No news was good news for NBA’s first Black athlete
Earl Lloyd, second from left, blocks a shot when he played for the Syracuse Nationals in 1956. In 1950, Lloyd became the first Black athlete to play in an NBA game.
On Nov. 1, 1950, the Rochester, New York, newspaper The Democrat and Chronicle reported that the Washington Caps defeated the Rochester Royals 7870 in their NBA opener. The article mentioned that the Caps' rookie forward, Earl Lloyd, scored six points and grabbed 10 rebounds.
That's how the world was informed — or not informed — that professional basketball had finally been desegregated on Halloween night, Oct. 31, 1950. Lloyd, the first African American to play in the NBA, would say later that the relative lack of interest in his race was probably a consequence of Rochester being a well-integrated city, the home of a major university and the high-tech corporation Kodak, with a welleducated, open-minded population.
The demographics of Fort Wayne, Indiana, where the team played its sixth game that season, were much different. Although Lloyd was allowed to stay in the same hotel as the rest of the team, he was banned from the hotel restaurant. He was sitting in his room waiting for room service when Bones McKinney, his coach, walked in. “I decided to have room service with you tonight,” Bones said.
“It was a very classy act from a very classy man,” Lloyd said. “Teammates like Bill Sharman and Dick Schnittker grew up in integrated states. I could understand why they had no problems adjusting to a Black teammate. But Bones McKinney grew up and played all his games in segregated schools. Yet the man didn't have a prejudiced bone in his body. I wasn't allowed to stay with the team when we played exhibition games in some Southern cities. So, I'd check into a Black hotel or stay with a Black family. It wasn't always easy to find restaurants that would serve me. Sometimes, I'd walk into a restaurant with my teammates and be turned away. Every time that happened, my teammates walked out with me.”
When the Caps folded, Bones caught on with the Celtics and roomed with Chuck Cooper, the first African American player drafted into the NBA in 1950. Chuck was taken in the second round by the Boston Celtics, while Washington took Lloyd in round nine. The worst of the racism came before and after the road games in the Midwest and South. When the Celtics were about to take the floor for a league game against Rochester in the State College Coliseum at Raleigh, North Carolina, Coliseum officials told Coach Red Auerbach that Cooper couldn't play. They explained that no mixed team had ever played there. “A mixed team will play here tonight, or there will be no game. No Cooper, no Celtics,” Auerbach warned.
The game went on, and Cooper had one of his best nights as a pro — rebounding, blocking shots, stealing passes, setting up baskets, and helping the Celtics to a 19-point win. Headlines in the papers the next day focused on Cooper being the first Black athlete to play in the Coliseum. But Cooper was not allowed to stay at the hotel with the team that night, so he decided to take the train back to Boston. Bob Cousy volunteered to ride with him. When they tried to order sandwiches at the lunch counter of a station greasy spoon, Cooper was denied service, so they ordered sandwiches to go and ate them in an empty baggage truck.
Cousy said later that what had struck him first were the segregated restrooms at the station. At that point, he said, he was “more embarrassed than poor Coop.” Cousy also remembered not knowing what to say at the station — not wanting to say anything trivial or light because he was sure Cooper was experiencing emotional trauma. “I was completely embarrassed,” he said, “because I was part of the establishment doing those things.”
Ken Dooley is the author of over 40 books and plays and a TV series “White to Black,” which he wrote with NBA stars Bill Russell and Sam Jones. He lives in Lincoln and was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2018.