Via Politico, a look at how – at the Republican National Convention in 1968 – Richard Nixon and the world’s biggest basketball star launched a bold plan to win over Black voters skeptical of the Democratic Party. But it turned out to be an illusion:

When an aide spotted the taxi, he told Nixon to turn right at the corner where it sat idling and let the marchers continue without him. Chamberlain, who was beside the former vice president, looked at the Oldsmobile as if his own prayer had been answered. “Can I get a ride with you?” he asked.

A minute later, the taxi driver looked in his rearview mirror in disbelief. That couldn’t possibly be Richard Nixon and Wilt Chamberlain getting into his back seat.

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.

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.

Critics on the left accused Chamberlain of giving Republicans a permission structure to attack Russell and other vanguards of the sports world. And his decision to go to work for Nixon was widely derided. But Chamberlain was very much in step with a wing of the Civil Rights Movement that was reassessing its priorities after a summer of race riots and police crackdowns. With Democrats dragged down by the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson’s bombshell announcement he wouldn’t seek a second term, some Black leaders were asking whether they should test the waters and eye new leverage with the Republican Party.

Today, more than a half century later, polls suggest a remarkably similar inflection point. A New York Times/Siena poll of registered voters taken just before the June 28 presidential debate found that many as 30 percent of African American voters are willing to cast a ballot for former President Donald Trump in a direct match-up with President Joe Biden. He won just 6 percent of the Black vote in 2016, and 8 percent in 2020, according to national surveys.

As The New York Times has noted: “Black voters are more disconnected from the Democratic Party than they have been in decades, frustrated with what many see as inaction on their political priorities.”

It’s a line that could have been written in 1968, when Nixon arrived in Miami with an economic plan for those voters, and the most famous basketball player in the world to help sell it.

Though Chamberlain played basketball in Philadelphia, he spent most of his down time in a jazz club he owned in Harlem. Alongside The Cotton Club and the Apollo Theater, Small’s Paradise was part of the Harlem Renaissance. Malcolm X, who worked as one of its waiters in the ’40s, wrote, “No Negro place of business had ever impressed me so much.” A decade later, Paul Robeson and Albert Einstein stopped by to help celebrate W.E.B. DuBois’ 83rd birthday.

In 1961, however, Smalls was bankrupt, and Chamberlain bought it with a partner for just $25,000. Following his games in Philly, he’d drive back to New York and pull up to the renamed Big Wilt’s Smalls Paradise in a Volkswagen Bug, customized so he could steer from the back seat.

Smalls was at the intersection of art and culture in Harlem, and art and culture was suffused with politics. Upstairs from the club, for instance, was the national headquarters of the Congress of Racial Equality, where a lawyer named Floyd McKissick was determined to shake up things.

CORE had spent decades as a dependable ally of the nonviolent protest movement. But McKissick, an organizer from North Carolina who’d just been installed as director, wanted a makeover. In Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. was pushing for full economic integration with his Poor People’s Campaign. But McKissick wanted to go in the opposite direction. Rather than expand Black influence in a white economy, he wanted to separate the two by having the federal government invest in “new cities that could be built to be owned and controlled by Black People.”

He called his philosophy Black Capitalism.

As his son, Floyd McKissick Jr., told me, “One of the things my dad did was try to define, What is Black power? What is it that you’re fighting for? First, you want to get power at the ballot box. You want to elect Black elected officials. But another important part was economic power. When he talked about Black Capitalism, it was about getting that capital, that green power in the hands of Black people.”

Every so often, after leaving his club, Chamberlain would pass McKissick coming into work. Eventually McKissick invited Chamberlain to a salon he held in his living room where prominent Harlem figures, actor Ossie Davis and U.S. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell among them, debated politics and policy.

