Albert Maxey on Coming to Lincoln in 1957 - Basketball, Police Work, and a Life in Art

Episode Summary

Albert Maxey came to Lincoln in 1957 at eighteen years old, recruited out of Crispus Attucks High School in Indianapolis to play basketball at the University of Nebraska. He is still here. In this conversation with Randy Bretz and Dr. Marilyn S. Moore, he traces almost seventy years in one city — a basketball scholarship, a marriage, a career in law enforcement he stumbled into because he needed work, a second career in the schools, and a third as a working artist.

About the Guest

Albert Maxey arrived in Lincoln in 1957 to play for Nebraska head coach Jerry Bush, whose grandson Fred Hoiberg now holds the same job. He left school in 1961 and joined the Lincoln Police Department, where he served as a patrol officer, sergeant, and detective, and graduated from the FBI National Academy in 1973. That same year he completed his degree at the University of Nebraska in art education, K through 12, with a minor in criminal justice. He went on to become the first campus supervisor for Lincoln Public Schools. He works today in acrylics, pencil, and ink out of a studio at the Burkholder Project in Lincoln's Haymarket, where he is known for portraits and for a recurring silverback gorilla.

His late wife, JoAnn Maxey, became the first Black member of the Lincoln Board of Education and the first Black woman to serve in the Nebraska Legislature. She died in 1992. Maxey Elementary School, which opened in 1995, is named for her.

About the Conversation

The story Maxey tells about arriving is the one that stays with you. He and JoAnn married in Indianapolis, got on a train, and walked into the Lincoln depot, where a stagecoach was sitting in the middle of the Great Hall as a decoration. She looked at it and asked him what he had gotten them into. It is a funny story, and it is also a story about how far away Nebraska felt to a young Black couple from Indianapolis in the late 1950s.

He is candid about the parts that were not funny. He was scared much of his first years here. He had come out of an all-Black high school where his major was industrial trades, and the university did not know where to place him. He flunked out in his junior year. What he found instead was the Malone Center, four or five blocks east of campus, where he could be around people who shared his background — and, eventually, a job he took because the police department happened to sit across the street from where he lived.

Once inside, he started asking questions. Why had Harry Peterson, the department's only other Black officer at the time, walked the same two beats in the Haymarket for years and never been put in a cruiser? The answer, as Maxey tells it, was that no one had asked. Peterson got a cruiser and a first shift. Maxey went on to detective work, and later to a career teaching Lincoln schoolchildren how to actually look at the world in front of them — staging a disturbance in a classroom, then asking who could describe the person who caused it.

The Mug

There was no mug on the table for this one. Maxey took ice water. But Randy, who had never tried cold brew in his life despite the fact that this whole show started with him offering to sell it, finally took a sip on camera and allowed that it was better than he expected.