NBA Pioneers: League celebrates 75th anniversary of first Black players

The quote quite possibly is apocryphal, something shaped and tweaked over time to sound glibber and to make for a better story. But the determination behind it, the heart and the logic and the fairness of it, ring as true today as those values did 75 years ago.

On a Tuesday afternoon in 1950, April 25, in a board room jammed with owners and coaches of the fledgling league’s 12 (soon to be 11) teams, the Boston Celtics’ Walter Brown called out a name in the second round of the NBA Draft that would wind up historic.

“Chuck Cooper, Duquesne.”

A rival owner interrupted as Brown made his pick. “Don’t you know he’s colored?” To which Brown’s response, as legend has it, was: “I don’t care if he’s striped, plaid or polka-dot.”

Brown’s purported reply was perfect, a sit-down-and-shut-up smack that instantly exposed how silly, wrong-headed and fearful the objection was. Until then, no Black player had played in the NBA or even had been invited.

Brown’s pick was done. A little later, the Washington Capitols read off the name of “Earl Lloyd, West Virginia State.” And four weeks later, on May 24, 1950, New York Knicks owner Ned Irish and coach Joe Lapchick put a contract in front of Nat (Sweetwater) Clifton to sign as a free agent off the Harlem Globetrotters.

The NBA’s integration had begun, with three men shouldering the load Jackie Robinson had lugged for baseball three years prior.

“Chuck Cooper, Earl Lloyd, and Nathaniel Clifton transformed the NBA and inspired countless individuals through their courage and determination,” said NBA Deputy Commissioner Mark Tatum. “These men embody the values of our game, and their legacy as pioneers is integral to our history.”

Not ‘easy, but easier’ thanks to Robinson

Having three Black pioneers wasn’t simple for a short-hand version of history. Instead of counting on a single polarizing, courageous individual to get the job done, with a target on his back for critics and hecklers (if not something worse), the NBA enlisted three.

There wasn’t one Branch Rickey, the Dodgers executive who planned for several years to scout “the right man” to cross his sport’s color line. Brown probably came closest, but the New York Knicks, the now-defunct Washington Capitols and others in that room were on board or soon persuaded.

Let’s not forget the Celtics’ legendary Red Auerbach, who moved to Boston for that 1950-51 season after coaching stints with Washington and Tri-Cities. Auerbach knew of Cooper, a tough 6-foot-5 forward who had returned to Duquesne and his native Pittsburgh after a year at West Virginia State followed by service in the military. He was 23 when Boston picked him.

“My father gave so much credit to Walter Brown, Red Auerbach and the Celtics organization,” Chuck Cooper III said recently in a phone interview. “They stuck their necks out. If they don’t draft my father as the first official act, who knows what happens after that?”

By putting three faces on this issue of race, the NBA got instant momentum. It looked more like an initiative than a single owner angling for a competitive edge or serving a personal agenda. (Note: two other Black players had bit roles in the unofficial movement. Hank DeZonie, out of Clark Atlanta University, played five games for Tri-Cities in December. Harold Hunter had gotten cut in training camp with the Capitols.)

Robinson’s trek through the National League, followed by Larry Doby’s debut in Cleveland in July 1947, and the signings of minority players such as Roy Campanella, Satchel Paige, Monte Irvin and Minnie Minoso before the decade ended surely softened things a little by 1950.

Still, it was 1950, five years before civil rights figure Rosa Parks took a stand by where she sat on a city bus. Cooper, Clifton and Lloyd were headed for hard times regardless.

“Mr. Lloyd, and my dad too, gave Jackie a lot of credit for making things easier for them,” Cooper III said. “Certainly not easy, but easier.

“I think it was helpful for them to have each other because they would kind of look out for each other. They had an agreement they would never fight each other … They would let each other know the safe places to go and hang out.”

Said Kevin Lloyd, one of Lloyd’s three sons: “There weren’t as many teams, so they played against each other a lot. Every time my father went to Boston, it was Chuck’s responsibility to take care of my father. And vice versa. Same with New York, ‘Sweetwater’ would take care of either one of them. They had to.”

Staying strong during societal change

Pushback came both externally and internally, in their introductions to and movement through American society at the time as well as their acceptance by peers and opponents in the basketball world.

Restaurants and hotels were constant hurdles, some welcoming the Black players but many not. Bob Cousy, Boston’s Hall of Fame point guard, was a fellow rookie and roomed with Cooper for a while. When the Celtics played a preseason game in North Carolina in the fall of 1950, the team’s hotel told the traveling party that it would not accommodate a Black guest.

Cousy accompanied Cooper on a late-night train to the next city. The two bonded and shared laughs throughout that trip.

“That’s one of the big differences between our dads and Jackie Robinson,” Cooper III said in a 2022 chat. “(Robinson) didn’t get a lot of support from some of his own teammates. NBA players were college-educated, so it was a much different dynamic.”

Jataun Robinson, one of Clifton’s four children, said: “He found families to eat with, and he had friends to go out on the town with. But back then, there were a lot of people who didn’t believe Black people should ‘glow.’ Have money, none of that.”

Lloyd played in just seven games that first season before being drafted into the Army. He didn’t resume his career until 1952-53, by which point some incremental progress in race relations had been made. Some of the bigotry had just grown more subtle.

“A lot of those towns like St. Louis, Ft. Wayne, Boston, they were tough towns,” Kevin Lloyd said. “They had to find other places to stay. Or there were some hotels, he could stay overnight, but he couldn’t leave his room until it was time to [check out]. It changed, but very, very slowly.

