Black Fives Foundation 2025 Impact Summary
Letter from the Founder
As I reflect on 2025, I am proud to share that this year marked a period of institutional consolidation, external validation, and strategic positioning for the Black Fives Foundation. Across our national programming, museum exhibitions, academic development, governance actions, and funding strategy, we strengthened our standing as a nationally and internationally recognized steward of early African American basketball history. This Black Fives Foundation 2025 Impact Summary highlights how our mission advanced across education, museum partnerships, academic development, and organizational growth.
This year brought a number of defining developments. We delivered our fourth consecutive season of educational programming with the BIG EAST Conference; earned major international museum validation through the featuring of a Black Fives artifact in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and our archives were selected for inclusion in the upcoming E Pluribus Unum: Celebrating the American Experience exhibition at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum.
We also received formal academic approval from Duquesne University for a Black Fives undergraduate elective course, scheduled to debut in its Fall 2026 course catalog; expanded our governance capacity; and our Board voted to establish a permanent Black Fives Museum. In addition, we developed a focused non-government grants strategy aligned with our core activities, and we introduced a female version of the Black Fives brand logo to structurally integrate women’s basketball history into our educational and interpretive framework.
Taken together, these outcomes reflect an organization moving deliberately from program execution toward long-term stewardship, infrastructure building, and institutional permanence. Through all of this, we continue to maintain fidelity to our mission as a public-history and education organization, dedicated to uncovering, preserving, teaching, and celebrating the rich history of the Black Fives Era of basketball.
At the center of this mission is our rallying call: Make History Now. For us, this is more than a slogan, it is a reminder that history is alive, that the past informs the future, and that every action we take today contributes to a lasting personal and cultural legacy. Make History Now challenges us to honor those who came before by building institutions that will stand long after us. It pushes this organization to innovate, to lead, and to create new space for African American history in museums, universities, athletics, and public memory.
Thank you for being part of this journey and for believing in the work we do. Your ongoing support ensures our programming, archival stewardship, and educational initiatives continue to grow, reach new communities, and expand public understanding of this powerful past. Our momentum is strong, our purpose is clear, and together we will Make History Now by shaping and inspiring the future through the lessons, legacy, and leadership born from the Black Fives Era.
Claude Johnson
Founder & Executive Director
Black Fives Foundation
Program Services
Signature Partnership: National Educational & Community-Impact Programming Through the BIG EAST Conference
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation delivered its fourth consecutive season of partnership with the BIG EAST Conference, continuing a multi-year educational collaboration focused on the history and legacy of African American basketball during the Black Fives Era.
The 2025 theme, “Pioneers of Change,” emphasized early Black basketball innovators who used sport as a tool for community development, enterprise, leadership formation, and racial uplift during segregation. This theme aligned directly with the Foundation’s broader interpretive framework linking basketball history to social institutions, education, and economic self-determination.
Across 22 men’s and women’s basketball games hosted by BIG EAST member institutions, student-athletes wore custom Black Fives shooting shirts featuring historically accurate team logos tied to each school’s geographic and historical region. These activations were supported by in-arena educational presentations introducing Black Fives history; printed and digital historical materials for fans and students; game-day storytelling integrated into Black History Month and Women’s History Month observances; and broadcast-visible apparel and recognition moments extending reach beyond the arena.
Fans and campus communities were introduced to figures including Edwin Bancroft Henderson, Will Anthony Madden, Ora Washington, and Cumberland Posey, positioning these pioneers within broader narratives of education, entrepreneurship, and community leadership.
All eleven member programs participated, each integrating Black Fives content into broader campus initiatives related to cultural education, DEI programming, and community engagement.
The BIG EAST will continue educational programming with the Black Fives Foundation for Black History Month 2026 and beyond, reinforcing the partnership’s durability and institutional value.
Education & Leadership Ambassador KK Arnold, University of Connecticut
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation advanced its educational mission through the continued involvement of UCONN Women’s basketball star KK Arnold, who serves as the Foundation’s Education and Leadership Ambassador. Her role provides a direct bridge between the history of the Black Fives Era and the experiences of contemporary student-athletes.
During the 2025 reporting year, KK Arnold won a national championship with UCONN, further elevating her leadership profile and reinforcing her credibility as a representative of the Foundation’s values. Her achievement underscores the connection between historical recovery and present-day excellence, leadership, and opportunity.
As Education and Leadership Ambassador, her involvement is intentionally educational rather than promotional. Her role is designed to connect early African American basketball pioneers to modern athletes through shared themes of resilience, responsibility, and leadership, while supporting the Foundation’s broader focus on women’s history and representation.
