Black player pro7/13/2023 ![]() ![]() More than 150 artifacts line fairly the small gallery at the New-York Historical Society. Many of the flyers advertising the Black Five games offer "basketball games and dance." They often combined ragtime, the music of the day, with basketball games as a way to bring in the crowds. "The mortality rate at the turn of the century, among blacks in cities, from pneumonia and tuberculosis was 25 percent," Johnson says. In the early days, he notes, when black basketball was only played in schools and Y's, playing the sport was often seen as a matter of character and health - for good reason. He says no one from those teams is alive today. He became obsessed with this lost history about 10 years ago. Johnson is the president and CEO of the Black Fives Foundation. "You know, the pioneers of the game, for all of us, not just for black descendants, but anybody who loves the game and who loves sports." "They are in parallel with the evolution of black culture, black society - and they are a mirror of the way America evolved, the way the game evolved," Johnson says. From there, it went to YMCAs, and eventually to black teams with names like the Washington Bears and the New York Renaissance.Ĭlaude Johnson, guest curator of this exhibit, says there are "dozens and dozens" of all-black teams that played basketball before 1950 - and that their legacy reflects the changing face of America at the time. In 1904, Edwin Bancroft Henderson, a black Washington, D.C., gym teacher, took a summer course at Harvard and brought the game back to black segregated schools. When basketball was invented in 1891, it was a totally white game. Most people have heard of the Negro Leagues in baseball and of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in the late 1940s - but relatively few people have heard of the Black Fives, the African-American basketball teams that played up until the NBA was integrated in 1950.Īn exhibit at the New-York Historical Society aims to rectify that. This 1943 publicity photo promoted the Washington, D.C., Bears basketball team.Ĭlaude Johnson/Courtesy of the New-York Historical Society ![]()
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