Black Fives

Milwaukee Colored Panthers

Location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Nickname: Black Panthers, Negro Panthers
Colors: Black, White

The Milwaukee Colored Panthers were an African American semi-professional basketball team that played in Wisconsin during the mid-to-late-1930s.

With an office on West Pierce Street in downtown Milwaukee, the Panthers’ innovative business model included sending postcards to post offices throughout the state, addressed simply, “Manager, City Independent Basketball Team,” along with the town’s name, but with no address. Yet, they would inevitably arrive at their destinations.

In 1938, the front of these mailers had a photograph of the team and the back promoted their success as “winners of 128 games in the past three years” with an assurance they “can be booked in your city” by writing to the club’s manager.

This “all-star colored team,” labeled in advance billing as “one of the country’s leading Negro quintets,” were sometimes called the Black Panthers or Negro Panthers.

They played against all-White teams throughout Wisconsin such as the Plymouth Cheesemakers, the Kimberly Papermakers, the Algoma Plumbers, the Sheboygan Athletic Club, the Green Bay Senators, the Waterloo V-8 Fords, and the Cedarburg Turners.

The Panthers won with excellent teamwork, which included “clever ball-handling and one-handed shots” according to the Green Bay Press-Gazette. “A dark cloud of speed and deception will descend on the armory Saturday night,” the Portage Daily Register reported in January 1937, prior to their game with the local Portage Sarbackers.

The team’s success advanced the popularity of the game throughout Wisconsin and paved the way for subsequent visits to the state by the all-Black, fully professional New York Renaissance, considered the top basketball team in the country at the time.

Those visits, in turn, led to the creation in 1937 of an annual World Series of Basketball, a multi-game series between the Rens and the Oshkosh All Stars, a championship-caliber all-White squad, which took place in several Wisconsin locations. This series was so profitable that it led to the inception of the World Championship of Professional Basketball in 1939, a Chicago-based tournament that lasted for ten years and led directly to the formation of the National Basketball Association in 1949.

You can celebrate this team with Milwaukee Colored Panthers™ merchandise at the Black Fives Online Shop.

Milwaukee Colored Panthers™ is a trademark of the Black Fives Foundation. All rights reserved. Images courtesy of the Sandler Archives.