"Riches do not respond to wishes. They respond only to definite plans, backed by definite desires, through constant persistence." - Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich, 1937)

In Perspective

Just after the game of basketball was invented in 1891, teams were called "fives" in reference to their five starting players. Basketball, like American society, was racially segregated. Teams made up entirely of African American players were known as colored quints, colored fives, Negro fives, or black fives.

"Big Basket Ball Game and Dance": A typical Black Fives Era advertisement.

The sport remained segregated from 1891 until the racial integration of professional basketball leagues such as the National Basketball League (NBL) and the National Basketball Association beginning in the late 1940s. The period in between became known as the Black Fives Era. Dozens of all-black teams emerged and flourished during this time, decades before the NBA was born. These were amateur, semi-pro, and professional teams that were sponsored by churches, athletic clubs, social clubs, businesses, colleges, and "Colored" YMCAs.

For a while, these teams had few places to play, since "colored" people were prohibited from using most athletic facilities and had few of their own.

But around 1910, the emergence of the phonograph and radio made indiginous black music -- ragtime, jazz, and blues -- so popular that it created a dancing craze. Sheet music and the piano in the parlor gave way to dancehalls and ballrooms. Almost overnight, African American musical talent was in demand. Positive entertainment opportunities replaced the insulting, degrading minstrelsy of the past.

Observant black basketball promoters saw this as an opportunity too. Empty ballrooms could be used for basketball games, and to attract more attention the games could feature popular music and dancing. In urban industrial centers like New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, black people were in motion, and new migrants from the South as well as new immigrants from all parts of the Caribbean, Africa, Central-, and South America were looking for ways to meet each other and assimilate.

As a result, Black Fives Era basketball games became meaningful social events, accompanied by full orchestras with dancing afterwards 'til well past midnight. This is why every game advertisement read, "Basket Ball and Dance." Although commonplace today, mixing basketball with music at the time was an African American innovation that grew out of necessity, opportunism, timing, and broad cultural awareness by community leaders.

There never existed a black professional basketball league akin to the Negro National League, for example. However, independent African American teams played within a well-organized nationwide barnstorming circuit and commanded national attention in the Negro press while battling for the annual right to be called "Colored Basketball World's Champions."

The Black Fives Era spanned what were perhaps America's darkest yet most colorful years, a rich period that included the First Black Migration, the emergence of the phonograph, radio, and entertainment culture, the explosion of jazz, ragtime, and the blues, vice reform, lynchings and race riots, the ballroom dancing craze, Prohibition, the Roaring '20s, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Depression, two World Wars, and the Golden Age of Sports.

One African American team, the New York Renaissance (aka Harlem "Rens") emerged and stood apart as arguably the most successful basketball team of the century, of any ethnicity. From 1923 to 1948, the Rens won 2,588 of 3,117 games - a staggering winning percentage of 83% sustained over a 25-year period! The Rens ushered in the Harlem Renaissance period, smashed the color barrier in pro basketball, and helped pave the way for the Civil Rights Movement.

The teams and players of the Black Fives Era created something from nothing, with no road map, no guidelines, no instructions, and no recipe. With definite plans, definite desires, and constant persistence, they succeeded on bigger and bigger stages despite a multitude of fears, doubts, internal and external obstacles. All the while they fostered hope, pride, unity, and self-esteem among African Americans during the most pivotal period in black history of the last century. The men and women of the Black Fives Era were true basketball pioneers whose desire simply to play their best and innovate the game opened doors for generations of African American players, leaving a worldwide legacy that inspires all ballers to this day.