Bob Lanier, a Dominant Center of the 1970s and ’80s, Dies at 73
Playing for the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks, he held his own against titans of the era like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Willis Reed.
Bob Lanier, who as a center for the Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks in the 1970s and ’80s parlayed a deft left-handed hook shot, a soft midrange jumper and robust rebounding skills into a Hall of Fame career, died on Tuesday in Phoenix. He was 73.
The N.B.A. said he died after a short illness but provided no other details.
Lanier, who stood 6-foot-11 and weighed about 250 pounds, excelled in an era of dominant centers like Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Nate Thurmond and Wes Unseld.
“Guys didn’t change teams as much, so when you were facing the Bulls or the Bucks or New York, you had all these rivalries,” he told NBA.com in 2018. “Lanier against Jabbar! Jabbar against Willis Reed! And then Chamberlain and Artis Gilmore and Bill Walton! You had all these great big men, and the game was played from inside out.”
He added: “It was a rougher game, a much more physical game that we played in the ’70s. You could steer people with elbows. They started cutting down on the number of fights by fining people more. Oh, it was a rough ’n’ tumble game.”
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As a Pistons rookie in the 1970-71 season, Lanier shared time at center with Otto Moore. In his second season, as a full-time starter, he averaged 25.7 points and 14.2 rebounds a game, putting him in the league’s top 10 in both categories.
“He understood the small nuances of the game,” Dave Bing, a Pistons teammate and fellow Hall of Famer, said in a video biography of Lanier shown on Fox Sports Detroit in 2012. “He could shoot the 18-to-20-footer as well as any guard. He had a hook shot — nobody but Kareem had a hook shot like him. He could do anything he wanted to do.”
Lanier wore what were believed to be size 22 sneakers. In 1989, however, a representative of Converse disputed that notion, saying that they were in fact size 18 ½. Whatever their actual size, a pair of Lanier’s sneakers, bronzed, is in the collection of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.
During nine full seasons with the Pistons, Lanier played in seven All-Star Games. He was elected most valuable player of the 1974 All-Star Game, in which he led all scorers with 24 points.
But the Pistons had only four winning seasons during his time with the team and never advanced very far in the playoffs. The roster was often in flux. Coaches came and went. Lanier dealt with knee injuries and other physical setbacks.
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“It was like a life unfulfilled,” he told Fox Sports Detroit.
In early 1980, with the Pistons’ record at 14-40, the team traded Lanier to the Milwaukee Bucks for a younger center, Kent Benson, and a first-round 1980 draft pick. Frustrated by the Pistons’ lack of success, Lanier had asked to be sent to a playoff contender.
“I’m kind of relieved, but I’m kind of sad, too,” he told The Detroit Free Press. “I’ve got a lot of good memories of Detroit.”
Lanier averaged 22.7 points and 11.8 rebounds a game with the Pistons.
Robert Jerry Lanier Jr. was born on Sept. 10, 1948, in Buffalo to Robert and Nannie Lanier. Young Bob was 6-foot-5 by the time he was a sophomore in high school, and he played well enough there to be wooed by dozens of colleges. He chose St. Bonaventure University in upstate Allegany, N.Y.
He was a sensation there, averaging 27.6 points and 15.7 rebounds over three seasons.
In 1970, the Bonnies defeated Villanova to win the East Regional finals of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, sending them to the Final Four. But Lanier injured his knee during the game, forcing the Bonnies to face Jacksonville in the national semifinal game without him. St. Bonaventure lost, 91-83.
“I didn’t even know at the time I tore my knee up,” Lanier told The Buffalo News in 2007. “But when I ran back down the court and tried to pivot, my leg collapsed. I didn’t know at the time I had torn my M.C.L.”
Lanier was still recuperating from knee surgery when the Pistons chose him No. 1 overall in the N.B.A. draft; he was also chosen No. 1 by the New York (now Brooklyn) Nets of the American Basketball Association. He quickly signed with Detroit.
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Although he had statistically better years with the Pistons, Lanier enjoyed more team success with the Bucks (and also played in one more All-Star Game). Under Coach Don Nelson, the Bucks won 60 games during the 1980-81 season, and they advanced to the Eastern Conference finals in 1982-83 and 1983-84.
