Sports helped Detroit Pistons head coach Dwane Casey overcome racism as he grew up in Kentucky in the 1960s.
He remembers seeing the n-word in the second-hand books his segregated school got from the white school. He remembers fighting kids who called him the n-word when the schools integrated and later becoming lifelong friends with some of those kids, once they realized he wasn’t what they’d been told about black people.
“I’ll never forget my first day of school. There were parents standing outside with signs: ‘We don’t want you here.’ ‘Go home,’” Casey told a group of more than 100 people Saturday at the Libro Centre in Amherstburg. “I see those vividly right now.”
He was in Grade 4 or 5 in Morganfield, Kentucky when the schools were forced to de-segregate. Casey talked about watching the progression of integration in schools and sports in his lifetime as he kicked off the Amherstburg Freedom Museum’s Freedom Achievers Program Saturday. He answered questions and signed autographs at the event that was also the launch of the museum’s mentorship program.
Casey, a former Toronto Raptors’ coach, won the NBA Coach of the Year Award and was fired by the Raptors the same year. He was hired by the Detroit Pistons in 2018.
It was sports, at first little league baseball, that brought different races together, he said. At age 14 Casey became the first African American coach in the same little league that years earlier hadn’t allowed black children to play.
SHARON HILL, WINDSOR STAR
Updated: October 14, 2019