American Black History - Pride, 8095 W Sahara Ave, Las Vegas, NV 89117, United States (2026)

05/06/2026

Sammy Davis Jr. raised one and a half million in 1965 dollars for the civil rights movement in one Broadway night. April 4, 1965, the Majestic Theater, exactly one month after Bloody Sunday.

Sixty-three performers played for free, the mayor of New York bought the first ticket, and the money went to SCLC, CORE, SNCC, and James Reeb's family. That is what answering Selma looked like with a stage and a microphone.

March 4, 1965. A dressing room on West 44th Street in Manhattan, in the back of the Majestic Theater.

Two men sat close, knees almost touching, and let the day go for a second.

One of them was Martin Luther King Jr. The Nobel Prize was four months old.

Selma was eight weeks of crisis behind him and three days of catastrophe in front of him, though he did not know that yet.

The other was Sammy Davis Jr. He was still in costume from the show that had just ended.

He had run on that stage minutes earlier in a boxing robe, doing eight songs and four solos and a choreographed fight finale, eight times a week for the last four months.

His voice was already wrecked. His marriage was already in trouble.

Behind the laugh in that photograph was a song. Just minutes before, Sammy had stood on the Majestic stage and torn into a gospel number called "No More."

"Well, you had your way. No more."

"Well, it ain't your day. No more."

"Well, I'm standin' up, I ain't on the floor." "I ain't bowin' down no more."

That was the number Martin Luther King had come for. He had been to "Golden Boy" before.

Of all the songs in the show, that one was the one he kept coming back to, the one his friends remembered him talking about, the one historians later recorded as his favorite.

It was the song of a Black man in Harlem who had finished asking nicely.

When the curtain came down, King and his small party were walked back through the corridor to Sammy's dressing room.

A dressing room is a strange kind of room. It is the one place in any theater that belongs to the performer and not the audience.

The mirror is rimmed with bulbs that make every flaw visible. The air smells like cold cream and sweat and the powder they pat onto Black skin to keep it from shining under stage lights.

It was inside that small private room, with the door closed and the show over, that an Associated Press photographer named Dave Pickoff lifted his camera.

Sammy's head was thrown back. King was leaning in.

Both of them were laughing at something we will never know.

The thing about that laugh is the weight it had to push against to exist.

Sammy was carrying a stage that wanted to kill him every night, a marriage to a white Swedish actress that had brought death threats to his door, and a Black America that often was not sure he belonged to them.

That last part was on him. The Rat Pack years and the long stretch he had spent passing through white rooms had left their fingerprints.

King was carrying a Nobel Prize that the FBI was using as a pretext to bug his hotel rooms, a movement that was about to lose more of its young people in Alabama, and a body that had not slept properly in months.

Yet here they were. Laughing.

Sammy himself once tried to explain what got him into rooms like this one. He wrote it down in his 1965 autobiography, "Yes I Can," which was being dictated at four in the morning during that very run of "Golden Boy."

"My talent was the weapon," he wrote. "The power."

"The way for me to fight. It was the one way I might hope to affect a man's thinking."

The dressing room photograph is what that sentence looks like in the flesh.

Three days after that photograph was taken, on March 7, 1965, Sunday morning in Selma, Alabama, six hundred people walked out of Brown Chapel and tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

State troopers and a county posse on horseback drove them back in clouds of tear gas.

Amelia Boynton was photographed unconscious on the pavement, and the image went around the world. John Lewis took an injury that day that he carried in his body for the rest of his life.

They called it Bloody Sunday.

When the news reached New York, Sammy did the thing that men with eight-show-a-week contracts almost never do.

He asked his producer Hilly Elkins to give him time off. Not a night off.

Time. He wanted to fly to Alabama and walk.

On the night of March 24, on a rain-soaked field at the City of St. Jude in Montgomery, the last campsite before the marchers reached the state capitol, Sammy stood on a flatbed trailer that had been turned into a stage.