Chamberlain had plenty of reason to warm to McKissick’s views about “green power.” A few years earlier, the co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers had promised him a quarter stake in the team, worth about $3 million. But when he suddenly died, the remaining partner reneged on the unwritten promise. Embittered and disillusioned, Chamberlain later wrote, “I’d broken my own records year after year. I’d even been on a championship team. What else could I do? With my [disgruntled] attitude toward Philadelphia, I just wasn’t in the mood to work hard at dreaming up some new goal.”

Black Capitalism, however, was something he could get excited about.

In 1968, Richard Nixon was parsing McKissick’s writings, too.

After his loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960, Nixon moved from California to New York, took a job as a Wall Street lawyer, and played the loyal party soldier. Following Barry Goldwater’s disastrous campaign in ’64, Nixon logged 127,000 miles stumping for candidates in 40 states to put the fractured party back together. The GOP’s success in the ’66 midterms put Nixon back on the political map and gave his comeback as a presidential candidate the air of inevitability.

Nixon understood the challenges in the primary. While Wallace was pulling voters from the far-right, Nelson Rockefeller was holding down the establishment center. California’s governor, Ronald Reagan, meanwhile, was lurking on the periphery, ready to step in if either faltered. The candidate needed a way to leverage his longstanding ties to the civil rights community, and the Black middle class.

Nixon began road-testing a message in the fall of 1967 in Reader’s Digest. The economic inequality that caused race riots in cities like Detroit and Newark could be fixed, he wrote. The real problem was the radical leftists who chanted slogans like, Burn, baby, burn. “Sooner or later,” he continued, “the white community is going to retaliate. All the patient work will be undone, and the majority of law-abiding Negroes are going to take the heat.”

The debate over economic integration versus separation dates back to at least the late 19th century, and by the mid-1960s was a popular rallying point for Elijah Muhammad at the Nation of Islam. “Build your own homes, schools, hospitals and factories,” he’d tell audiences. But it took until April 1968 for Nixon to explicitly employ “Black Capitalism” on the stump, using it in a radio spot to call for a “new approach.” As Kelefa Sanneh has noted in The New Yorker, that “speech helped popularize the term, and it attracted the attention of a number of Black leaders, including McKissick, who met with Nixon the next month.”

“My father knew Nixon from the time he was Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president,” McKissick Jr., told me. “So, when my father spoke of black entrepreneurship, it resonated with Nixon.”

Part of the reason was that the idea was politically pliable. Writing in the Journal of Black Studies, academics Lewis Randolph and Robert E. Weems Jr., quote the historian Stephen Ambrose as concluding that the platform resembled a domestic version of Nixon’s détente policy toward Russia and China. Just as Nixon dangled concessions to America’s Cold War rivals, “he offered African Americans the notion of Black capitalism as an incentive to move away from the notion of Burn Baby Burn.”

In the summer of 1968, with Nixon a heavy favorite for the nomination but taking fire from Wallace and Humphrey, the campaign decided to move the message onto television. In its ad, a camera pans across a photo montage of burned out, inner-city neighborhoods while the candidate announces, “The face of the ghetto is the face of despair. It is a face whose eyes show only hopelessness. If we hope to light this face, we must rescue the ghetto from despair.” As the camera pulls out to photos of plaintive faces, Nixon continues: “But not with more promises. Not with the old solution. The old handout. We must offer a new solution. The hand up.”

Yet the commercial got shelved, never to be seen. One problem, as Joe McGinniss noted in The Selling of the President 1968, was that the ad agency behind it had trouble getting a final shot. It sent a white photographer to Harlem to take uplifting photos to run with Nixon’s hopeful voiceover. But after only an hour, the shooter called a campaign aide to say that once he revealed he was working for Nixon, “it was suggested to him that he remove himself and his camera from the vicinity.”

The footage from the ad was placed in a tin can, leaving the job of selling Black Capitalism largely in the hands of Chamberlain.

