Publication date:
15 December 2018Length of book:
280 pagesPublisher
Rowman & Littlefield PublishersISBN-13: 9781442277533
Today, it is nearly impossible to talk about the best basketball players in America without acknowledging the accomplishments of incredibly talented black athletes like Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, and Kobe Bryant. A little more than a century ago, however, the game was completely dominated by white players playing on segregated courts and teams.
In Breaking Barriers: A History of Integration in Professional Basketball, Douglas Stark details the major moments that led to the sport opening its doors to black players. He charts the progress of integration from Bucky Lew—the first black professional basketball player in 1902—to the modern game played by athletes like Stephen Curry and LeBron James. Although Stark focuses on the official integration of basketball in the late 1940s, the story does not end there. Over the past 60-plus years, black athletes have continued to change the game of basketball in terms of style, social progress, and marketability.
Spanning the early 1900s to the present day, no other book features such a comprehensive examination of the key events and figures that led to the integration of professional basketball. In Breaking Barriers, these crucial steps in the history of the sport are placed within the larger context of American history, making this book an essential addition to the literature on sports and race in America.
In Breaking Barriers: A History of Integration in Professional Basketball, Douglas Stark details the major moments that led to the sport opening its doors to black players. He charts the progress of integration from Bucky Lew—the first black professional basketball player in 1902—to the modern game played by athletes like Stephen Curry and LeBron James. Although Stark focuses on the official integration of basketball in the late 1940s, the story does not end there. Over the past 60-plus years, black athletes have continued to change the game of basketball in terms of style, social progress, and marketability.
Spanning the early 1900s to the present day, no other book features such a comprehensive examination of the key events and figures that led to the integration of professional basketball. In Breaking Barriers, these crucial steps in the history of the sport are placed within the larger context of American history, making this book an essential addition to the literature on sports and race in America.
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.