The Foundation’s Name, Image, and Likeness (NIL) relationship with KK continued through 2025, reflecting a mission-aligned model for engaging contemporary athletes centered on education, historical awareness, and leadership development.
Her ambassadorship strengthens the Foundation’s ability to demonstrate relevance across generations and reinforces the role of women’s leadership within both historical interpretation and present-day storytelling.
Museum & Public History Programs
Poster House Museum – “Legacy of Inspiration: The Black Fives & Nike”
In January 2025, the Foundation partnered with the Poster House Museum in New York City to present Legacy of Inspiration: The Black Fives & Nike.
The program featured a live talk by Founder Claude Johnson, examining the 2003 Black Fives–Nike collaboration and situating Black Fives Era teams within broader conversations about design history, branding, and cultural representation. The program demonstrated how historical research and archival materials inform contemporary storytelling and visual culture.
A recorded livestream extended the reach of the program beyond museum attendees, enabling national and international audiences to engage with the Foundation’s scholarship and reinforcing its role in public humanities discourse.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art – Superfine: Tailoring Black Style
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation received major international cultural validation through the inclusion of a Foundation artifact in Superfine: Tailoring Black Style at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The exhibition opened May 10, 2025, following the Met Gala on May 5, 2025, and remained on view through October 26, 2025. Superfine examined more than 300 years of Black style, identity, and self-fashioning, positioning Black cultural expression within global art and design history.
The Met selected and displayed a 1915 promotional placard for a New York Incorporators basketball game, associated with early professional basketball pioneer Will Anthony Madden. The artifact situated Black basketball within broader narratives of Black entrepreneurship, modern urban life, and cultural agency, positioning the Foundation’s archive beyond sports history and firmly within global cultural scholarship.
George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum
In December 2025, the Black Fives Archives were formally selected to support the upcoming E Pluribus Unum: Celebrating the American Experience exhibition at the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum through an artifact loan.
The exhibition will explore “all the different areas of our culture that are distinctly American.” Importantly, this advancement reflects a two-way standard of trust and stewardship where we entrust our archive only to institutions that show the vision and care this history deserves, and the museum, in turn, only selects archival collections that satisfy its standards for historical rigor and cultural relevance, reinforcing the Foundation’s role as a trusted steward of nationally significant historical materials.
Apparel as Public History
Throughout 2025, the Black Fives Foundation advanced a strategic approach to apparel as public history, using historically grounded archival material as accessible educational tools that translate archival research into everyday cultural engagement. Each collection was developed directly from primary-source materials such as championship programs, advertisements, and contemporaneous print materials held in the Black Fives Archives, and was intentionally paired with interpretive content designed to deepen historical understanding rather than function as standalone merchandise.
Spring 2025 – “World’s Pro Champs” Collection
The “World’s Pro Champs” Collection focused on the World’s Professional Basketball Championship era (1939–1948), a formative but frequently overlooked period in American sports history. Designs centered on the African American world’s championship title-winning teams: the New York Rens, Washington Bears, and Harlem Globetrotters.
Educational content accompanying the collection explained how African American basketball teams organized, negotiated venues, traveled nationally, and built sustainable enterprises during racial segregation. The collection served as an entry point into discussions about Black entrepreneurship, labor, and national Black sporting networks prior to the formation of the NBA in 1949.
“Among die-hard basketball fans, too few know that there were ten World’s Championships of Pro Basketball years before the NBA was formed in 1949, and African American teams won three of them,” Johnson stated.
Fall 2025 – “All Logos” Collection
The “All Logos” Collection expanded the Foundation’s interpretive focus to the full ecosystem of Black Fives Era teams, using historic logos as visual gateways into deeper historical narratives. Rather than presenting logos as branding alone, the collection framed them as reflections of place, migration, identity, and ownership.
Educational materials connected team names and marks to the neighborhoods, cities, institutions, and social conditions that produced them, illustrating how Black basketball teams functioned as expressions of community pride and collective self-definition. The collection encouraged audiences to see Black basketball history as a network of interconnected local stories rather than a linear progression toward integration.
“These logos and team names are vintage in the truest sense,” Johnson reflected.
Holiday 2025 – “Home Court” Collection
Following the All Logos Collection, the “Home Court” Collection shifted the interpretive lens from teams to physical spaces, highlighting historic gyms, ballrooms, armories, and athletic halls as cultural hubs within Black communities.
The collection emphasized that these buildings were not merely places where games were played, but centers of social life, economic activity, political organizing, and cultural exchange. Educational storytelling focused on how neighborhoods rallied around these venues, how they supported Black-owned businesses and institutions, and how they anchored community identity during periods of exclusion.
