Basketball

Although basketball in the United States is now dominated by African Americans, their role in the sport was relatively unimportant in the early years of the game. Created in 1891 by James Naismith at a Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA, basketball was originally played primarily at YMCAs. Black YMCAs produced the earliest African-American teams.

By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, a handful of blacks competed on white varsity basketball teams, mostly in small, remote midwestern colleges. Ironically, a man who did not play varsity basketball, Edwin B. Henderson, opened the door for many others to compete at both the interscholastic and intercollegiate levels. In 1905, after a summer at Harvard, Henderson, who was a physical education instructor, returned home to Washington, D.C., to become a founding father of African-American basketball. As physical education director for black schools in Washington, Henderson led in the organization and promotion of high school, club, and YMCA sports programs for African-American youths. In 1909 he became an instructor at Howard University, where he introduced basketball. Two years later he launched a varsity program, recruiting most of his players from the black YMCA in Washington.

A number of black colleges joined Howard in adopting basketball for intramural and intercollegiate purposes. During World War I these colleges began forming conferences "in a common effort for athletic elevation," as a Howard professor put it, and "to train students in self-reliance and stimulate race-pride through athletic attainment." In 1916 Howard, Lincoln, Shaw, and Virginia Union universities joined Hampton Institute in forming the Central Interscholastic Athletic Association. Four years later, educators and coaches from several Deep South colleges convened at Morehouse College in Atlanta to form the Southeastern Athletic Conference. By 1928 four regional conferences covered most of the black institutions below the Mason-Dixon line. By codifying rules and clarifying terms of athletic eligibility, these new conferences benefited the game of basketball.

Historians have made much of the massive black migration northward in the 1920s, but there also was a reverse migration of black athletes from the North to such southern schools as Tuskegee Institute (later Tuskegee University) in Alabama and Tugaloo College in Mississippi. Basketball especially flourished at Morgan State University in Baltimore, which went undefeated in 1927; Xavier University in New Orleans, whose entire starting team in the late 1930s came from a championship high school team in Chicago; and Virginia Union University, whose 42–2 record in the 1939–1940 season included two victories over the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) champions Long Island University.

During the period between World War I and World War II, some black students played basketball at integrated colleges. John Howard Johnson, the first black basketball player at Columbia University, graduated from there in 1921. Basketball players who later achieved fame in other endeavors included Ralph Bunche, a Nobel Peace Prize recipient who starred at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in the mid-1920s, and Jackie Robinson, who, also playing for UCLA (1939–1941), led his conference in scoring two years in a row before he went on to become the first African American to play baseball in the modern major leagues.

Because basketball is less expensive than football and more centrally positioned in the academic year than baseball, it became popular in black high schools in the 1920s. The black state high school athletic associations of West Virginia were the first of many to begin sponsoring state basketball tournaments in 1924. By 1930 eight tournaments had been established; by 1948 every racially segregated southern and midwestern state had African-American statewide athletic organizations that emphasized basketball. In May 1929 Charles H. Williams, the director of physical education at Hampton Institute, inaugurated the National Interscholastic Basketball Tournament, which was held annually until 1942.

Of the several professional basketball leagues that rose and fell during the interwar period, all excluded blacks, though given the weak and disorganized nature of professional basketball at this time, this ban had less impact than for other professional sports. Independent all-black teams such as the Smart Set in Brooklyn, as well as St. Christopher's, Alphas, and the Spartans in New York City and Loendi in Pittsburgh, were beset with inadequate facilities, small turnouts, and uncertain schedules, and they struggled to survive. The most successful teams hit the road, barnstorming from city to city on a trail blazed by the best all-white team of the interwar era, the Original Celtics. The two best African-American squads, the New York–based Renaissance Big Five ("Harlem Rens") and the Chicago-based Harlem Globetrotters, frequently played against the Original Celtics and other all-white touring teams, thus making basketball the only interwar professional team sport to allow interracial competition.

