Breaking Barriers

Celebrating pioneering black athletes, Stark offers a succinct history of the professional basketball, beginning in 1902 with Bucky Lew’s entry in the pro leagues up through the golden era of the 1940s and ’50s. He examines the life of professional black athletes in the Jim Crow South, where they were excluded from white hotels and often forced to sleep on buses and change uniforms in rest rooms rather than locker rooms. The writing is detailed as Stark discusses the rivalry between the New York Rens (short for Renaissance) and the Harlem Globetrotters (“The Globetrotters were entertainers, not basketball purists like the Rens”) or the formation of the integrated National Basketball League in 1937. Throughout, Stark revisits long-forgotten players such as Zack Clayton, who played for the New York Rens in the 1940s; William “Dolly” King who played in the NBL’s Rochester Royals in 1946; and Chuck Cooper, who in 1950 became the first black player to be drafted into the NBA. He shows how much basketball has evolved, closing with such NBA stars as the L.A. Lakers’ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who “retired with the most points in NBA history”; Bill Russell, who, with the Boston Celtics, revolutionized how defenses “could alter the game”; and the Chicago Bulls’ Michael Jordan, “regarded as the game’s greatest player.” This is an excellent survey of the breaking of pro basketball’s color line.