Together, the 2025 collections demonstrate how apparel can function as portable interpretation, extending the Foundation’s educational mission into daily life while maintaining historical rigor and archival integrity.
“I’ve always seen fashion as its own language, and what better way than as an educational conversation starter” said Johnson.
Women’s History & Representation
New Women’s Logo
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation introduced a female version of its existing Black Fives brand logo that features five male players, extending the organization’s core visual identity to include African American women’s basketball history within the same unified brand system.
This version mirrors the structure and symbolism of the original Black Fives mark while depicting five vintage female players, ensuring African American women’s basketball history is presented as integral to the Black Fives Era narrative.
“It says a lot about our female fans that they supported us all these years without this logo, so we wanted to get it right,” Johnson said. “And for that we enlisted the help of illustrator Olivia Callender, who was also our first guest artist.“
Educational and Interpretive Value
The women’s logo functions as a compact educational tool within the Foundation’s programming and interpretation:
- It provides immediate visual confirmation that women were active participants in early Black basketball communities, countering persistent misconceptions.
- It serves as a repeatable learning cue across classrooms, exhibitions, presentations, and digital materials.
- It acts as a gateway to deeper inquiry into women’s teams, leagues, institutions, and community roles.
- It reinforces the Foundation’s interpretive framework by embedding women’s history within narratives of community building, stewardship, and enterprise.
Deeper Programmatic Significance
The new women’s Black Fives logo strengthens inclusive interpretation across curriculum development, exhibition labeling, public humanities programming, and institutional partnerships, ensuring that African American women’s basketball history remains structurally embedded in our long-term storytelling.
Media Coverage & Broadcast Visibility
During the 2025 Black History Month period, BIG EAST games officially designated as Black Fives celebrations were carried across FOX, FS1, CBS Sports Network, Peacock, regional BIG EAST broadcast partners, and the Big East Digital Network.
Black Fives history appeared through on-court apparel, in-arena recognition, game notes, and broadcast context, extending educational reach far beyond in-person attendance.
Digital Communications & Social Media Impact†
In addition to in-person and broadcast visibility, the Foundation achieved substantial digital impact in 2025, as reflected in Brand24 analytics. These results demonstrate both expanded visibility and stronger audience participation with Black Fives educational and historical content.
High-Level Results
- 1,763 total mentions (+63%)
- 1.7 million estimated social media reach
- 26,000 interactions (+309%)
- 24,301 social media likes (+361%)
Engagement increased sharply, indicating more active participation and stronger interaction with the Foundation’s content and messaging.
Platform & Source Breakdown
- News media mentions: 1,420 (+263%)
- Instagram mentions: +100%
- Facebook mentions: +23%
- TikTok and Reels: high-performing fan-generated posts amplified reach and engagement
The significant increase in news mentions aligns with the Foundation’s high-visibility institutional programming and museum-level validation during the year.
Engagement Drivers and Content Performance
These results indicate that engagement was driven by a blend of:
- Foundation-authored educational storytelling
- Partnership amplification
- High-performing community and creator-driven content
Examples of strong-performing mention types included:
- Women’s history-related content and interpretive storytelling
- Video content attracting sustained comments and discussion
- Viral short-form posts (including third-party creator activity) generating outsized engagement relative to post volume
Community Influence and Share of Voice
- The @blackfives account on Instagram represented about a 32.5% share of the Foundation’s overall voice, generating an estimated 561K reach.
- Third-party creators and public profiles contributed meaningfully to total reach, with organic community amplification accounting for a substantial portion of overall visibility.
These results reinforce that the Foundation’s content is increasingly circulating through earned and community-driven channels, extending reach beyond the Foundation’s owned platforms.
†Brand24
Education & Curriculum Development
University-Approved Black Fives Curriculum – Duquesne University
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation received formal academic approval from Duquesne University for a Black Fives undergraduate elective course, which is scheduled to appear in its Fall 2026 course catalog. This represents a significant milestone in the organization’s evolution from a public-history organization to credentialed academic content provider.
The course will be titled, The Emergence of Black Basketball through Community, Stewardship, and Enterprise, 1900–1950.
This is significant because of Duquesne‘s academic reputation, its deep connection to African American basketball history, and its membership in the basketball-centered Atlantic 10 Conference.
The curriculum was designed intentionally as a humanities-based course, not a sports elective. Black basketball history serves as the organizing lens through which students examine how African American communities built institutions, governed organizations, generated economic opportunity, and sustained cultural life under conditions of racial exclusion.