Twenty-five thousand people were spread out in the mud. The bottoms of his trousers were soaked.

Harry Belafonte had chartered the plane that brought him and most of the others in. The bill for the evening, ten thousand dollars in 1965 money, Belafonte paid himself.

Sammy sang for marchers who had walked fifty-four miles in the cold. Tony Bennett sang.

Joan Baez sang. Nina Simone sang.

Mahalia Jackson, who had sung at the March on Washington, sang for them again.

They called it the Stars for Freedom Rally. They sang for the Black women in tennis shoes who had walked the highway, for the white seminary students who had come down on Greyhound buses, for the Unitarian minister James Reeb who had lost his life two weeks before in a Selma alley.

They sang for Jimmie Lee Jackson, the twenty-six-year-old church deacon whose death in Marion, Alabama, on February 26 was the reason any of them were marching in the first place.

The next morning, King delivered "How Long, Not Long" from the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.

Then Sammy flew back to New York. He had an idea.

Exactly one month after the laugh in the dressing room, on April 4, 1965, the Majestic Theater on West 44th Street turned itself into something else.

That night the building did not host "Golden Boy." The Shubert Organization, which owned the theater, had donated the use of the entire venue.

The marquee read "Broadway Answers Selma."

Sammy produced it with Hilly Elkins, and Sammy hosted it. The mayor of New York, Robert F. Wagner Jr., bought the very first ticket.

Ticket prices ran from five dollars at the back of the house to a thousand dollars in the orchestra. Carol Burnett came.

Barbra Streisand came. Eli Wallach.

A young actor named Martin Sheen, who would later play the federal judge in the movie "Selma," came too. Sixty-three performers in total, none of them paid a dollar.

Earlier that day, five thousand people had filled the streets of the Theater District for a rally before the show even began.

Sammy spoke at a breakfast at Temple Emanu-El that morning and compared the treatment of Black people in the Deep South to what had been done to the Jews in Germany.

The benefit raised one hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a single night.

Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly one and a half million dollars today, raised in one room, in one evening, in the same theater where Sammy had been laughing with King exactly thirty-one days before.

The money was split between the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the family of James Reeb.

Then Sammy did something the Wikipedia entries tend to skip over.

Two months after the benefit, he walked into the Freedom National Bank in Harlem, the Black-owned bank that Jackie Robinson had helped found in 1964, and he deposited seventy-seven thousand dollars of the proceeds there.

Half the money he had raised, sitting in a Black bank in Harlem, doing the slow work of Black capital while the rest went south to the movement.

He did not have to do that. He chose to.

The deposit was the quietest decision he made in 1965, and it was the one that says the most about him.

That theater on West 44th Street is still standing. It is now the home of "The Phantom of the Opera," the longest-running Broadway show in history.

Most of the tourists walking past it have no idea that this is the building where a Nobel laureate and a Jewish Black entertainer with a glass eye sat in a dressing room and laughed, three days before Bloody Sunday.

Three years and one day later, on April 4, 1968, King would be killed on a balcony in Memphis.

The date was exactly three years from the night the Majestic Theater raised one and a half million dollars in his name.

Sammy was guest-hosting "The Tonight Show" that week. When the news came in, he did what King would have asked him to do.

"We can't answer King's assassination with violence," he said.

"That would be the worst tribute we could pay him."

Sammy died in 1990 of throat cancer, in his bed in Beverly Hills, owing the IRS millions.

The voice that had carried "No More" eight times a week through 1964 and 1965 was gone by the end.

But the photograph is still there.

A dressing room on West 44th Street. The mirror lights still on.

Sammy's head thrown back. King leaning in.

The door closed against the world for one minute that nobody in the room thought they would have to remember, until they did.

05/06/2026

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05/06/2026

Even years after leaving office, Barack Obama can't escape the weight of public expectation. People constantly demand he speak out against Trump, weigh in on every political crisis, and continue carrying the torch of Democratic leadership. But at home, Michelle Obama has had enough of the endless commentary requests and campaign appearances that pull her husband back into the political spotlight.

