“The most any kid can ask for,” says [Bill] Russell, “is to succeed or fail on his merits. Success and failure are relative. Everyone doesn’t have presidential abilities and everyone can’t be an All-America. It doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a failure. My father’s a foundry worker. This doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a failure—because another person’s father is a lawyer. Society needs both. Some people are going to be laborers, but why say a man has to be a laborer because he’s black? One right we never had in this country—we never had the right to be a failure or an individual. Why if one black man fails should all black men fail? That’s what the struggle is about; whether it’s through love, as with Martin Luther King, or through pride, as with the N.A.A.C.P., or through hate, as with Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad.”