Lanier was also president of the players’ union, the National Basketball Players Association, and helped negotiate a collective bargaining agreement in 1983 that avoided a strike.
Early in the 1983-84 season, his last as a player, Lanier became angry with Bill Laimbeer, the Pistons’ center, for riling him under the boards at the Silverdome in Pontiac, Mich. Lanier retaliated with a left hook that leveled Laimbeer and broke his nose.
The act not only earned Lanier a $5,000 fine; it also delayed the retirement of his No. 16 jersey by the Pistons until 1993. The Bucks retired his number in late 1984.
He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1992.
In retirement, he owned a marketing firm and worked extensively with the N.B.A. as a global ambassador and special assistant to David Stern, the league’s longtime commissioner, and Adam Silver, his successor. Lanier was also an assistant coach under Nelson with the Golden State Warriors during the 1994-95 season and replaced him as interim coach for the final 37 games of the season after Nelson’s resignation.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.
Lanier said that after he retired, he was less likely to be recognized by the public than when he was a player. After Shaquille O’Neal, one of the league’s most dominating centers, came along in the early 1990s, people figured he must have been O’Neal’s father, he told NBA.com in 2018.
“‘You’re wearing them big shoes,’” he said people would tell him. “I just go along with it. ‘Yeah, I’m Shaq’s dad.’”
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Samella Lewis, Artist and Activist for Art World Diversity, Dies at 99
In addition to painting, she was a historian who pushed for a more inclusive definition of art, in part by founding her own museum devoted to Black artists.
Samella Lewis, a Black artist and art historian who did more than just decry the racial blinders of the white art establishment, in part by founding a museum dedicated to promoting Black arts, died on May 27 in Torrance, Calif., near Los Angeles. She was 99.
Her son Claude Lewis said the cause was renal failure.
Keasha Dumas Heath, executive director of the Museum of African American Art, the institution Dr. Lewis founded in Los Angeles in 1976, noted her wide-ranging impact, calling her, in an email, “a leading voice in the scholarship on Black art, and a promoter of new pathways for Black artists.”
“She envisioned opportunities that did not yet exist for Black artists,” she added, “and then she created them.”
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In a remarkably varied career, Dr. Lewis also co-founded an arts journal, helped run galleries, made films about Black artists, taught at universities and wrote well-regarded books, most notably “Art: African American,” first published in 1978. That book (later republished as “African American Art and Artists”) remains influential, said Kellie Jones, a noted art historian at Columbia University, which, she said, is characteristic of Dr. Lewis’s various efforts: They have endured.
“She starts a magazine: Still in print,” she said in a phone interview. “The museum: still there.”
“She did it all,” Dr. Jones added. “She really did it all.”
Samella Sanders was born on Feb. 27, 1923, in New Orleans to Samuel and Rachel Sanders. (Two oral histories give her birth year as 1924, but her son said that she came to believe that 1923 was correct.) Her father was a farmer, and her mother was a domestic worker.
She grew up in Ponchatoula, La., northwest of New Orleans, and was drawing from a young age. In an oral history recorded in 1992 by the Center for Oral History Research at the University of California, Los Angeles, she said her first sale of an artwork was to her kindergarten teacher, who was impressed with how she had handled an assignment to draw a pig.
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“All the other children were doing brown pigs, white pigs, so I drew a purple one,” she said. “And I was determined that, in doing that pig, that I was not going to stay within anybody’s lines. I just drew lines, but then I moved outside of them. It was like the pig was vibrating.”
She enrolled at Dillard University in New Orleans intending to study history, she said, but at the urging of her high school art teacher, she took a freshman art course. Her professor was the artist Elizabeth Catlett, who became an important influence artistically and in terms of activism. When they would ride the bus together, for instance, Ms. Catlett would do things like grab the “For Colored Patrons Only” sign demarcating the Black seats and throw it out the window — a revelatory action for a young student who had simply accepted the racial situation in Louisiana as the way things are.
“There I am sitting there, having grown up under these circumstances, and here this woman comes and disrupts the whole situation,” Dr. Lewis said in the oral history.
Ms. Catlett changed her approach to art as well.