Obama himself admits the tension is real. He tries to be selective about when he speaks publicly, resisting the urge to become just another political pundit. Yet the pressure never stops coming from party leaders, media outlets, and supporters who still see him as their moral compass. Michelle, meanwhile, wants their post-presidency life to actually feel like retirement from the intense political duties that consumed their family for decades.

This reveals something we rarely consider about former presidents and their families. The job never truly ends, even when it officially does. Public figures carry invisible burdens that follow them home, creating strain in the most private spaces of their lives. The Obamas' situation raises an uncomfortable question: how much should we expect from our former leaders, and at what personal cost to their marriages and family peace?

05/06/2026

Martine Morency refused the doctors’ warning about her triplet pregnancy at 30 weeks after they said the babies likely would not all survive. She and her husband put their faith in God instead, and nearly two decades later, all three of her children have graduated from college together.

The Morency triplets reached a proud milestone this spring at Oakwood University in Huntsville, Alabama. Gabriel, Ethanael,and Janelle completed their degrees at the historically Black school. They chose different majors and friend groups, yet supported one another throughout.

Their close bond made the moment even sweeter. “Before we had anybody else, there were our siblings,” Ethanael said. “We had each other to help each other through.”

Their mother said, “We have watched them do all the things that man said were probably impossible. This has been a gift that God has given us.”

Janelle plans to become a trauma surgeon, Ethanael is pursuing a master's in cybersecurity, and Gabriel will attend Johns Hopkins for a master's in electrical engineering.

04/06/2026

Annie Lee painted the most recognizable woman in all of Black art and gave her no face at all. It was the closest thing to a self-portrait she ever made, and she still left the features blank.

She wanted every worn-out woman in America to be able to climb inside that picture. That empty face was always meant to be yours.

There is a woman sitting on the edge of a bed in that painting, and she has no face. Where her features should be there is only a smooth brown oval, head tipped down, shoulders folded toward the floor.

She is not crying and she is not asleep. She is just gathering herself, the way you do before a day you never asked for.

You know exactly how she feels anyway. That is the strange power of Blue Monday, and none of it was an accident.

The woman who painted that picture understood it from the inside. Her name was Annie Lee, and for a long stretch of her life she was the one sitting on the edge of the bed before dawn.

Annie Frances Lee was born in Gadsden, Alabama in 1935 and grew up in Chicago. Her mother was a seamstress who believed every child in the house should learn to take care of themselves, so Annie learned early to cook, to clean, and to sew.

The art showed up early too. She won her first competition at ten years old and earned a free semester of study at the Art Institute of Chicago.

Everyone around her could see the gift. When she finished high school, Northwestern University offered her a four-year scholarship to come and study.

She said no. She married instead, and she raised a family, and the scholarship became one of those things a person folds up small and tucks into the back of a drawer.

So her real schooling in the subject of Blue Monday did not come from a university. It came from the life she actually lived.

Annie took a job as a clerk in the engineering department of the Chicago and North Western Railway. She was good at it, and over the years she rose to chief clerk.

It was steady, it was secure, and it paid what a family needs. It also meant a cold dark walk to the bus stop before sunrise, one Monday after another, for years on end.

One winter morning around five o'clock, she was trying to assemble herself for that walk. Chicago in deep winter does not forgive anyone, and the dark pressing against the bedroom window had a real weight to it.

She sat on the edge of her bed in the cold and did not want to move. Her body was tired in the specific way that sleep does not fix.

And in that moment a small, ordinary thought arrived that would quietly change the rest of her life. She wondered whether anyone else in the whole city felt as heavy right then as she did.

That was the entire seed of the painting. Not a grand vision of art, just one worn-out woman wondering if she was the only one.

When she finally put that morning on canvas, she made a choice that became her signature for the rest of her career. She left the face blank.