The Rens were created in 1923 by the St. Kitts native Robert L. Douglas, who immigrated as a child to the United States in 1888. For several years Douglas played with the New York Spartans, then decided to form his own team. He rented the Renaissance Casino ballroom in Harlem. The team took their name from that home site but played most of their games on the road against any team—black or white, city or small town—that would take them on. Over a twenty-year span, the Rens averaged more than one hundred victories annually. In their greatest season, 1932 to 1933, they won eighty-eight consecutive games and finished with a 120–8 record. At Chicago in 1939 they won the first "world tournament" of professional basketball. Little wonder that all seven players who formed the core of the team during the 1930s—Charles T. "Tarzan" Cooper, John "Casey" Holt, Clarence "Fats" Jenkins,

James "Pappy" Ricks, Eyre "Bruiser" Satch, William "Wee Willie" Smith, and William J. "Bill" Yancey—are in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

The Rens were already well established when the Harlem Globetrotters played their first game in January 1927. Initially called the Savoy Big Five because they played in the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago, the Globetrotters were the brainchild of a Jewish immigrant, Abraham Saperstein. The somewhat misleading Harlem tag was a public relations ploy, which provided a racial rather than a geographical reference. As a team of barnstorming professionals, they traveled far longer, more widely, and to consistently larger crowds than any sports team in history. In 1951 they appeared before 75,000 spectators in Berlin's Olympic Stadium. They have performed for literally millions of live spectators around the world, as well as to huge television and movie audiences.

Although best known in later years for their basketball comedy, the original Globetrotters were serious, highly skilled athletes. In 1940 they succeeded the Rens as "world champions" in the fiercely fought Chicago tournament. Earlier, during the Great Depression, they averaged nearly two hundred games per year, winning more than 90 percent of them. Constant travel produced fatigue; large margins of victory made for boredom. For rest and relief from tedium, the Globetrotters began clowning, especially on those frequent occasions when they dramatically outmatched their opponents. Comedy proved contractually lucrative, so the Globetrotters developed funny skits and routines. Staged silliness swamped competitive play in the 1940s. Still, Reece "Goose" Tatum, Marques Haynes, Meadow George "Meadowlark" Lemon, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, Connie Hawkins, and Wilt Chamberlain are among the most famous of the many superb athletes who wore the colorful Globetrotter uniform.

It was just as well that the Globetrotters shifted from serious basketball to comedy routines, because the racial integration of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1950 meant that the Globetrotters could no longer attract the best college athletes. (A forerunner of the NBA, the Basketball Association of America, signed black players as early as 1948.) For the 1950–1951 season, the Boston Celtics recruited Charles "Chuck" Cooper from Duquesne University, the Washington Capitals tapped Early Lloyd from West Virginia State College, and the New York Knicks bought Sweetwater Clifton from the Globetrotters.

Prior to World War II the abolition of the center jump, the introduction of an innovative one-handed shot, and the use of the fast break served to streamline Naismith's slow and deliberate original game. In the early 1950s the NBA responded to the market's demand for a faster, more attractive game by banning zone defenses, doubling the width of the foul lane (to twelve feet), and introducing a twenty-four-second shot clock. All these changes were completed by 1954 and worked to the great advantage of African-American newcomers who had mastered a more spontaneous, personalized style of play on the asphalt courts of urban playgrounds.

The first African American to become a dominant player in the NBA was William "Bill" Russell. Russell came from an extremely successful undergraduate career at the University of San Francisco, where he and another gifted African American, K. C. Jones, led the San Francisco Dons to fifty-five straight victories and two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) championships. Rather than go into the NBA immediately, however, both men participated in the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne, Australia, leading the United States basketball team to an easy gold medal. Then, while Jones fulfilled a two-year military obligation, Russell joined the Celtics at midseason. The defensive, shot-blocking, and rebounding skills of Russell complemented those of several high-scoring Celtics. Together they produced their first NBA championship in Russell's first pro season.

Jones joined the Celtics in the 1958–1959 season, and he and Russell helped the Celtics to an all-time record nine consecutive NBA crowns. In 1964 Boston fielded the first all-black starting lineup in the NBA: Russell, Jones, Sam Jones, Tom "Satch" Sanders, and Willie Naulls; John Thompson, the future coach of Georgetown University, backed up Russell. Russell's NBA nemesis was a high-scoring giant of a man, Wilton Norman "Wilt" Chamberlain. Over seven feet tall and weighing 265 pounds in his prime, Chamberlain earlier led Overbrook High School in Philadelphia to two city championships, once scoring ninety points in a single game. In his varsity debut at the University of Kansas in 1957, his fifty-two points set the Jayhawks on the path to the NCAA finals, where they narrowly lost in triple overtime to top-ranked North Carolina. After two All-American seasons at Kansas, Chamberlain toured for a year with the Harlem Globetrotters, then joined the Philadelphia Warriors in the NBA in 1959. In a fourteen-year NBA career, he played with four different teams and was selected for thirteen All-Star games, seven first-team All-NBA squads, and four Most Valuable Player awards. In a total of 1,045 NBA games, he averaged more than thirty points per game, and in 1962, he scored one hundred points in a single game against the New York Knickerbockers. At his retirement in 1973, he held or shared forty-three NBA records.

