How does a ticket to a 1941 basketball doubleheader link Ohio, the tire industry, burgers, the Star of David, Harlem, FDR, Nike, the UN, and Norman Rockwell?
Episode 3: The Four Freedoms Ticket of 1941
During the 1910s, a Lower East Side basketball coach brought Jewish Americans and African Americans together in the sport for the first time. Who was he? What did he do? Was he Jewish?
During World War II the Bronson Field Bombers, an all-black U.S. Navy basketball team stationed at Bronson Field in Pensacola, Florida, won the Naval Air Training Bases basketball championships.
The formal ceremony in the building’s vintage gymnasium was attended by Thurgood Marshall’s 81-year-old widow, Cissy, and by the great-grandson of former president Theodore Roosevelt.
In a special ceremony tomorrow (Saturday, February 7) the historic Twelfth Street Colored Y.M.C.A. Building in Washington, D.C. will unseal the contents of the more than 100 year old time capsule contained in its cornerstone, which was laid by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Mr. Obama stopped at Ben’s Chili Bowl in D.C. this weekend, across the street from a historic black basketball site once known as True Reformer’s Hall.
This week marks the 100th anniversary of the date (November 26, 1908) that President Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone of the Twelfth Street Colored Y.M.C.A. Branch building in Washington, D.C. In a formal ceremony involving “many prominent persons of both the white and colored races,” Roosevelt spread the first trowelful of mortar on the foundation… Read more »
The building’s gymnasium was the site of many early games between African American basketball teams, including the Washington 12 Streeters led by Edwin B. Henderson.
The roots of the black basketball trace back to the Hemenway Gymnasium on the campus of Harvard University.