By her own account, Blue Monday was the closest thing to a self-portrait she ever made. And still she refused to give the woman her own features, or any features at all.

There was a clear reason for it. "You don't need to see a face to understand emotion," she once explained, saying she tried instead to let the movement of the body carry the feeling so anyone looking could use their own imagination.

The empty oval was an invitation. It meant the exhausted woman on the bed was not only Annie Lee, which meant she could be anyone.

A nurse coming off a double shift could find herself there. A grandmother raising grandchildren could find herself, and so could a man who dreaded Mondays exactly the way Annie did.

But Annie Lee was not willing to stay the woman on the edge of the bed forever. Somewhere in her forties, she decided that folded-up scholarship was not going to be the final word on her life.

She enrolled in night classes. She studied at Loop Junior College and then at Mundelein College, all while still reporting to the railroad every single morning.

This was not a season. It went on for eight years.

Eight years of a full day's work, then a classroom in the evening, then home to a canvas until her hands gave out. The bus stop, the office, the lecture hall, the easel, and then the bus stop again.

At the end of all of it she earned a master's degree in interdisciplinary arts education from Loyola University. She did not consider that a small thing.

"Getting my masters degree was the best thing I ever did for myself," she said. "It reopened my mind."

Painting at night had become her shelter. After the numbers and the timetables and the long workdays, the brush was the one place where the pressure finally let go of her.

In 1985, at fifty years old, Annie Lee had her first gallery show. She had been an artist in private for most of her life, and now her paintings were hanging on a public wall for strangers to walk past and judge.

She did not have to wonder for long how they would feel about it. Every piece in the show sold within four hours.

People were not simply admiring the work from a polite distance. They were recognizing it, the way you recognize your own kitchen table or the back of your own mother's hands.

Blue Monday hung among those paintings, and the demand for it was immediate and loud. To keep up, Annie allowed prints to be made of four of her originals, so that families who could never buy a painting could still hang her work in their homes.

What the buyers admired on the wall had a cost they never saw. Annie painted constantly, and her body slowly began to send her the bill.

She developed tendinitis and trouble in her spine from the long hours bent over a canvas. The fumes from the acrylic paint she used made her sick.

She kept painting through all of it. The work that wore her body down was also the work that kept the rest of her standing.

Then came 1986, and the hardest morning of Annie Lee's life had nothing to do with a clerk's shift.

Her son was killed in a car accident.

There is no way to read that sentence a second time and have it sit any easier. A woman who had spent years painting the quiet weight of ordinary Black life was now carrying a grief that no slumped shoulder or bowed head could ever hold.

She stepped back from everything. She took time away, and she sat inside the loss, because that is the only way through it.

And somewhere in that long stillness, sitting with the one thing that could never be undone, she made a decision. She was not going back to her old job.

It is worth slowing down right here, because the easy version of this story skips straight past it. The easy version says Annie Lee took a brave leap and chased her dream.

The truer version is heavier than that. She walked away from the security of that steady railroad job not in a burst of confidence, but in the middle of mourning her child, when the old life simply no longer fit the woman she had become.

"I never thought I would leave the railroad," she said later. "It was hard to leave the security, but you have to take a leap of faith."

She never went back. Blue Monday, the painting about one heavy Monday morning, had been finished a year before the heaviest morning of her life arrived, and that quiet symmetry sits at the very center of who she became.

What Annie Lee built in the years after was its own kind of answer to that grief. She became a full-time artist, opened her own gallery, and named it Annie Lee and Friends so she could give other artists wall space too.

Her style earned a name of its own. Critics called it Black Americana, scenes of everyday Black life painted with humor and tenderness and not a trace of condescension.

She painted church ladies fanning themselves in the heat. She painted children turning a double dutch rope, beauty shops, card games, and the slow unhurried theater of a Sunday morning.

"My paintings are of everyday life," she said. "I try to paint things that people can identify with."

Her figures never did get faces. Decades into her career the empty oval was still doing its quiet work, still leaving a doorway for whoever happened to be standing in front of the canvas.