“It could have broke my father, but he stayed strong. He forgave, but he didn’t forget. To the day he died.”

Different roles & a different style of play

Their employers posed different challenges. The NBA held for several seasons to an unofficial quota system, limiting rosters to two Black players, later three. Coaches and players allegedly cooperated with some owners’ preference that Black team members do a lot of the sport’s dirty work — rebounding, defense — as supporting players rather than stars.

“My father played with Dolph Schayes, and Dolph Schayes was Mr. Everything,” Lloyd said of the Syracuse National’s Hall of Famer. “He got hurt for three or four games, and my father was the leading scorer in each of those games. But when Dolph Schayes came back, he was like ‘Earl, I’m back. Get the rebound and give me the ball.’”

Said Cooper III: “My father was a great athlete. I think all three of them were skilled and as players, were ahead of their time. Sweetwater actually was asked to tone his game down, because he played with so much flair. Ball fakes with one hand, which you see today, were considered over-the-top then.”

At 6-foot-7 with enormous hands, Clifton had entertained vast crowds with the Globetrotters. But the NBA wanted none of that.

“He said they told him to ‘play down’ all that stuff,” Robinson said. “And Black players were not allowed to do a lot anyway. He said it didn’t bother him too much — he wanted to play — but there were times he could have made shots, but he wasn’t permitted to shoot.”

Bill Russell’s arrival in 1956 as the ultimate rebounder and defender — and leader — sparked the Celtics to a decade-plus of dominance with Sam Jones, K.C. Jones, Tom “Satch” Sanders as Black stars.

Elgin Baylor came in with the Minneapolis Lakers in 1958 and took the game above the rim. Wilt Chamberlain arrived in 1959 like the eighth wonder of the world, his 7-foot-1 powers tearing up and rewriting all NBA record books for individual achievements.

Much changed in the 1960s and ’70s, which gave us Oscar Robertson, Earl Monroe, Connie Hawkins, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Julius Erving. Then came Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Michael Jordan and a league that is now about 75% Black.

Historic trio makes its mark on game

Cooper, Clifton and Lloyd don’t have a shared jersey number hanging in the rafters of every NBA arena.

Heck, the three wore a total of nine different numbers in their careers anyway. But their collective place in the game’s history is secure. In 2022, the league created annual trophies for its six division-winners, naming half after the three. (Wayne Embry, Willis Reed and Sam Jones also were honored.)

Cooper’s best season was that first one. He averaged 9.9 points and 8.5 rebounds. After his second season in Boston, he wanted a raise beyond the contract Auerbach offered him. While holding out from training camp, he got his raise by going around the coach/GM directly to Brown.

“He got the money, but he also got in the doghouse. And he never got out,” Cooper III said. “It made me feel better when I saw in ‘Celtics City’ [a Max streaming documentary] that it wasn’t anything personal to my dad. That’s just how Red operated. He only paid [well] one or two guys on a team.”

After four seasons, Cooper asked for a trade and got sent to the Milwaukee Hawks. He moved with that franchise to St. Louis, then finished with Ft. Wayne in 1955-56. Six weeks after he retired at age 29, the Celtics traded for freshly drafted Russell.

“If he knew Russell was coming, he never would have asked for a trade,” his son said. “He would have loved running and cutting off of Bill.”

Clifton, from Chicago, had played minor league baseball and 16-inch softball in his hometown well enough to earn a spot in that sport’s Hall of Fame. He was with the Globetrotters for two years when owner Abe Saperstein sold his contract to the Knicks.

He was 28 when he reached the NBA. His top season was 1954-55 when he averaged 13.1 points and 8.5 rebounds per game, followed by 19.7 ppg in three playoff games against Boston. In 1957, he was named an All-Star at age 34. After one more season with Detroit, he went home and drove a cab until he died in 1990.

Lloyd, the eighth-round pick, returned from his military obligation to have the best NBA career of everyone drafted after No. 18 Bill Sharman, a Hall of Famer. He averaged 11.5 ppg and 8.1 rpg to help Syracuse win the 1955 NBA championship, and reached the postseason each year. After two final seasons with Detroit, the man known as “Big Cat” retired, having averaged 8.4 ppg and 6.4 rpg in 560 NBA games.

(By the way, Lloyd technically was the NBA’s first Black player, his Capitols opening the 1950-51 season at Rochester on Halloween, one day before Cooper’s Celtics played at Fort Wayne and four days before New York tipped off vs. Tri-Cities.)

Lloyd established a series of other NBA “firsts” in the years after his playing days. He became the league’s first Black scout, its first Black assistant coach and, in 1971, he was promoted by the Pistons as the first Black “coach only.” (Russell and Lenny Wilkens already worked as player-coaches.)

Also, Lloyd was the first of the trailblazing trio to be welcomed into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003. Clifton was enshrined in 2014, and finally, in 2019, Cooper took his place alongside them.

That last one looped back to 1975, when Bill Russell chose not to attend his induction ceremony. Ironically, the man many casual fans might erroneously assume was the NBA’s first Black player did not feel he deserved to be the Hall’s first Black honoree.

In November 2019, after a 44-year wait and by then 85 years old, Russell celebrated his enshrinement in a private ceremony, satisfied that three men who paved his way had been properly credited. Their place in the league’s history remains, 75 years after their names were called.

* * *

Steve Aschburner has written about the NBA since 1980. You can e-mail him here, find his archive here and follow him on X.