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In the profane manner of professional athletes, Bobby Hunter had this summary of Abe Saperstein, the founder of the Harlem Globetrotters and, for more than three decades, the team’s owner and director:
“Abe was about six different kinds of asshole, but racist wasn’t one of them.”
That, in its odd way, was quite an endorsement of the 5’3” London-born Chicagoan Saperstein who had an oversize impact on professional basketball in the US and around the world as well as on Major League Baseball and other sports. Hunter, who joined the team in 1966, the year Saperstein died at the age of 63, was the leader of the successful unionization effort of the players several years later.
For nearly a century, the Globetrotters, a Black squad unaffiliated with any professional league, have been the epitome of basketball excellence while also serving as the clown princes of the sport. That clowning, however, especially in the early decades, involved feeding into the stereotypical expectations of white audiences in a way that was called demeaning by some Black leaders and activists.
Mark Jacob and Matthew Jacob, the brothers who wrote Globetrotter: How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports, point out that some of Saperstein’s players saw him as bigoted while others, like Hunter, viewed him only as a boss who was tight with the dollar and had a paternalistic manner.
And then there was Connie Hawkins, who played for the Trotters and went on to an NBA career that put him in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Shortly after Saperstein’s death, Hawkins told a Chicago Daily News reporter:
“He was a master at finding out if they really enjoyed the show. Lots of times people were really laughing but he’d come and give us heck because he’d say they weren’t laughing enough. He always knew. He was a connoisseur of laughter.”
Nonetheless, six years later, David Wolf, the author of Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story, quoted the star as saying:
“What we were doing out there was acting like Uncle Toms…Grinnin' and smilin' and dancin' around, and that’s the way a lot of white people like to think we really are.”
Throughout Globetrotter, Mark and Matthew Jacob wrestle with race and racism—in Saperstein’s attitudes, in the entertainment that he and his players offered their audiences, in the coverage that white and Black newspaper reporters gave to the team and its owner and in the American culture itself.
They recognize that, in contrast with the vast majority of white America, Saperstein dealt with Black players and employees as fellow human beings and, often, as friends. At the same time, he expressed in various ways some of the cultural blindness of white society of his time. It is a messy topic, and one they don’t try to tidy up.
For instance, the authors note that, in 1938, the Chicago Tribune described a Black murder suspect as a “jungle beast” and added a physical description similarly derogatory. (Seventy decades later, Mark Jacob worked at the Tribune as a news section editor while I was a features writer. Our paths rarely crossed.)
“Exploder of That Myth”
The Jacob brothers write that, during the first half of the 20th century, many white people thought of Blacks as “a notch or two down the evolutionary scale,” and Luther Gulick, the mentor of James Naismith, the inventor of basketball, asserted that non-whites weren’t able to play team sports.
Saperstein, the authors point out, saw himself “as an exploder of that myth.”
The basketball skill and artistry that audiences saw before their eyes often ran counter to the attitudes they brought into the arena.
“His Globetrotters often played in places where the townspeople had never seen a Black American in person before. The Trotters had met all comers and defeated them at a clip of more than 90 percent. For Saperstein, it was both a business and a crusade. He was smart enough to appreciate Black talent when others didn’t. That allowed him to turn a profit and expose the folly of prejudice at the same time.”
The basketball skill and artistry that audiences saw before their eyes often ran counter to the attitudes they brought into the arena.
An example occurred in the 1950s when the Globetrotters played a game in Muncie, Indiana, known as the northern headquarters of the Ku Klux Klan. Don Shelby, later a Minneapolis broadcast anchor and a basketball reporter, was a boy in the crowd that day and, in an interview with the authors, recalled the experience seven decades later:
“White people there recognized the talent they were seeing. Watching the Globetrotters’ incredible athleticism on the court started to change the paradigm of how white fans viewed Black athletes. The cultural shift may have been only by millimeters, but I think it gained momentum from there.”
As best the authors can determine from a muddy historical record, the Globetrotters played their first game on January 21, 1929, and, in those early years, the diminutive Saperstein served as the team’s coach—and, on occasion, as a substitute on the court. One reporter commented that “his shooting and passing was not up to the standard of the other four members of the team.”
Soon enough, Saperstein handed off the coaching duties to Inman Jackson, one of his top players, and focused on scheduling games and promoting the team. In a time before human relations departments and fair employment laws, the owner, like those in Major League Baseball and other sports in that era—well, any era—tried to get the most out of his players for the least amount of money.
The Jacob brothers write that many players had “conflicting feelings about Saperstein, who gave them opportunities but left no doubt who was boss.” Longtime star Meadowlark Lemon wrote in his 1987 autobiography:
“I felt like I had to treat him as a father figure, a Santa Claus, to get anything out of him. None of us really liked him, but for some reason we loved him.”
“Sharing the Same Bed”
There was, the authors note, a deep emotional bond between Saperstein and Inman Jackson, a Black who, the mainstream attitudes of the time notwithstanding, was his best friend and like a brother to him.
And, like friends and brothers, they would argue at times, and the authors report:
“They generally roomed together on the road, but after one fight they gave each other the silent treatment for three weeks even though they were staying in the same room and sometimes sharing the same bed.”
Saperstein, who lived nearly all of his life in and around the Chicago neighborhood of Ravenswood, was much more than the founder and moving force behind the Globetrotters.
A workaholic and “a human dynamo” who traveled hundreds of thousands of miles during his career as a promoter and sports impresario, Saperstein helped keep the Negro Leagues alive and worked with Bill Veeck to try to break down Major League Baseball’s color barrier several years before Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers.
He was influential in the hiring of Larry Doby, the first African American on an American League team, and helped Satchel Paige, one of the greatest pitchers of all time, Black or white, get to the majors, albeit at the age of 42.
He befriended Olympics star Jesse Owens when he fell on hard times and, with the Globetrotters, became an international goodwill ambassador for the United States during the coldest of the Cold War years. On top of that, he was a proponent of the three-point shot in basketball, nearly two decades before its adoption by the NBA.
But, above all of those other pursuits, Saperstein’s legacy is the Globetrotters, and, despite the critiques about some of the ways the players were used and portrayed, he has a fan in civil rights activist Jesse Jackson who, in 1978, said:
“I think they’ve been a positive influence. They did not show blacks as stupid. On the contrary, they were shown as superior.”
Globetrotter How Abe Saperstein Shook Up the World of Sports is available at bookstores and through the Rowman and Littlefield website.
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