Her work traveled far past Chicago. Annie Lee paintings appeared on the sets of television shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World, and her art turned up in the world of films such as Coming to America and Boomerang.

She made figurines and dolls and housewares carrying her designs, so her vision could live in homes that would never afford an original canvas. The railroad clerk had become an internationally collected artist, and she had done nearly all of it after the age of fifty.

Annie Lee died in 2014 at the age of seventy-nine, and the faceless woman on the edge of the bed outlived her, the way the truest art always outlives the hand that made it.

In 2022 the singer Lizzo recreated the exact pose of Blue Monday on national television. In 2025 a movie poster slouched a well-known actress at the edge of a bed in that same heavy morning light, and within hours people online were typing Annie Lee's name.

That is what the empty oval finally bought her. A woman once handed a scholarship she could not use, who sat worn out at five in the morning wondering if a single other soul felt the way she did, took that exact feeling and gave it to the world without a face.

And all these years later, strangers still lean toward that picture and find their own face waiting in the space where Annie Lee refused to paint one.

04/06/2026

Meet Chiamaka, Somto, and Anita Anigbogu - triplets who just made history at the University of Houston. After four incredible years, they walked across the same graduation stage on the same day, but each carrying a different degree. Chiamaka earned her economics degree, Somto graduated with management information systems, and Anita completed computer information systems. Three sisters, three distinct career paths, one unshakable bond.

For four years, these remarkable young women proved that you can grow independently while still leaning on each other. They navigated college life together, supported each other through late-night study sessions, celebrated each other's victories, and pushed through challenges as a team. While their academic journeys took them down different halls and into different classrooms, their connection remained their greatest strength.

As they step into their professional futures - economics, tech management, and computer systems - their paths will diverge even further. Chiamaka might find herself analyzing market trends, Somto could be optimizing business technology solutions, and Anita may be designing information systems. But no matter where their careers take them, they'll always have what they started with: each other. This is what family winning looks like - not just one success story, but three brilliant futures launched from the same foundation of love and support.

04/06/2026

In the late 1960s, an African American woman named Clara Hale opened her home in Harlem NYC to babies born addicted to drugs.

Mother Hale began by taking in one infant in her own apartment. She saw a need that many others ignored, and that small act of care grew into Hale House.

During her life, she personally cared for nearly one thousand children over the decades. Even during the AIDS crisis, she continued welcoming affected babies into her care.

"Hold them, rock them, love them, and tell them how great they are," she said. Her work became a lasting legacy of compassion in the Harlem community.

03/06/2026

Julius Erving carried the championship trophy into a bathroom in Los Angeles. He set it on the sink and stood over it alone, sweat still on his uniform, the Forum loud through the door behind him.

After seven years of trying to win this thing in the NBA, Doc needed one minute by himself before he gave the world its photograph. Seven years bought him that one minute.

Julius Erving walked the Larry O'Brien Trophy into a bathroom on the night of May 31, 1983. He set it down on the sink in the visitors' locker room at the Forum in Inglewood, California, and stood over it.

He was thirty-three years old and finally a champion. He had been chasing this trophy for seven years in the NBA, and he needed a minute alone with it before he gave it back to the cameras and the noise.

Outside in the locker room, the Philadelphia 76ers were screaming. Champagne was running across the carpet, towels were flying, and Moses Malone, the most reserved man in basketball, was mugging for the television cameras like Muhammad Ali.

Doc had spent six seasons in Philadelphia trying to win this thing. He came over from the ABA in the summer of 1976 already a legend, two championships with the New York Nets, the most electrifying basketball player alive.

The city was promised a title. The 76ers won the first two games of the 1977 NBA Finals against the Portland Trail Blazers, then lost four straight, the kind of collapse that sticks to a player for the rest of his career.

The team that year had George McGinnis, Lloyd Free, Darryl Dawkins, Doug Collins, and Erving, and the press treated them like a circus act. Too many stars, not enough basketball.

