Why Black Fives?
The idea behind “Black Fives” is that it’s all about taking history and making it relevant today.
Once it’s seen as relevant, we can take important, timeless lessons from that past and apply them in our lives today, right now.
This allows us to engage, teach, enlighten, and inspire ourselves and others in ways that change peoples’ lives.
As a result, something that was once considered boring by some — history — could be made meaningful.
Anything meaningful helps evolve the consciousness of the world. This can only be done one moment at a time, by each one of us. In other words, we can make history now.
We feel so strongly about this outlook that we’ve adopted it as the slogan of our efforts: “Make History Now.”
The Black Fives Foundation researches, preserves, promotes, and teaches the history of African American participation in basketball, with focus on the many all-black teams that played from the early 1900s through the late-1940s, prior to the racial integration of pro basketball, a period known as the Black Fives Era.
Our goal is to bring the history of the teams of the Black Fives Era back to life. These teams make up our basketball family tree. Those players are our on-court ancestors. This is our history.
We strive for our research to be impeccable. We love, honor, and respect our early basketball forbears, and we hope this passion shows up in our work. This history is all of ours, to share and pass along.
