The NBA was ahead of the college game, but the college game still held the pathway to the NBA and a lot of blacks were denied chances to play, especially in certain geographic regions and when they did play, they had to conform to a certain style of basketball.
"The first step in integrating collegiate basketball was integrating the school itself. White southern colleges did not even begin to admit black students until the early 1960s, despite the fact that Brown vs. Board of Education had deemed segregated public schools unconstitutional in 1954. Once African Americans were allowed on campus, they were still excluded from athletic teams until the late 1960s and early 1970s."
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When my mother was in high school the girls played basketball in PE. That was it. Playing another girl's team was out of the question. Same as football, same as baseball or other sports. How many pro or college women football, or baseball players do we have today? It's time to admit too, racism was a nationwide trait. You have one of the most racist people alive in the white house, obama, a man that is half white, but refuses to acknowledge it.
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INTEGRATION AND THE BIRTH OF THE NATIONAL BASKETBALL ASSOCIATION
In 1950, Chuck Cooper became the first African-American player drafted by the fledgling National Basketball Association (NBA). By the 1960s, African-American participation at both the college and professional level had drastically increased, so much so that the Boston Celtics had an all–African-American starting line-up in 1964. The percentage of African Americans playing in the collegiate and professional ranks continued to increase in the 1970s.
The increase in African-American dominance of professional basketball during the latter decades of the twentieth century was such that a survey of NBA all-franchise players in 1994, covering the league from its beginnings, showed that out of 124 players, 86 were African Americans, 35 were European Americans, 1 was African, 1 was European, and 1 was an Iranian American. The NBA named its fifty greatest players from its first fifty years in 1996. Of these, thirty-one were African Americans and eighteen were European American. In 2001, the Basketball Hall of Fame included 34 African Americans and 77 European Americans. James Naismith and the Nigerian-born Hakeem Olajuwon were the only non–American-born inductees.
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