Richard Lapchick
American activist
Richard E. Lapchick is a human rights activist and sportswriter.
Early years
Lapchick's life passion began in Germany at the age of 14 while touring the Nazi internment camps of Dachau. While he was in Europe during the 1960 Summer Olympic Games, he discovered the profound impact that sports can have across all lines of race, color, creed, and religion. It was then that his dream to use sport as a vehicle for social change was born.
It reinforced his early experiences witnessing public hostility toward his father Joe Lapchick when, as the coach of the New York Knicks, he signed Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, the first African-American player signed in the NBA in 1950. His earliest memory as a five-year-old was seeing an image of his father swinging from a tree across the street from his house where people were picketing against the inclusion of a black athlete in a "white" team.
Activist work
In the 1970s, Lapchick started fighting apartheid and led the boycott of South African participation in international sports events, the Davis Cup in particular. Lapchick was physically attacked in his college office in February 1978 just as it looked like the Davis Cup was going to be canceled. He was attacked by men who proceeded to carve N-I-G-E-R into his stomach. Lapchick worked for the United Nations from 1978 to 1984.
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This entry incorporates text from “Richard Lapchick” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.