Before The NBA Was Integrated, We Had The Black Fives : Code Switch : NPR

Before The NBA Was Integrated, We Had The Black Fives : Code Switch : NPR: Most people have heard of the Negro Leagues in baseball and of Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in the late 1940s — but relatively few people have heard of the Black Fives, the African-American basketball teams that played up until the NBA was integrated in 1950.

An exhibit at the New-York Historical Society aims to rectify that.

When basketball was invented in 1891, it was a totally white game. In 1904, Edwin Bancroft Henderson, a black Washington, D.C., gym teacher, took a summer course at Harvard and brought the game back to black segregated schools. From there, it went to YMCAs, and eventually to black teams with names like the Washington Bears and the New York Renaissance.

Claude Johnson, guest curator of this exhibit, says there are "dozens and dozens" of all-black teams that played basketball before 1950 — and that their legacy reflects the changing face of America at the time.