Because he’d hurried out of Los Angeles without packing correctly, Chamberlain made his first order of business when he arrived at the Miami Hilton purchasing $10,000 in clothes from a boutique in the lobby, which he promptly charged to the campaign. (Dwight Chapin, a former aide to Nixon, told me that Nixon’s finance chair, Maurice Stans, hit the roof when he got the tab, threatening to sue Chamberlain before being convinced to just pay it.)

The next day, Chamberlain hosted a cocktail party for newsmen and delegates on a borrowed yacht. As he told Rowan, the syndicated columnist, “I think Black Americans are foolish to move so overwhelmingly into one party that takes them for granted and remain so little-involved in the other party that it figures it’s hopeless to woo them.”

Later, in Chamberlain’s hospitality suite at the Hilton, the sportswriter Red Smith watched him continue his charm offensive. “He was beautiful,” Smith marveled. “Seven feet of shimmering silk lent the famous torso an Edwardian silhouette in golden brown.”

In the sports world, the backlash to his appearance at the GOP convention was swift. Harry Edwards, the human rights activist with deep roots in the Olympic movement, complained to the Los Angeles Times, “Wilt’s killing his own image. He’s made his pile, now he’s forgetting the ones who haven’t made theirs.” A columnist for the New York Post was snarkier, writing, “He will be so affluent under his new contract, he can afford to be a Republican.”

Chamberlain saw the criticisms as condescending, what he called “a supercilious putdown of my intelligence.” In fact, he remained committed to the campaign until it became clear that Black Capitalism was only part of the reason he was in Miami. As it turned out, Nixon had another product for him to sell.

Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, ran as a progressive, pro-integration Republican in 1966. But in April 1968, after eight days of the worst rioting the nation had seen, Agnew assumed a different posture by calling in 10,000 National Guardsmen to make more than 6,000 arrests in Baltimore. When he was unveiled as Nixon’s running mate at the convention in Miami, he was so polarizing that Maryland’s Black delegation threatened to walk out.

A sportswriter for the Sentinel who was also working for Nixon, Brad Pye Jr., got tasked with using Chamberlain to keep those delegates in check. At the convention, he’d prepared a memo entitled: “How to help tell the story that ‘Nixon is the one’ in Black communities across America.” Among the bullet points, one stood out: “Agnew Scores 99 [out of 100] on Civil Rights.”

In a private get-to-know-you session, Chamberlain pleaded with the governor to modulate his language. As Chamberlain later wrote in his book, he told the Agnew to use “Black” instead of “Negro” and to add “justice” when speaking about “law and order.” But Agnew had no intention of censoring himself, as a post-convention press event in San Diego in front of civil rights leaders, dubbed “Bridges to Human Dignity,” made clear.

Appearing with Chamberlain for a filmed spot beforehand, Nixon gently steered his surrogate on message. “Wilt, there’s a lot of unrest among young people, particularly in the Black community,” he began. “I know you’ve done a lot of work with these folks. Give me an idea. What is it we can do to give them more hope?”

Leaning back in a crisp blue suit, his hand placed thoughtfully on his knee, Chamberlain ventured, “Actually, I feel as though there are many young Negros who are in a position to go into business for themselves. They’re definitely qualified. What they need is some help, some loans that maybe will stimulate their interest. If you could direct the money that’s being appropriated toward welfare to personal, private business for Negros to be their own entrepreneurs, it would be ten times more valuable than just putting it into welfare.”

Chamberlain’s message was tailor-made for a receptive audience. But the candidate couldn’t get out of his own way. “Do you think a lot of these young Negros are going to be able to make it if they get this chance?” Nixon asked, as if he’d never met a single one. “Have you talked to them? Do they have the drive that you have? Is it there just to be uncovered? Or is this something that’s going to take an awfully long time?”

Chamberlain looked utterly lost trying to answer. He replied, “As I said before, they do need some help as far as loans. But if given a chance, I think they’re ready to go out there and start their own businesses.”

