Earl Lloyd (seated) with Jim Tucker, close friend and Syracuse teammate, on the day Earl's statue was unveiled at West Virginia State University. Credit: Photo courtesy West Virginia State University

Halloween night, 1950: The Edgerton Sports Arena, not so far from the Genesee River gorge in Rochester, a civic auditorium that was home at the time to the old Rochester Royals of the National Basketball Association, a new league just starting its second year.

That night, the Royals hosted the old Washington Capitols. Rochester won, 78-70, and no one writing about the game at the time saw it as a major pivot and breakthrough in the history of basketball itself, even if the box score contained this line involving the results for a 22-year-old rookie forward on the Capitols…

Earl Lloyd, two-of-three from the floor, two-of-three from the free throw line, six total points.

That was how and when Earl became the first Black player to compete in an NBA game.

Before long, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. By the time he returned from service, the Capitols were gone, dissolved. Earl — I call him that in this column because it feels too strange, for reasons I will soon explain, to call him by his last name — spent most of his NBA playing career here in Syracuse.

In 1955, 70 years ago last spring, Earl and the late Jim Tucker — a young teammate who always saw Lloyd as a friend, teacher and mentor — were the first African-Americans to play on an NBA champion, when the Nats won it all.

Earl, for his part, was the first Black starter on an NBA champion. Ever.

Contemplate the game today — and all the dreams and aspirations and heritage and imagination surrounding it in Black communities across this nation — and consider that.

Years later, I met Earl through my job as a columnist with The Post-Standard. It blew my mind in the early 1990s to learn that the guy who shattered basketball’s color barrier played in Syracuse, yet was largely unknown — at least at the time — in mainstream America.

The connection led to a close friendship, eventually building into a book we wrote together, “Moonfixer,” which I always say is less an autobiography than Earl’s testament. Within the pages, Earl offers witness to the pain he endured, and progress made — yet is blunt and achingly eloquent about the challenges and obstacles that still exist in this country.

In those pages, he takes pain to give credit to everyone else. He refuses to compare himself to Jackie Robinson, saying the level of bile and abuse that Robinson endured in 1946 and 1947, when he broke into the all-white International League and then into Major League Baseball — which happened only three years before Earl did the same in pro basketball — was incomparably brutal and difficult.

Earl spoke with reverence of Chuck Cooper and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, Black players who entered the NBA in the same 1950-51 season. He said the Capitols would never have drafted him in the ninth round out of West Virginia State if the Celtics, in an earlier round, hadn’t already drafted Cooper – which is why Earl always described Celtics coaching legend Red Auerbach with deep respect.

Earl Lloyd, with the Syracuse Nationals. Credit: Courtesy of Le Moyne College, Biasone collection.

He was also aware that such Black players as Dolly King and William “Pop” Gates had excelled in the old National Basketball League, a circuit all too easily overlooked today, which eventually merged with the Basketball Association of America to become the new NBA — and the NBL, in its earliest incarnation as the Midwest Basketball Conference, included a Black player in Buffalo, Hank Williams, in 1935.

Most important to Earl, who grew up in Virginia in suffocating and dangerous Jim Crow segregation, he always made the point that countless generations of Black athletes before him in this country should have been allowed to play at the highest levels of every American sport, and he saw his breakthrough as having the good luck of being alive to cross that threshold at the right moment – and he always insisted the best way to honor him was by remembering so many earlier generations smothered by a vicious, poisonous system.

That thought was the crescendo of the book. It is why he wanted to write it. It matters now in our world, more than ever, and I know — I absolutely know — that if Earl were alive, it is what he would say needs to be remembered today.

Yet in Earl’s innate empathy and humility, that approach did not capture just how admired and beloved he was within the game, particularly by the African-American players who followed the same trail, young guys who remembered his guidance and advice and relentless dignity in an America where hostility, rejection and violence could still await them at any time, and any place.

Earl Lloyd (second from right, back row) on 1955 NBA champion Syracuse Nats. Credit: Courtesy Le Moyne College, Biasone collection.

His tenure in Syracuse, for instance, was hardly without struggle: Earl spent much of his time living in a boarding house in the old 15th Ward, an historically Black neighborhood, because he found it was almost impossible for African-Americans to rent or buy homes at the time in “white” communities.

He was never a drinker — he loved his orange soda — but he spent a lot of time at the old Embassy Lounge in Syracuse, listening to great jazz. His frequent companion and closest friend in Syracuse was the late Donald “Peewee” Caldwell, a letter carrier who had been the first African-American player at Le Moyne College.

And Earl’s landlords were J. Luther and Helen Sylvahn, the couple who produced The Progressive Herald, legendary newspaper of the Syracuse Black community.

Earl Lloyd reaching for ball, during his undefeated senior season at West Virginia State. Credit: Provided for 'Moonfixer' by West Virginia State

Earl competed until 1960, ending his playing career in Detroit, where he became the first Black assistant coach in NBA history. He went on to a long career in business and as an educator before retiring with his wife Charlita to Tennessee, the time in his life in which we built our friendship.

How important was Earl? When West Virginia State University put up a statue to honor him in 2014, Bill Russell and Oscar Robertson — two of the greatest players in the history of the game — both were there.

The NBA and the NBA Players Association, for their part, have promised to honor all the 1950 groundbreakers, throughout this season.

Earl died in 2015, and the mourners at his packed funeral understood the deeper magnitude of his legacy. His focus in life was always on honoring all those who confronted impossible barriers before him — and on recognizing the wearisome challenges too many children of color are still facing in American cities today, a reality he summarized with several passages in “Moonfixer:”

“Today, these kids in these cities, they’re not legally segregated, but people fear them and hate them without knowing them just as much as they hated Ruby Bridges, without knowing her. You talk about me, and this ceiling I’m supposed to be so proud of busting through, but tell me, aren’t we still pouring that cement?”

It was that kind of thinking, that kind of generosity, that kind of soul — combined with his staggering achievements — that led to Earl’s induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Earl is now part of a sweeping downtown mural — proposed and brought into existence by JazzFest founder Frank Malfitano, and created by artist Jonas Never — that shows him alongside Dolph Schayes, Breanna Stewart and Manny Breland, a homegrown basketball star and educator who often spoke of how his own dreams were influenced by Earl.

Earl Lloyd, top left, as part of a mural of groundbreaking basketball legends, downtown. Credit: Sean Kirst | Central Current

Malfitano’s theme was that all of them, in some way, shattered or challenged societal barriers. People who don’t understand the message will sometimes ask: If the mural is supposed to be about basketball and Syracuse, why doesn’t it honor, say, Dave Bing, the Syracuse University hoops legend?

I can answer that, definitively. Bing — who admired and loved Earl — wrote the foreword for “Moonfixer,” which he used as an opportunity to talk about the lasting impact Earl had on the game of basketball, and what Earl shouldered on behalf of all the Black players who came after him.

Here is a quote about that magnitude, direct from Bing:

“Because of the way he carried himself, he opened doors for the rest of us.”

Bing’s own life was changed by the qualities that put his friend up on that wall, an impact you can multiply countless times, over many generations — and a reminder of why it was to the eternal good fortune of all of us that Earl brought such grace and guts, to Syracuse.

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Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Central Current. He has been an Upstate journalist for more than 50 years. He held his first reporting job as a teenager and worked for newspapers in Dunkirk, Niagara...