Today in history: First Black NBA Player

[Callalily]

First Black NBA Player

October 31, 1950

Seventy-one years ago today, Earl Lloyd became the first Black player and scorer in an NBA game. In 1950, three years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s race barrier, three inaugural Black men were chosen in the NBA draft: Lloyd, Chuck Cooper, and Nat Clifton. All three made their debuts during the same week, in their season openers, but scheduling dictated that Lloyd — the hundredth overall pick — took the court first for the Washington Capitols. He scored six points and a game-leading 10 rebounds against the Rochester Royals at Edgerton Park Arena.

Hailing from Alexandria, Virginia, the 6-foot-6 power forward had won a conference title with West Virginia State University, a historically Black college. Yet after just six more games with the Capitols, Lloyd was drafted into the Korean War — during which his team went out of business. Post-combat, Lloyd played for both the Syracuse Nationals (a precursor to the Philadelphia 76ers) and the Detroit Pistons, a team he would later coach. He and his Syracuse teammate, Jim Tucker, were the first Black players to take home an NBA Championship, in 1955. Almost five decades later, Lloyd was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

[Tetrachloride]

1. Five decades is quite a wait.

[Callalily]

2. Indeed!

[multigraincracker]

3. 100 and 5 days after James Naismith was born.

I feel very old when I tell people that my mother took a fencing class in college from the man that invented the game of basketball at the University of Kansas.
I told my story to the tour guide at the Naismith Hall of Fame and he had to take me around and introduced me to all of the folks there.
About 1932.

[Tetrachloride]

4. Helluva story