This historic 1941 basketball ticket that celebrates FDR’s birthday and raises funds to prevent Infantile Paralysis represents a major milestone in the sport.
Artifact of the Week (8): The 1941 Diversity Ticket
To celebrate the start of Black History Month 2016, we launched a new feature called the Artifact of the Week.
In addition to being banned for life, Donald Sterling also should be forced to visit the Black Fives exhibition now at the New-York Historical Society, which reveals that blacks and whites have been working together in basketball for a very, very long time.
One is a media pass to a history-making event. The other was an “errant” pass that may have changed history.
Price was not only the oldest living former Harlem Globetrotter but was also one of 10 black players who in 1941 broke the racial color barrier in pro basketball by signing with the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets of the National Basketball League.
Today is the anniversary (1939) of the all-black New York Renaissance (a.k.a. “Harlem Rens”) winning the first World Championship of Pro Basketball.
Did one devastating punch thrown by a future Basketball Hall of Fame player in an unrelated game threaten to derail Jackie Robinson’s baseball debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers?
The NBA celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996. The problem is that it didn’t exist until 1950 when the BAA merged with the NBL. This new book clears that up.
The Rochester Royals won the 1945-46 National Basketball League Championship in their first season with the league. The following year the Royals defended their title, with a new player named William “Dolly” King, the team’s first African American player.
Brian Gaynor of the Des Moines Register copped some nice research about the breaking of the racial color barrier in the old National Basketball League, for a piece he wrote that appeared this week in the Sheboygan Press.