“One of the important things I learned in Elizabeth’s class is that you don’t paint people without knowing something about them and who they are and where they are,” she said. “I was painting these portraits, and she would say, ‘Who is this?’ And I would say, ‘I don’t know.’ ‘Well, what are you painting it for?’”
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After two years she transferred to the Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) in Virginia, earning a bachelor’s degree in art history there in 1945.
She went on to do graduate work at Ohio State University, first studying printmaking, then sculpture, although she encountered some resistance in that genre.
“I ran into problems of not only racism but also sexism,” she said, “where my professors felt that women shouldn’t do welding” because of the heavy equipment involved. So she focused on painting and on broadening her study of art history, developing particular expertise in Asian and pre-Columbian art. She earned a master’s degree there in 1948 — the year she married Paul G. Lewis, a mathematician — and in 1951 became the first Black woman to receive a Ph.D. in fine arts and art history at the university. A posting on a university website once called her “the godmother of African-American art.”
In 1953 Dr. Lewis was appointed head of the art department at Florida A&M University, which needed bolstering. According to the book “African Americans in the Visual Arts” (2003), by Steven Otfinoski, she once told the university president that she would paint his portrait in exchange for more funding for her department.
The Lewises became active in civil rights issues, and harassment by the Ku Klux Klan and others led them to leave Florida in 1958, when Dr. Lewis took a teaching post at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. In 1966 she took a post at California State University at Long Beach. That same year she made the first of several short documentaries, “The Black Artists,” a survey of African American art.
Though she was vocal about Black art and artists, Dr. Lewis said that, especially in her teaching, she tried to draw on her expertise in Asian art and other areas to make connections.
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“I never taught courses where I closed the door: ‘This is African art and this is Caribbean art,’” she said in the oral history. “I tried to show interrelationships.”
But as the 1960s turned more strident, so did she on the subject of white domination of the art world. In late 1968 she left academia to be the coordinator of education at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, hoping to elevate Black art there.
“Anybody can have a quick Black show,” she told The Los Angeles Times at the time, but she sought more substantive change. She lasted a little more than a year before quitting, so frustrated at the lack of progress that she picketed her own museum.
“We have gone through several periods — slavery, emancipation, underpaid and overworked, pacification, integration, trying to prove something instead of dwelling in our own household,” she told The Progress-Bulletin of Pomona, Calif., in early 1972. “I’m fed up with this proving of self.”
In 1969, with Ruth Waddy, she published “Black Artists on Art,” forming her own publishing house, Contemporary Crafts, to do it. In it, Black artists spoke out, some vehemently, about their work and the obstacles they faced. The book (which was followed by a second volume in 1971) rattled the art establishment and the people who covered it, including William Wilson, art critic for The Los Angeles Times.
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“Statements by artists range from modest affirmations of a desire to make art of worth, to frankly militant rejections ‘of the intellectuals and pseudo-intellectuals who dominate the art scene’ and of white culture in general,” Mr. Wilson wrote in a review, in which he seemed to find the challenge thrown down by the book to be off-putting.
Dr. Lewis was also looking for ways around the white establishment. She had already helped establish the National Conference of Artists, a professional organization for Black artists, which continues today. And after leaving the Los Angeles museum, she was a founder of the Multi-Cul Gallery in Los Angeles, which focused on Black art and on selling works at prices almost anyone could afford.
In 1975 she and two others founded Black Art: An International Quarterly, which continues today under the name International Review of African American Art. Then, in 1976, came her Museum of African American Art, which has mounted exhibitions and run educational programs ever since.
Dr. Lewis resumed teaching in 1969 at Scripps College in Claremont, Calif., where she remained for 15 years and which now houses the Samella Lewis Contemporary Art Collection. Over the years she curated numerous exhibitions at galleries and museums.
And throughout her busy life, she found time to make her own art. Her paintings and prints have been exhibited in solo and group shows all over the country.
Her husband died in 2013. In addition to her son Claude, she is survived by another son, Alan, and three grandchildren.
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During a talk in Columbus, Ohio, in 2000, Dr. Lewis had a simple explanation for why people should respect artists of all races and backgrounds and try to hear what they are saying.
“They can tell us what will happen in the future,” she said. “They can tell us what we should have seen in the past.”