In addition to Chamberlain and Russell, black athletes such as Elgin Baylor and Oscar Robertson achieved basketball renown in the late 1950s and 1960s. Though they had their differences in talent and style, it is perhaps possible to see in their play elements of a shared athletic aesthetic that would dominate NBA basketball in the 1970s. Baylor, Chamberlain, Robertson, and Russell exhibited skills developed in playground competition best represented in the Rucker tournament (New York) and the Baker League (Philadelphia), both created in the postwar era. All four of these early NBA stars grew up in urban, not rural, America, and they developed their game in East Coast, industrial Midwest, and West Coast inner-city playgrounds. All four also attended white rather than traditionally black colleges. Another player from the early and mid-1960s who exemplified the playground style was Earl "the Pearl" Monroe, who attended Winston-Salem College in North Carolina before beginning a successful career with the Baltimore Bullets and New York Knicks. Connie Hawkins, a consummate playground basketball player from New York City, had his promising career derailed by his ambiguous involvement in a point-shaving scandal in 1960. After some years in basketball purgatory, he joined the Phoenix Suns in 1969.

In the period after World War II, blacks became prominent in college basketball. Two black players started for the City College of New York (CCNY) squad of 1950, the only team ever to win the NCAA and NIT tournaments in the same year. When the first significant cracks appeared in the armor of racially segregated universities in the 1950s, basketball coaches rushed to recruit bluechip African-American athletes for traditionally all-white teams. Even the smallest of colleges sought to enhance

their status through the basketball prowess of new black talent. With fewer than one thousand students, little St. Francis College of Loretto, Pennsylvania, wooed Maurice Stokes. He carried them from the obscure National Catholic Tournament to the more prestigious and lucrative National Invitational Tournament in 1955.

As integration undercut black college athletics, coach John B. McLendon's program at Tennessee A&I enjoyed a kind of last hurrah of basketball excellence. After successful stints at North Carolina College and Hampton Institute, McLendon in 1954 went to Tennessee A&I in Nashville. Employing a fast-break press-and-run game that he claimed to have learned years earlier from the aged Naismith at the University of Kansas, within five years McLendon won four league championships and three national titles in the newly integrated National Association for Intercollegiate Athletics (NAIA). The Most Valuable Player of the 1959 NAIA Tournament was Tennessee A&I's Richard "Dick" Barnett, a future New York Knickerbocker stalwart.

Strong racially integrated teams won NCAA titles for the University of Cincinnati and Loyola University of Chicago in the early 1960s. Building on a tradition of integration that dated back to the 1920s, UCLA attracted a number of African-American athletes during the eleven-year span (1964–1975) in which they won ten national titles. The person most identified with UCLA's reign was Lew Alcindor, later known was Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a 7'2" dominating center with a deft scoring touch who later went on to a twenty-year career in the NBA with the Milwaukee Bucks and the Los Angeles Lakers.

The passing of the old era of segregated basketball was symbolized in the NCAA finals of 1966, in which an all-black squad from Texas Western University (now the University of Texas at El Paso) defeated a highly favored all-white team from the University of Kentucky. Shortly thereafter, the color bar began crumbling in the segregated schools of the Southwest Conference when James Cash became Texas Christian University's first black basketball player in 1966. In Maryland, Billy Jones became the first African-American basketball recruit in the Atlantic Coast Conference. Finally, Perry Wallace of Vanderbilt University broke the racial barrier in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) in 1967, the same year the University of Alabama's new basketball coach, C. M. Newton, began recruiting African Americans. In 1974 Alabama became the first SEC team to field five black starters.