At the hourlong summit that followed, things went even farther downhill. Referring to Agnew, Chamberlain would recall, “That dumb f–k must have said ‘Negro’ and ‘law and order’ 10,000 times. I’m sitting right there, looking at him, and sliding further down in my chair every minute.” The Associated Press described the Black participants at the event as “openly unhappy” when Nixon and his running mate left early.

As Chamberlain’s longtime girlfriend, Linda Huey, told me about his feelings for Agnew, “Wilt said, ‘I’m outta here. I’m not working for that guy.’ The end of that sentence would actually be, ‘I’m not working for that racist MF.’”

Upon returning to the NBA, Chamberlain found it harder and harder to defend Nixon, especially to colleagues like Elgin Baylor, his new teammate and an enthusiastic Humphrey man. “The superstars went round and round that fall on planes and in locker rooms, about the relative merits of the two candidates, at first in their usual bantering way and then, as Election Day neared, more and more seriously,” Merv Harris, a beat writer for the Lakers, would recall. “Sometimes, the bantering turned into furious shouting matches and, often as not, it was Chamberlain who was shouting loudest.”

The Nixon campaign still trumpeted Chamberlain’s support. “Wilt is one of our most active workers,” a staffer told the press in September. But in the home stretch, it was hard to hide the fact that he was missing in action. The campaign’s most visible Black supporter no-showed at a GOP gala in Buffalo and failed to materialize for a much-hyped swing through seven states. With Election Day nearing, Jackie Robinson used his syndicated column to ask what was on a lot of minds: “Has anyone heard what happened to Wilt Chamberlain?”

‘I had about as much chance to influence [Nixon] as the Pope’

Chamberlain, who died of heart failure in 1999, never publicly regretted his support for Nixon, though did attempt to rationalize the way he was used. Conceding in his 1973 memoir that “I was pretty naïve” and “I had about as much chance to influence [Nixon] as the Pope,” he addressed the withering criticism from outside the GOP that clung to him — and would until his death. “Does that mean [Nixon] exploited me?” he wrote. With more than a touch of fatalism, he answered, “Sure. All endorsements and testimonials are exploitation, though.”

Money started flowing to historically Black colleges; the General Services Administration began prioritizing contracts to Black-owned businesses; African American generals were promoted in the military. But as Randolph and Weems note in the Journal of Black Studies, Nixon always had an ulterior motive, and “the discourse regarding Black capitalism [mainly] helped Nixon accomplish his larger ideological objective of ‘containing’ potential domestic Black radicalism.”

By the time he ran for reelection in 1972, Nixon’s signature domestic policy was a war on drugs that had hollowed out communities of color. Going back to his ’68 playbook on Black Capitalism, he approached Chamberlain’s Harlem mentor, Floyd McKissick, for help. The CORE leader hadn’t supported Nixon in ’68. But he was in the midst of building a Black-owned community near Durham, North Carolina, that he called Soul City, and was eager for financing. When the president arranged for him to get $14 million in urban development grants, McKissick was only too happy to be a surrogate. In his book about Soul City, the author Thomas Healy notes that the grant “raised more than a few eyebrows, with conservatives questioning Nixon’s judgement and prominent Black leaders accusing McKissick of selling out.”

One reason for the skepticism was the pervasive feeling that Soul City would never work. (It didn’t.) In The Myth of Black Capitalism, a landmark 1970 work that has just been re-released, Earl Ofari Hutchinson argued that creating a new class of Black capitalists wouldn’t do anything to correct the systemic imbalance that leaves today’s Black households with just 30 percent of the net worth of non-Black ones.

Yet the allure of Black Capitalism persists, with entrepreneurs from Jay-Z to Killer Mike frequently appropriating its language. Maybe the closest anyone has come to actually building on McKissick’s work was Ermias Joseph Asghedom, aka Nipsey Hustle, who was remaking a swath of South Los Angeles when he got murdered in front of his boutique in 2019.