Odds are the average Pittsburgh sports fan doesn’t know what a big role the city played in the early development of Black basketball. Yet even many non-fans will recognize the name of the man most critical to that process: Cumberland Posey, the renowned Homestead Grays owner and the only person in both the pro baseball and pro basketball halls of fame.
Claude Johnson’s 2022 book “The Black Fives: The Epic Story of Basketball’s Forgotten Era” is, in part, a monument to Posey’s genius as a player, manager and sports impresario. It’s also a window on the wider world of Black sport from the early 1900s to the mid-century founding of the National Basketball Association, an era of rampant segregation across the country.
On Fri., Feb. 17, Johnson delivers Heinz History Center’s ninth annual Black History Month Lecture, with a focus on Posey and such fabled Pittsburgh teams as Posey’s groundbreaking Monticello Athletic Association, the Scholastic Athletic Association, and Posey’s Loendi Big Five – the latter was the most dominant Black team of the 1920s.
Posey was born in 1890, the son of industrialist Cumberland Posey, Sr., a leader of the local Black economic elite who co-founded the Pittsburgh Courier. The younger Posey was actually a basketball star, at Homestead High, before he started playing pro baseball with the Grays, the club he'd later lead to the status of perennial Negro-leagues champions.
His exploits included starring in varsity basketball—under an assumed named—at Duquesne University in the late 1910s. But, at the same time, he was making his name on the club side of the sport that Edwin Henderson had introduced to Black athletes in 1904, in Washington, D.C.
Posey formed the all-Black Monticello Athletic Association in 1911. The very next year, the team beat a vaunted Howard University squad. Johnson said that upset made Pittsburgh’s name as a hoops hotbed, with games and practices in gyms and field houses all over town.
“Pittsburgh became a center for Black basketball,” Johnson said. “As a result of Cumberland Posey’s success, other teams from all over the place, from New York City, from Chicago and D.C. and elsewhere, started to come to Pittsburgh.”
Posey “basically became the spearhead, the architect of Black sport in Pittsburgh, both basketball and baseball,” he added.
Along the way, Posey pioneered such practices as recruiting and paying players in a culture that still prized “amateurism.”
Johnson lives in Connecticut, where his Black Fives Foundation is based. But he said he has many Pittsburgh connections, including family here, a degree in civil engineering and economics from Carnegie Mellon University, and a mentor in noted University of Pittsburgh sports historian Rob Ruck.
His “Black Fives” book also focuses on other key cities, including New York, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., and their own local sports heroes. Johnson’s history travels right up to the creation, in 1949, of the National Basketball Association.
Here, too, was racism: Johnson said the lone team excluded from the merger between the National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America that formed the NBA was the New York Rens, the Black squad that many consider the finest of its time.
But Pittsburgh had a further role to play. In 1950, Westinghouse High School and Duquesne University grad Chuck Cooper became the first Black player to be drafted by the NBA, and one of the first three Black players to take the court in the league.
Johnson is well aware of Pittsburgh’s overall sports history. He said he just wanted to show that the City of Champions earned the title in more ways, and even earlier, than many acknowledge.
“What I was trying to do here was unearth some more things that Pittsburghers could be proud of,” he said.