The growing dominance of African Americans in college basketball has not been without its share of problems, however. Many colleges recruit black players as athletes, with little regard for or interest in providing them with an education. For example, shortly after winning the 1966 NCAA title, members of the Texas Western team began dropping out of college. They had all been recruited from the New York City area, and the overwhelmingly white, southern campus environment provided a combination of academic and social pressure. Dropout rates remained at high levels into the 1990s but showed some improvement. According to NCAA reports, in 1997 to 1998, 42 percent of black male college basketball players graduated (as opposed to 48 percent of white male players). Another problem that has ruined or seriously detoured many promising careers is drug addiction. Len Bias, a number-one NBA draft choice from the University of Maryland, allegedly died of a drug overdose in 1988. Other talented black basketball players, such as the playground legends Earl "the Goat" Manigault and Herman "Helicopter" Knowings of New York City, and William "Chicken Breast" Lee and Terry "Sweets" Matchett of Washington, D.C., did not have the social skills to enable them to move beyond the milieu of their hometown neighborhoods.

The African-American player has simply transformed basketball at all levels, especially bringing extraordinary excitement, media exposure, and financial success to the NBA. The seamless web of connections between high school, college, and professional basketball is best seen in Baltimore's Dunbar High School squad during the 1982–1983 season. Finishing with a 31–0 record, Dunbar was top-ranked among all high school teams by USA Today. Virtually the entire team went to college on basketball scholarships. In 1987 three of them were selected in the first round of the NBA draft: Tyrone "Mugsey" Bogues of Wake Forest, by the Washington Bullets; Reggie Lewis of Northeastern, by the Boston Celtics; and Reggie Williams of Georgetown, by the Los Angeles Lakers. As of 2005 nearly 80 percent of all NBA players were black.

African Americans also play a prominent role in women's basketball. The 1984 Olympic women's basketball team, the first to win a gold medal, included Cheryl Miller, who led her University of Southern California team to two NCAA championships; Pam McGee; Lynette Woodard, who later became the first female player for the Harlem Globetrotters; and C. Vivian Stringer, who became coach of the women's basketball team at Cheyney State College in 1972, leading them to a second-place victory in the NCAA Women's National Basketball Championship ten years later. When Stringer became coach of the University of Iowa's women's team in 1983, she became the first black female coach to lead a women's basketball team of national rank. Under her leadership, the Iowa team qualified to play in the NCAA national tournament for seven straight years, from 1986 to 1992. In 1992 Stringer became the NCAA delegate for the committee organizing the Barcelona Olympic Games. Black women, notably Nikki McCray, also dominated the women's basketball competition at the 1996 Olympics, at which the American women's team won the gold medal. McCray went on to star in both the American Basketball League and the Women's National Basketball League (WNBA), the two women's leagues that were created in the mid-1990s. The American women's basketball team won gold medals again at the 2000 and 2004 Olympics. The 2004 team at Athens was led by Dawn Staley, who was chosen as the flag bearer for the U.S. Olympic team, as well as Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes.

Although African Americans are vastly underrepresented in the management and coaching ranks of the NBA, they are considerably more visible there than in major league baseball or in the National Football League. In 2005 the NBA had ten black head coaches out of a total of thirty (as opposed to only two a decade earlier), and fully one-third of the NBA's assistant coaches were black. However, the number of African-American general managers, owners, and others in positions with decision-making powers remains in the single digits.

In the collegiate ranks, in 2005 there were fifty-four African-American head coaches out of 318 Division I schools. Some of the most successful Division I coaches were John Thompson of Georgetown, John Chaney of Temple, George Raveling of the University of Southern California, and Nolan Richardson of the University of Arkansas. Division II coach Clarence "Big House" Gaines, who retired from Winston-Salem State University in 1993, was by far the most successful of all African-American coaches, having won the most victories in Division II history.

Georgetown's John Thompson became probably the most visible, and certainly the most controversial, African-American coach. After a brief, successful stint at St. Anthony's Catholic High School in Washington, D.C., Thompson moved to Georgetown in 1972. Emphasizing the tenacious defense and team play he had learned during his brief time as a Celtic, he steered the Georgetown Hoyas to three consecutive NCAA finals, from 1983 to 1985, and to the national championship in 1984. Four years later he coached the United States Olympic team to a bronze medal in Seoul. Always emphasizing the primacy of academics, he ably recruited African-American athletes for Georgetown. Patrick Ewing and Alonzo Mourning are two of the most famous among many players to whom Thompson directed his homilies of racial pride and achievement.