Years later Erving admitted that loss became part of what drove him. He was the only character left from that team by the time the Sixers finally got it done.

In 1980 the Lakers came to Philadelphia with a rookie named Magic Johnson and took the title in six games. In 1981 the Boston Celtics came back from down 3-1 and ended Philadelphia's run in the Eastern Conference Finals.

A year later the Lakers came again. When the series was over, Erving sat in front of his locker and said it hurt more than any other year, that it was very painful, and he could not explain it.

By that summer he had become the most popular player in the league, the once-villain in the bandanna everyone now wanted to see hold a trophy. The league had spent six years watching him not win.

Then on August 29, 1982, the phone rang in assistant general manager John Nash's house in suburban Philadelphia. Harold Katz, the new owner, was calling from a hotel out West.

Katz had owned the team for barely a year and had one instruction. He wanted Moses Malone, the Houston Rockets center who had just won his second MVP, and he wanted Nash to set the meeting before Moses left for Europe in three days.

The 76ers signed Malone to an offer sheet for six years and $13.2 million. No center had ever been paid like that, and nobody in team sports had ever been paid like that.

Houston had fifteen days to match the offer and could not afford to. On September 15, 1982, the Rockets traded Moses to Philadelphia for Caldwell Jones and a first-round pick.

At his first press conference at Veterans Stadium, Moses sat in front of the Philadelphia microphones and said something that did not sound like a two-time MVP talking. "I know it's Doc's show," he said, "and I'm happy to be part of Doc's show."

Then he added the line that landed him in Philadelphia for good. "Doc'll still be the show, but maybe now it'll be a better show."

He was twenty-seven years old, the best center in basketball for four years, and the best rebounder alive. He arrived saying he was here to fit in.

Moses Malone grew up on St. Matthew Street in Petersburg, Virginia, raised by his mother Mary, a cashier at Safeway who sang in the choir at Community Independent Methodist Church. There was no father in the house and no money.

Moses had a speech impediment and almost never talked in school. What he did instead was carry a basketball out of the house every afternoon and dribble it up Short Harding Street and across Virginia Avenue and onto the school yard, and stay there until two in the morning.

By his senior year at Petersburg High he had led the Crimson Wave to a fifty-game winning streak and back-to-back state titles. The first ballplayer in modern history to skip college and turn professional, he signed his ABA contract in the summer of 1974 at the age of nineteen.

His hands were so small he could not palm a basketball. The greatest rebounder of his generation, the man Bob McAdoo would later say was scarier on the boards than Dennis Rodman, could not get his fingers around the ball.

What he could do was position himself. He read every shot before it left the shooter's hand, knew every angle off every rim, and worked harder for thirty-six seconds of every minute than the man guarding him.

Robert Parish of the Boston Celtics said Moses got the deepest post-up of anybody he ever played against. Cunningham would later put it more simply, that the difference from the year before was Moses.

Doc was the artist, Moses was the foreman. One of them flew through the air, the other one swept the floor, and together they did not lose to the Lakers anymore.

The Sixers went 65-17 in the regular season. Erving made his seventh straight All-Star team and was named All-Star Game MVP.

Moses won his third league MVP, the only player ever to take the award in consecutive seasons with two different franchises. The pieces were finally lined up.

In May, Erving sat with a New York Times reporter and said something he had not been able to say in seven years. "I don't have to do heroics anymore," he told the writer.

That was the whole thing. Moses had taken the weight off Doc.

There were years when Erving had to put up shots with two men hanging on him because no one else was going to score. Now there was only one defender on him, and the pass was always open.

Before the playoffs began, a reporter asked Moses how the postseason would go. The kid from Petersburg with the stutter, who had grown into the league's most dominant center, mumbled.

What came out, in the Southern voice he carried with him his whole life, was "fo, fo, fo." Four, four, four, meaning the Sixers would sweep all three rounds, twelve games to a championship.

