About
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The Black Fives Era In Perspective
In urban industrial centers like New York, Washington, Pittsburgh, and Chicago, black people were in motion.
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 baseball’s Negro Leagues. However, independent African American teams played within a well-organized nationwide barnstorming circuit.
They commanded national attention in the Negro press and headlines in local papers 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 and radio, the growth of 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.
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