The course aligns with academic frameworks in history, African American studies, ethics, sociology, cultural studies, leadership, and organizational analysis.
Thematic modules will include:
- The origins of Black basketball as a community institution
- School-based, church-based, and neighborhood athletic programs
- Black-owned teams: their networks, promoters, venues, supporters, and communities
- Ethical leadership, governance, and stewardship under segregation
- Entrepreneurship, migration, and urban development
- Media, representation, and historical erasure
Each module integrates primary-source materials drawn directly from the Black Fives Archives of artifacts, including photographs, game programs, league documents, promotional materials, correspondence, and ephemera.
The curriculum was structured to integrate easily into existing humanities and social science offerings. It supports interdisciplinary teaching objectives and aligns with institutional goals related to experiential learning, diversity, ethics, and civic engagement.
It also establishes a replicable academic model that can be adopted by other institutions without compromising historical accuracy or interpretive integrity.
From inception, the curriculum was intentionally designed for downward scalability. Core concepts and source materials can be adapted into high school history and social studies units, middle school enrichment modules, and teacher professional development workshops. This positions the Foundation to extend educational impact while maintaining control over historical framing and source use.
Other Collaborations
Washington Wizards Educational & Cultural Activation
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation continued with planning for a collaboration with the Washington Wizards centered on education, historical interpretation, and community engagement.
Programming will include in-arena educational content, historically grounded merchandise, and community-based events.
In-arena educational programming will incorporate Black Fives history through curated storytelling, interpretive content, and educational messaging presented to live audiences, introducing fans to early African American basketball history, key figures, and institutions connected to Washington, DC and the broader Black Fives Era.
Planning discussions emphasized the Foundation’s ability to contribute museum-quality archival materials from its 1,000+ item archive, educational storytelling centered on DC-based African American basketball teams including the Washington Bears, and portable interpretive displays suitable for multiple settings.
New York Rens Commemorative Sidewalk – Harlem
Planning continued for a Harlem sidewalk commemoration honoring the New York Renaissance (Rens) at the former Renaissance Casino site, with significant meaningful support from the New York Knicks. The project centers on community-accessible ways to memorialize key New York Rens players and contributors and reflects ongoing collaboration with cultural and institutional partners.
Governance & Organizational Development
In 2025, the Foundation expanded governance capacity through the addition of a new cohort of board members, strengthening leadership depth and strategic oversight.
The Board also voted to establish a permanent Black Fives Museum, marking a decisive long-term commitment to preservation, stewardship, and public access to the Foundation’s nationally significant archive.
Grants & Funding Development
In 2025, the Black Fives Foundation developed a non-government grants and funding strategy designed to support long-term institutional growth while protecting mission integrity. The strategy was developed as a board-level planning framework, guiding fundraising priorities, staff capacity, and partner engagement.
Organizational Assets Driving the Strategy
The grants strategy is grounded in three established strengths:
World-Class Archive The Foundation stewards what is believed to be the world’s largest archive of African American basketball artifacts from the pre-NBA era. These materials have already been exhibited by major national museums, confirming national significance and funder-level credibility. Funding in this category supports digitization, cataloging, conservation, rehousing, professional archival staffing, and public access infrastructure.
Established Academic Curriculum The Foundation holds an approved college-level curriculum, positioning it squarely within humanities-based education rather than athletics programming. The curriculum’s scalability expands eligibility across multiple education-focused funding categories. Funding supports adaptation of the college curriculum for secondary education, development of teacher-facing resources, pilot programs, and evaluation.
Public Humanities & Cultural Impact The Foundation operates at the intersection of history, education, and cultural preservation, making it a strong fit for archives, humanities, and interpretation funders rather than youth sports or recreation-only grantmakers. Funding supports traveling and pop-up exhibitions, public talks, speaker series, digital exhibitions, and community-based storytelling initiatives.
Strategic Funding Filters
To remain focused and realistic, the Foundation applied the following filters:
- Non-government funders only (private foundations, corporate philanthropy, nonprofit grantmakers)
- Exclusion of youth athletics-only or sports-program funders
- No requirement to own or operate a historic building
- Preference for funders with a track record supporting African American history and culture
- Archives, conservation, and preservation
- Humanities-based education
- Public interpretation and storytelling
Combined Perspective
Taken together, 2025 reflects a year of institutional elevation for the Black Fives Foundation, marked by sustained partnerships, global museum validation, academic approval, confirmed collaborations, strengthened governance, and disciplined funding strategy focused on long-term cultural stewardship.
Join us in shaping and inspiring the future. With your support, together we’ll continue to Make History Now.