A new film sheds light on the history of Black players in the NBA, but doesn’t tell the whole story | GUEST COMMENTARY
Most Americans are familiar with how Major League Baseball was integrated, the 76th anniversary of which was recently observed. Who was the first African American in the NBA, and when did he join? It’ s an important story and a good film, recognizing former New York Knick Nat“ Sweetwater” Clifton as the trailblazer he was for African American players in the NBA.
Most Americans are familiar with how Major League Baseball was integrated, the 76th anniversary of which was recently observed. Jackie Robinson broke the color line in 1947, and before then Black players had to play in the Negro Leagues.
But what about pro basketball? Who was the first African American in the NBA, and when did he join?
A recently released film, “Sweetwater,” sheds light on this previously little-known chapter in professional sports history. It’s an important story and a good film, recognizing former New York Knick Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton as the trailblazer he was for African American players in the NBA. But like many Hollywood tales, it doesn’t tell the whole story.
On May 24, 1950, Clifton signed a contract with the Knicks. While the film and elsewhere have identified him as the first Black player to sign an NBA contract, many sources say that distinction actually belongs to Harold Hunter, who signed with the Washington Capitols a month earlier but was cut in training camp.
Clifton played in his first NBA game on Nov. 4, 1950. But once again, he was not the first African American to do so. On Oct. 31, 1950, Earl Lloyd debuted in a game for the Capitols. And the following night, Chuck Cooper, who was the first African American drafted by the NBA when the Boston Celtics selected him earlier that year, became the second Black player in an NBA game.
This is not to take anything away from Clifton. Like Lloyd and Cooper, it took great courage and character to do what he did. And like Lloyd and Cooper, he was a solid and steady player in the NBA and, in that first season, helped to lead the Knicks to their first-ever appearance in the NBA finals.
Clifton, Lloyd and Cooper are sometimes referred to as “The First Three” (or “First Four” when including Hank DeZonie, who signed a contract with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks on Dec. 3, 1950), and are jointly regarded as the original African American trailblazers in the NBA.
It would be a nice capstone to the story if the doors swung open for Black players after those initial signings, and NBA rosters soon were assembled without regard to race. But that’s not quite what happened, either.
For the decade of the 1950s and well into the ‘60s, most NBA teams followed an unwritten but undeniable quota on the number of Black players per team. It started with one per team, went up to two, and by the early ‘60s was three or four on a team. Moreover, NBA teams wanted Black players to do the nitty-gritty work of playing defense, boxing out and rebounding, but they did not want their Black players to be scorers or stars.
In his autobiography, “Moonfixer: The Basketball Journey of Earl Lloyd,” Lloyd wrote “nobody said it, but it was whispered how most of the Black guys who made it early in the NBA were big, physical guys who weren’t expected to be cerebral. They let white guys run the team on the floor, and they sent the Black guys under the hoop to do the heavy labor, which fit the pattern in this country for a long, long time.”
So where did the many great Black players from the 1950s and early ‘60s, especially scorers and historically Black college and university alumni, go to play? That would be the Eastern Professional Basketball League, a weekend league located in small, blue-collar, mining and factory towns in and around Eastern Pennsylvania, like Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, Sunbury, Allentown and Trenton.
During the 1950s, many Black players with prolific scoring ability entered the Eastern League, including Hal “King” Lear, Tom Hemans, Julius McCoy, Dick Gaines, Wally Choice, and Stacey Arceneaux. The top four scorers in Eastern League history, and six of the top 10, are African-American players who entered the league between 1955 and 1958. (Two others in the top 10 — Bill Spivey and Sherman White — were banned by the NBA for their implication in the 1951 college point-shaving scandal.)
The Eastern League had the first all-Black starting lineup in an integrated professional basketball league in 1955-’56, nine years before the Boston Celtics did it in the NBA in 1964. And while the NBA continued to play a comparatively deliberate style, the Eastern League was already playing a high-scoring, fast-paced, above-the-rim style of play a decade earlier.
Indeed, in 1964 the Eastern League adopted the three-point shot from the short-lived American Basketball League of the early 1960s. And when the American Basketball Association came along in 1967, it took the three-pointer, the free-flowing, high-scoring style of play, and about 25 of the best players from the Eastern League, and changed the way the game is played today.
The film “Sweetwater” casts a long overdue light on the first generation of Black players who opened the doors for African Americans to the NBA. May that light shine wider to recognize what former NBA player, coach, and Eastern Leaguer Ray Scott called the men “of character and intellect whose stories may never have been told” who toiled in the Eastern League waiting for the doors to open a little wider.
Syl Sobel (syl.sobel@gmail.com) is the co-author, with Jay Rosenstein, of “Boxed Out of the NBA: Remembering the Eastern Professional Basketball League,” which is now being developed into a documentary film.
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