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Overlooked No More: Louise Little, Activist and Mother of Malcolm X
She fought oppression in public and private spheres, and shaped her son’s education as he evolved into a powerful thinker and speaker.
This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
For more than 50 years, the few Americans who knew the name Louise Little had one, maybe two, images of her.
In the first, on a dark night in 1925, a young woman trembles on a porch in Omaha, Neb., three children at her skirts, the future Malcolm X in her belly, while Klansmen circle the house shattering windows.
In the second image, 14 years later, the same woman, now a widowed, careworn mother of eight, is shuffled into a sheriff’s car and driven off to a mental asylum, her children left to the mercy of the state authorities.
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The first story opens “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (1965), and it became ubiquitous in the many books and films about his life that followed. The second consigned Little to obscurity: She disappeared behind the tall brick walls of the asylum, where she remained for 25 years.
Both stories are keys to the narrative of a boy, born Malcolm Little, who rose from violence and poverty to become a global figure in the struggle for Black rights. But both have played too neatly into the bluntest of tropes about Black women and erased vital truths not only about Malcolm’s life but also the arc of Black history.
Now, as a new generation of biographers reclaim Little’s life, these images of her have been transfigured: Louise Little emerges as a formidable and nuanced protagonist who, like other Black women over the centuries, fought oppression in both public and private spheres. The reframing of her life corrects a tradition that has presented Black women activists as exceptions, and has missed the critical role of Black mothers. Anna Malaika Tubbs says it precisely in the subtitle of her 2021 book, “The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation.”
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The K.K.K. targeted the Little home because Louise and her husband, Earl, were unapologetic activists who pushed a message of revolution in the new Black communities of the unwelcoming Midwest. On that terrifying night on her porch, recalled her eldest son, Wilfred, she drew herself up to her full 5 feet 8 inches and spoke with her characteristic calm until the Klansmen retreated. Her institutionalization trapped her and traumatized her children, but it came only after she had waged an eight-year battle against welfare workers, police and judges — the powers that have epitomized structural racism.
Helen Louise Langdon was born on the Caribbean island of Grenada in 1894 or 1897. Her birth year is just one of many details that are hard to pin down. Larger questions about her life are also matters of dispute or interpretation in the now growing literature about her. Did a white man named Norton, her biological father, have a relationship with Louise’s mother, the much younger Edith, or did he rape her? How did Louise feel about her fair skin, which complicated her relationships with her husband, with Malcolm and with any community where she lived?
Louise was a baby when Edith died, so she was raised by her grandmother Mary Jane Langdon and her aunt Gertrude. Mary Jane and her husband, Jupiter, who also died when Louise was small, were captured in West Africa when they were young but were freed by the British Navy sometime after 1833, when imperial Britain banned slavery. The Langdons celebrated their African roots and Grenada’s proud legacy of rebellion against occupiers while living a code of self-reliance. They farmed their own land and each plied a trade, Jupiter as a carpenter, Mary Jane as a herbalist and Gertrude as a seamstress.
Louise studied at a local Anglican school, excelled in writing, spoke English, French and Creole and absorbed world history — however slanted a version — from the Royal Reader textbooks given to millions of children across the British Empire.
At about 21, she embarked alone on a journey of more than 3,000 miles, from the port of St. George in Grenada to Montreal, where her uncle had emigrated. He introduced her to the growing Black nationalist movement led by Marcus Garvey. Little was immediately drawn to Garvey’s ethos of self-determination and Pan-African confraternity — as was Earl Little, a Baptist minister and recent immigrant who had escaped the violence of Jim Crow Georgia. The two married after meeting at a Garvey event.
Their marriage proved turbulent. Earl, haunted by what he had suffered in the South, was sometimes calmed, sometimes provoked by the more hopeful, worldly Louise; she, by contrast, had escaped “exposure to America’s more toxic form of racism,” according to “The Dead Are Arising,” a 2020 biography of Malcolm X by Les Payne and his daughter, Tamara Payne.
By most accounts Earl was abusive at times. But the marriage was also a “stable merger of shared striving,” the Paynes wrote, powered by shared passions for their children, for personal and political autonomy and for their work.
