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Larry--I'm a little older than you. Boston didn't love Russell. He had a hell of a time finding a home. Read his books sometime. The Celts couldn't sell out a home playoff 7th game in his day, when the Celts were the first NBA team to field an all-black starting 5. After he retired, he only came back to the Garden on a few occasions, as a favor to Red. If Boston loved Reggie Smith so much, why was management so eager to trade him for peanuts? There were some ugly rumors of an affair with a white player's wife (many speculated that it was Yastremski's, although they were just rumors) and they couldn't ship him out of town fast enough. People loved George Scott the way they loved Stepin Fetchit or Jack Benny's Rochester. He was an amiable southern black who, in the parlance of his time, "knew his place" and wasn't "uppity" like Reggie Smith.
Tiant came around later. He had two things going for him--he was Cuban, and he also had more of Scott's personality than Smith's or Rice's. And Rice wasn't as beloved as you might think, even with the fans. I used to go to Fenway in the late 1970s and some of what I heard shouted when he'd hit into one of his signature 6-4-3 DPs was horrible.
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