In the 1980s basketball soared to new heights of international popularity, as did African-American basketball players. Two players who stood out in particular were Earvin "Magic" Johnson and Michael Jordan. Johnson, an unusually tall guard at 6'8", led Michigan State University to an NCAA championship in his sophomore year in 1979 before turning pro and joining the Los Angeles Lakers. He helped the Lakers to an NBA championship in his rookie season and subsequently led his team to five championships during his career. In addition to his basketball skills, his effervescent and winning personality propelled him to media celebrity. His many admirers were shocked to learn of his early retirement in the fall of 1991 after he announced that he had contracted HIV. In the second half of the 1980s and the 1990s, the dominant basketball player was Michael Jordan. Jordan played for the University of North Carolina before joining the Chicago Bulls in 1984, where, as a shot maker of astounding versatility, he quickly became one of the most powerful players in league history. Jordan also became a media spokesman for a number of products and advertising campaigns. His widespread acceptance and popularity was as remarkable as his outstanding on-court skills. Michael Jordan retired from professional basketball in October 1993 but returned in the spring of 1995. He helped lead the Bulls to a total of six NBA titles during his years in Chicago, before and after his first retirement. Jordan retired a second time in 1999, before returning for a final two-year stint with the Washington Wizards (2001–2003).

The role of African Americans in basketball was further underlined by the success of the so-called Dream Team, an NBA All-Star team that romped against the best of the rest of the world in the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona and (to a lesser extent) the 1996 games in Atlanta. Eight of the twelve players on the team were black, including Magic Johnson in his final competitive appearance before his retirement. The 2000 U.S. men's basketball team, with eleven black players, won the gold medal at the Sydney Olympics.

Other gifted African-American players entered the basketball spotlight in the 1990s and early 2000s, including Shaquille O'Neal, Hakeem Olajuwon, Scottie Pippen, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Karl Malone, Kobe Bryant, and Allen Iverson. Seven-foot-tall O'Neal, who in February 1993 became the first rookie since 1985 to lead the NBA All-Star Game starting lineup, went on to become one of the most celebrated stars of professional basketball. Winner of numerous Most Valuable Player awards, O'Neal's scoring average ranks third all-time among NBA players (behind Jordan and Chamberlain). More than any NBA star, O'Neal has achieved celebrity status in the larger culture. Kobe Bryant went from high school directly into the NBA, becoming the youngest player in NBA history. He helped lead the Los Angeles Lakers to league titles in 2000, 2001, and 2002. In women's basketball, star players included Cynthia Cooper, who won four WNBA championships with the Houston Comets and went on to become a coach; Olympian Sheryl Swoopes, voted the 2003 WNBA defensive player of the year; and Teresa Edwards, the most decorated Olympic basketball player of all time, male or female.

Yet, despite the increasing successes of individual black basketball players, the nature of collegiate basketball itself continues to be an issue of controversy in the African-American community. In the 1990s the NCAA established rules for prospective players, setting minimum academic standards for team admittance (graduation from high school, completion of a specified number of core courses, and specified grade point averages) and limiting the number of college scholarships offered for basketball. Many decried these rules as unfair to young African-American athletes from disadvantaged backgrounds. Balancing a number of interests has been tricky for the NCAA. Challenges include the need to attract more promising minority athletes, the need to maintain a quality team in order to attract alumni donations, the need for schools to maintain consistent academic standards, and the decrease in available scholarship funds. For prospective African-American student athletes, the new NCAA rules meant the intensification of an already keen competition for a chance at professional status. The controversy highlighted the debate within the black community on the role of basketball as a means of upward mobility for inner-city youth and whether basketball unduly dominated the activities of black teenagers.

See also Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem; Chamberlain, Wilt; Harlem Globetrotters; Howard University; Johnson, Earvin "Magic"; Jordon, Michael; Lincoln University; Olympians; Sports; Related Maps, Graphs, or Tables in Appendix: African-American Members of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, Mass.

Bibliography

Ashe, Arthur R., Jr. A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete. New York: Amistad, 1993.

George, Nelson. Elevating the Game: Black Men and Basketball. New York: Harper, 1992. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

Peterson, Robert W. Cages to Jump Shots: Pro Basketball's Early Years. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.

Sailes, Gary A., ed. African Americans in Sport: Contemporary Themes. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1998.

Shropshire, Kenneth L. In Black and White: Race and Sports in America. New York: New York University Press, 1996.

Wideman, John Edgar. Hoop Roots. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

william j. baker (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005