and Bala - Sports Illustrated

foxsports.com.au/news/patty-mills-delivers-moving-martin-luther-king-address-before-san-antonio-nba-game/news-story/408786043fefc908fc06b4bf29e625cc

~lw3

[bird_dirt]

Go Hawks! Beat the San Antonio Don’t-ers!

[lethalweapon3]

No changes in the Boo-Boo Report for the Hawks as of the 10:30 AM update. Dre Hunter (inflamed knee) and Wesley Matthews (strained calf) remain Out.

Charles Bassey's season-ending ACL tear in mid-December shortened the depth chart behind Wemby, and fellow starter Zach Collins (Out, sprained ankle) has yet to play in calendar year 2024. The Spurs' youngest player, Sidy Cissoko, is Out (sprained ankle), while the eldest, Doug McBuckets (sprained ankle), is Questionable.

As per Spurs' GameNotes, Sochan's output versus the Hawks, in Atlanta's road win on November 30, had him joining three other NBA players clearing minimums of 33 pts / 8 rebs / 6 asts / 85 FG% / Perfect 3FG% (Barkley '89, Glove '95, Bosh '08).

Tre Jones has been elevated into the starting five now that Coach Pop's Jeremy Sochan Starting Point Guard experiment has been suspended to have Sochan aid in rebounding. The Spurs are 2-3 in Jones' five starts. But they had two big wins over two bad teams (+22 @ DET, +36 vs. CHA) in this current stretch, while the Ls were all by six-points-or less (vs. MIL, @ CLE, vs. CHI).

~lw3

[JeffS17]

Need Trae to play his game tonight and not try to do too much.  He gets excitable for natl tv games and starts jacking up ill advised threes and forcing passes— just run the offense and we should outscore this awful team even if we are horrible on D

[HawksNWaffles]

Oh forgot to mention....we getting the dub MLK is on our side today, It wouldn't let me add more photos to my original post

 

Edited January 15 by HawksNWaffles

[JayBirdHawk]

 

 

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Bey keeps missing corner 3s.

Does Quin realize that?

[Hawkmoor]

The Spurs and Hawks look like they switched uniforms.

[terrell]

Good shooting from Trae so far and 0 turnovers..

Keep it up

JJ is special

Bey still cant hit anything.. Geez

[TheNorthCydeRises]

Nice overall quarter by the Hawks.

Don't even let this team breathe today.

[Gray Mule]

Nice 1st quarter!

[TheNorthCydeRises]

1 hour ago, HawksNWaffles said:

Oh forgot to mention....we getting the dub MLK is on our side today, It wouldn't let me add more photos to my original post

 

MLK vs Prince in a basketball game.

Sounds like a new Dave Chappelle skit.