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The young couple arrived in Omaha — their first assigned post as Garvey missionaries — in the wake of the Red Summer of 1919, when dozens of American cities were convulsed by racial violence. The thousands-strong lynch mobs there were particularly notorious.
The Littles set to work founding a Garvey chapter, as they would in cities in Wisconsin and Michigan over the next decade. Earl recruited at home and on the road. Louise was chapter secretary and a reporter for Garvey’s newspaper, The Negro World. According to “The Life of Louise Norton” (2021), by Jessica Russell (with contributions by Little family members), the family sheltered Garvey when he was in flight from federal agents on charges of mail fraud, and Louise wrote material for a national campaign urging President Calvin Coolidge to grant Garvey clemency.
Wherever they settled their growing family, the Littles were a provocation. Not only did they spread Garvey’s bold rhetoric, but their own literacy and economic autonomy were also an affront. When one of their homes in a white area burned down, Earl, a skilled carpenter, quickly rebuilt it. Louise worked as a seamstress and sold her own designs. Most of the family’s livelihood came from farming and hunting — on land they owned, a rarity in sharecropping America. Their family car was another anomaly — as was Louise’s driving it. They were continually threatened by white neighbors and officials, and many Black residents were afraid to be seen with them.
As the Little children began to attend school, Louise took on a new role: a prescient form of the activist parent. She worked to counter what the children were taught, correcting the routine slander about Black people to inoculate her children against self-hatred. If she heard of a particularly egregious remark or lesson, she would march into the school and demand respect. She took the children to various churches and temples to sample religious ideas and had them sing the alphabet in French, read aloud from The Negro World and another newspaper, The West Indian, and look up every new word in the family dictionary. By the seventh grade, Malcolm had top grades and was class president.
Family life, solid if not secure, was shattered in 1931, when Earl died after he was run over by a streetcar in Lansing, Mich. The idea that the incident was not an accident — that Earl could have been murdered — became a touchstone of Malcolm’s life story, though it has largely been refuted.
Even with help from her oldest children, Louise struggled to keep the family fed in the depths of the Great Depression and in the throes of escalating harassment.
First, an insurance company insisted that Earl had committed suicide and refused to pay out on the $10,000 policy that the Littles had so carefully funded. When Louise reluctantly accepted federal relief money, violating her values, she became subject to new levels of scrutiny. Local officials routinely withheld her relief checks while pushing her to sell her land.
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Hope appeared briefly in the form of a man courting her. But when she became pregnant, he left town. She was suffering from hunger, overwork and most likely postpartum depression when the authorities used her out-of-wedlock birth — and delinquent behavior by Malcolm — as excuses to attack with fresh vigor. A judge first removed Malcolm from the home, then ordered Little’s other children to be placed in foster care. Soon after, the judge engineered Little’s commitment to an institution.
Malcolm saw his mother twice during her 25 years of institutionalization, the same years he was evolving into a powerful thinker and speaker as a prominent figure in the Nation of Islam. His renown very likely helped get Little released in 1963, after years of petitions by his siblings.
He saw her again at a joyous family reunion. Less than two years later, he was assassinated.
In her last years, Little lived quietly with one of her daughters in the celebrated Black community of Woodland Park, Mich. Her ashes were scattered there after her death, on Dec. 18, 1989. She was believed to be 91.
Malcolm’s speeches and writing reflected a deep ambivalence about his mother. In his autobiography, written with Alex Haley and published after Malcolm’s death, he sounded contrite in allowing that his behavior had accelerated Louise’s decline. But he also seemed to justify Earl’s abuse of Louise because she had showed off her superior education, and he sought to erase any hint that his educated mother had educated him.
For years the autobiography set the tone for any view of Little. But beginning in 2003, letters that Malcolm wrote to family members have surfaced to present a different picture. The scholar Garrett Felber, who has had access to the letters, referred to one that Malcolm wrote to his brother Philbert in 1949. Their mother had suffered at the hands of the state, Malcolm wrote, because the authorities knew that “she was not ‘deadening our minds.’”
He added, “My accomplishments are ours, and yours are mine, but all of our achievements are Mom’s, for she was a most Faithful Servant of the Truth years ago. I praise Allah for her.”
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