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The game was finally integrated in April of 1947. A number of factors led to the inevitable end of segregation. In the 1930s and ’40s, the media was in on a conspiracy of silence. The owners were in on the conspiracy. The commissioner was in on the conspiracy. It was shameful.

CONCLUSION:

#2

NBA owners cater to the “white dollar” in the 1950s with a quota system

In the 1930s and 1940s, before there was a National Basketball Association, the best professional black basketball players barnstormed the country as members of the Harlem Globetrotters or the Harlem Renaissance (known as the Rens). One theory advanced by the black press, according to Arthur Ashe’s 1985 book, A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete from 1919-1945, was that, “being white, Abe Saperstein made an arrangement with the owners of the white teams to keep blacks out so that his Globetrotters could always have the pick of the best blacks. This would accomplish two ends: ensure that the Globetrotters always had quality black players and, with no black players in the white leagues, the white players would never complain. This was never proven one way or the other. Nevertheless it was believed by many black players and fans.”

The NBA was started in 1947, and the League’s color barrier wasn’t broken until October 31, 1950, by Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitols, one of three blacks in the League that season. Chuck Cooper of the Boston Celtics and Sweetwater Clifton of the New York Knicks debuted in their teams’ season openers the next day. One would think that the National Basketball Association would have been more open to people of all races, and perhaps compared to other sports, it was. In fact, Mr. Lloyd told me a few years ago that he greatly admired Jackie Robinson, as the indignities and slurs that he faced in the NBA were a fraction of what Robinson had to put up with. Lloyd said that that was because most NBA teams were located in the northeast, and most fans in that region were already used to integrated college sports teams. But that doesn’t mean that a quota system didn’t exist. On the contrary, it seems clear that there was an unwritten agreement between the all-white owners that prevented a team from having too many black players on their roster (and even dictated how many black starters each team could employ).

The Hawks, the franchise now playing in Atlanta, entered the League in 1949-1950, playing in three mid-western cities (Moline, Illinois; Rock Island, Illinois; and Davenport, Iowa). At that time, they were known as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, and Red Auerbach coached the team that first season. After two years as Tri-Cities, and four more permanently situated in Milwaukee, the team moved to St. Louis for the 1955-1956 season. The city was the southernmost in the NBA at the time, and its star frontline players included Bob Pettit and Cliff Hagen, southern men who had played college ball at segregated schools. St. Louis made the Western Conference Finals in 1956, and took the Boston Celtics to the seventh game of the NBA Finals in 1957 (losing Game Seven in Boston, 125-123, in double-overtime). The Hawks lost to the Celtics mainly because of a trade that Auerbach—by then with the Celtics—had made with the Hawks, which had sent center Bill Russell to the Celtics.

In 1958, the Hawks defeated the Celtics in the NBA Finals, becoming the last team in NBA history to win a championship without a black player on its roster. (Well, that’s mostly true. The Official NBA Guide, the League’s history book, includes the team picture of every NBA champion, and the 1957-1958 champion Hawks team picture features only eleven players. The twelfth member of the team, Worthy Patterson, a black guard from the University of Connecticut, played four games in the regular season for St. Louis but did not appear in the playoffs and was left out of the picture.)

Two years later, the Hawks drafted a black forward with the fifteenth overall selection in the draft. His name was Cal Ramsey. I caught