He was almost right. Philadelphia swept the New York Knicks in the conference semifinals.

They lost a single game in Milwaukee in Game 4 of the Eastern Conference Finals, the only game they would lose all postseason. Then they swept the defending champion Lakers in four straight.

The rings would later be inscribed "Fo, Fi, Fo." Four, five, four, the closest anyone had ever come to a clean run through an NBA postseason.

Game 4 of the Finals at the Forum was where Doc finally took it. With less than two minutes left and the Lakers up by two, Erving made a steal at half court and threw down a dunk he later described as a no-doubt-about-it.

A minute later Maurice Cheeks hit him on a fast break, and Doc finished the three-point play. The Sixers led 109-107.

After Kareem Abdul-Jabbar made one free throw to cut it to one with forty-two seconds left, the shot clock ran down to six. Erving looked across the Lakers defense from the top of the key and saw nothing open.

Erving told reporters afterward what happened next. "There wasn't time to drive, there wasn't time to swing the ball, so I let it fly," he said.

The ball cut through the net like a knife. "I didn't find that shot," he said in the locker room, "it found me."

The Lakers folded. Moments later Maurice Cheeks, six-foot-one with hands so small that Bobby Jones did not know he could dunk, finished the game with a fast-break jam that left his own teammates speechless.

Moses had twenty-four points and twenty-three rebounds in the clincher. Andrew Toney scored twenty-three, Erving had twenty-one, and Bobby Jones came off the bench and made six of seven shots.

Across the four games Moses outrebounded Kareem more than two to one. Cunningham looked across the floor at his team afterward and said it the only way he knew how, that they toyed with people, just toyed with them.

Then they went to the locker room. Moses, the man who almost never let the public see anything, stood up and started imitating Muhammad Ali for the cameras, posturing and roaring like a heavyweight.

For Moses Malone that was an emotional release. It was a rare and touching thing to witness.

Earl Cureton, the backup center, walked over with a friend and introduced him to Moses. "I want you to meet Al Capone Malone," Cureton said, "he steals basketball games."

Moses' mouth curled into a wide smile. "That's me," he said quietly, "the gangster of basketball."

When the noise died down, he sat in front of his locker and said the line that separated him from every other star in the league. "This was for the Doc," Moses told the reporters.

"I wanted to be able to say that I played on a world championship team with Dr. J." That was Moses, the Finals MVP, the dominant force of all four games.

What he wanted out of his championship was to be able to tell people he had won it with Julius Erving. That was when Doc picked up the trophy and walked into the bathroom.

He needed a minute. There was a sink and a mirror and the glittering Larry O'Brien Trophy in his arms, and the photographer Manny Millan caught him there in the visitors' lavatory at the Forum, towering over the porcelain in his sweaty Sixers uniform, finally alone with the thing he had carried his whole career toward.

Two days later, an estimated 1.7 million people watched the Sixers parade down Broad Street to Veterans Stadium. Erving stepped to the microphones over the fifty-yard line and gave full credit where it belonged.

"We had most of the parts," he told the crowd, "and then we went out and for cold cash we got a hard hat." Moses stood behind him, mostly silent, the way he always was.

When asked later how the team had finally done it, Erving did not give a coach's answer. "We did it the long way, and we did it the hard way," he said, "but we did it the best way."

Moses Malone went into the Hall of Fame in 2001 in his first year of eligibility. He died on September 13, 2015, of cardiovascular disease, in a hotel room in Norfolk, Virginia, sixty years old, on the morning he was supposed to play in a charity golf tournament.

The rings the Sixers wore home that summer of 1983 still say "Fo, Fi, Fo" on the inside band. The trophy they won is still the last NBA championship the city of Philadelphia has won.

Forty-three years later, that bathroom photograph at the Forum is still the best picture anyone has of what it cost Julius Erving to finally hold it. A man, a sink, and a piece of metal he chased his whole life.

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American Black History - Pride

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