As the cab started off to the airport, one of the most unlikely alliances in GOP politics was about to take shape. Nixon needed help wooing Black voters to the GOP, and Chamberlain, the perennial all-star, was eager to make his mark in politics. Soon, Chamberlain was being announced as an adviser to the campaign on “community relations.” By the time the Republican National Convention hit Miami that August, the NBA’s MVP had become the highest-profile Black surrogate in Nixon’s campaign.
Chamberlain’s role at the convention was specific: to attract minority voters by endorsing an experiment in economic separatism called Black Capitalism. Nixon hoped it would be seen as an answer for the violence that was gripping America’s cities. Instead, the GOP cemented its slide in support among African American voters that lingered more than 50 years.
Nixon’s political career had been built on a strong relationship with the Black electorate. When he ran for president against John F. Kennedy in 1960, he won 32 percent of the Black vote, a high-water mark for the GOP that would never again be touched. But by 1968, his popularity among that group was slipping. Trying to keep white Southerners from flocking to George Wallace, the pro-segregationist third-party candidate, Nixon started embracing ever harsher law-and-order rhetoric. The Miami Herald described Nixon’s proposal for a war on crime as a “militant, hardline parade of all the word weapons Wallace has been brandishing.”
As late as July 1968, polls showed Nixon trailing his Democratic rival, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, by 5 points in a head-to-head matchup. If he wanted to make up the difference, his advisers warned, he’d need to get at least a quarter of the urban Black vote. And he had an opportunity: Riots were burning America’s cities and disillusionment with establishment Democratics was at an all-time high. In a special report entitled “Why Political Parties Need Black Voters,” Jet magazine noted that “the Democrats boast one of the smallest sets of black campaigners in history.”
Chamberlain needed something from Nixon, too. At 32, and entering his ninth year in the NBA, he was restless. He had won an NBA championship and owned stakes in racehorses, restaurants and real estate. But what he really wanted was political relevance — specifically the kind that his archrival, Bill Russell of the Boston Celtics, seemed to wield so effortlessly as a progressive.
The two men were political mirror images. Russell experienced such racism in Boston — his house was once ransacked, and feces smeared on his bed — that he became a committed organizer and activist. Chamberlain, less comfortable in the spotlight, believed change was better wrought through the quieter course of capital investment.