How Did The Change Perry Wallace's Life

Beaten to the limit with anything ranging from coins to daggers, Perry Wallace changed the history of African Americans in basketball forever. Strong Inside is a biography on Perry Wallace’s life that takes place in Nashville, Tennessee written by Andrew Maraniss, who spoke to Perry himself. Although Perry Wallace changed the course of history forever, the way he was treated and how he felt outweighed the results for him personally. One of the reasons that Perry’s adventure wasn’t worth it is that he suffered physical pain from it. As page 165 says, “He was spit on and pelted with Cokes, ice, and coins”, he was very hated. Of course, with hate comes violence, and that is exactly what happened to Perry Wallace. Even though he did nothing wrong but want to play a game that he liked. Another way he was hurt was simply by names. Being called very inappropriate names that really tore him down. The names were very racist and he might have been used to hearing them in this time period, but seriously, he was

The physical pain he suffered could be solved over time, but the mental damage will always stay with him. I cannot tell you how many times Perry was threatened with death. One major example of this is on page 166, “folks dangled a noose near the Vanderbilt bench, pretending they were threatening to hang Wallace”. This is really bad because they were threatening to kill him in one of the most painful ways, breaking his neck and then suffocation. Also on page 166, it states that his teammates ignored everything going on. This means that Perry had no one to talk to, making him lonely. I’m sure that this really affected the way he saw his teammates. The last example I have of traumatization is the stress. Perry had to juggle keeping himself safe, making sure his family was okay, schoolwork, and basketball all at once. This is way too much stress for any humans to handle and it probably wore him out