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By BETH SLOVIC and PETER D'AURIA
A black Lincoln High basketball player who was at the center of varsity coach Pat Adelman's halftime rant about racism says he wasn't bothered by the lecture.
Jonah Pemberton, 17, says a complaint filed by four parents alleging Adelman humiliated black students during a junior varsity game against Jefferson High School last month is much ado about nothing.
"It didn't even cross my mind to go and tell my parents," says Pemberton, a junior and a point guard on Lincoln's varsity team.
Pemberton's defense of Adelman comes as Portland Public Schools continues its investigation of the varsity coach who, according to the complaint filed Jan. 14, burst into the locker room during halftime and accused Lincoln's white JV players of racism because they weren't competing aggressively enough against Jefferson's black team.
Adelman, son of former Trail Blazers coach Rick Adelman, declined to talk to WW, as did school officials.
But Pemberton, whose name was redacted from the complaint WW obtained last week, says Lincoln players "were playing scared" against Jefferson on Jan. 12 and that Adelman wanted the JV players to cut it out.
He used colorful language to make his point, telling the Lincoln players, for instance, that they looked down on Jefferson players from their West Hills homes with "gold-plated toilets," Pemberton says.
Pemberton doesn't dispute Adelman brought him and another black Lincoln player into the locker room to illustrate his point. He also doesn't dispute Adelman urged white players to touch the black players, including Pemberton. But he says Adelman didn't burst into the locker room, no one was forced to touch the black players, and that only two did. "It wasn't weird in any way," he says.
The mother of the other player, whom WW is declining to identify, wrote in her complaint that Adelman singled out her black child and "wronged" him by asking the white players to touch him. That made him feel like an outsider, mother Laurie Wimmer wrote to Superintendent Carole Smith.
Wimmer says she's speaking out because Adelman has exploded before. "This racial incident was over the line for me, and I felt I couldn't stay silent," she says.
Pemberton says he doesn't agree. "I do not feel like an outsider," he says. "If anything, it made me feel better."
Willamette Week