There are three ways to start a story in Chicago’s Southside: basketball, the blues, or both.
We are in 1926. The southern district of Chittown live in time injury; With Paul Newman and Robert Redford being handsome and trick-or-treaters among factories, smoke, and brick buildings. European immigrants have populated the south side neighborhoods since the 19th century, but now they’re seeing waves of African Americans fleeing the southern United States. Most of them are from the Mississippi Delta region. His goal is to start a new life in a freer North in theory.
And it ended up happening, just less than they expected.
Thousands of blacks who have come to the south side of Chicago adopt the same sport there as their counterparts from other northern cities: from New York, Boston and Detroit. The system invented by James Naismith in 1891, and baptized as Basketball, which they start playing in their very own way. Freer, more physical, and more fun and unrestricted than those played in YMCA schools, on college campuses. In places that African Americans could not reach in the early twentieth century.
On the south side, few interpret this new basketball result as the Savoy Big Five, a show team made up of African-American players, as the first ball players. In 1928, several of its members split to form their own team: its new name, Globe Trotters.
That’s when Abby Saperstein, a Jewish immigrant in Chicago, sees the opportunity. He became a manager and coach for the group, and toured throughout the United States. And since the Harlem neighborhood of New York was at that time a center of African American culture, of which basketball played freely and without handbrake became an essential part, Saperstein renamed Chicago’s Southside Group with the following name that went down in history: Harlem Globetrotters.
The emergence of blues music in Chicago
The Harlem Globetrotters became the logo and flag of Afro Basketball at a time when the National Basketball Association was still not accepting black players. In fact, when the League opened its doors to everyone, regardless of skin color, in the 1950s, many of its African-American pioneers—Chuck Cooper, Nat Sweetwater Clifton, Hande de Zune, and Wilt Chamberlain—formerly came through the Harlem Globetrotters. . .
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