benefactor
12-28-2015, 07:57 AM
When Meadow George Lemon walked into the Ritz Theater in Wilmington, N.C., at age 11, he didn’t have much going for him. He was born a second-class citizen in the Jim Crow South. His folks had split up, leaving his aunt and uncle to raise him — a skinny boy with a funny name “not at the top of anyone’s priority list,” as he later wrote. And, for a kid who looked forward to splurging 25 cents on westerns and adventure flicks, there was no clear way out.
Then, in the early 1940s, Lemon saw the newsreel that changed his life.
“The newsreel on this particular Saturday was about a new kind of team — a basketball team known as the Harlem Globetrotters,” he later wrote. “The players in the newsreel were unlike any I had ever seen. … They laughed, danced, and did ball tricks as they stood in a ‘Magic Circle’ and passed the ball to a jazzy tune called ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ How they could play!” He added: “There was one other thing that was different about them, though. They were all black men. The same color as me.”
The man the world would come to know as Meadowlark Lemon — who died Sunday at 83, as the New York Times first reported — dreamed what seemed like an impossible dream: to play for the Globetrotters and conquer the globe. Yet, it came true.
Keep reading---> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/28/meadowlark-lemon-legendary-harlem-globetrotter-dead-at-83/
Then, in the early 1940s, Lemon saw the newsreel that changed his life.
“The newsreel on this particular Saturday was about a new kind of team — a basketball team known as the Harlem Globetrotters,” he later wrote. “The players in the newsreel were unlike any I had ever seen. … They laughed, danced, and did ball tricks as they stood in a ‘Magic Circle’ and passed the ball to a jazzy tune called ‘Sweet Georgia Brown.’ How they could play!” He added: “There was one other thing that was different about them, though. They were all black men. The same color as me.”
The man the world would come to know as Meadowlark Lemon — who died Sunday at 83, as the New York Times first reported — dreamed what seemed like an impossible dream: to play for the Globetrotters and conquer the globe. Yet, it came true.
Keep reading---> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/12/28/meadowlark-lemon-legendary-harlem-globetrotter-dead-at-83/