Washington Bears

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The Washington Bears, or Washington Lichtman Bears, were a professional African-American basketball team from Washington, DC that existed from 1941 to 1948 . The Bears , which consisted almost exclusively of members of the New York Renaissance , played a perfect season in 1942/43 with 41 wins, which culminated in winning the $ 10,000 World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago and prize money of $ 1,500.

Bob Douglas ' New York Rens were deprived of most of their income due to the war-related travel restrictions as a mainly tinkering team and therefore played almost entirely in DC.After Tarzan Cooper fell out with Bob Douglas about a new contract in 1940, he became more African at the behest of the American and indigenous descent Sam Lacy to Washington DC where he established the semi-professional team of the Washington Bruins on which played only on Sundays. After Sam Lacy took a job with the Chicago Defender and moved, the team was sold. Co-owner was the Homestead Grays radio journalist Hal Jackson , who brought Abe Lichtman on board, a cinema operator in whose cinemas African-Americans were also allowed. With Lichtman's purchase, the Bruins were renamed Bears for legal reasons . Played mainly on Sundays in the Turner Arena, in which from 1946 the championship tournament of the Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA), which was to be called Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association from 1950 , took place.

The Bruins games had already been lucrative for some members of the New York Renaissance , but with the Bears it was possible to earn three times the fee of the Rens exclusive possible bonuses for significantly fewer games and at the same time to hold secure jobs in national defense in New York . Without the transfer supervision of a proper league operation, it was common for African-American basketball players during the war to play for up to six black teams at the same time and of course for the integrated factory team of the Grumman Aircraft Company. The games for Lichtman had priority for all players.

Douglas had waived contracts with his players due to possible conscription. At the World Professional Basketball Tournament, however, a serious conflict of interest arose for the first time, because the Rens players announced that they only wanted to compete for the Bears, whereupon Douglas withdrew the message of the New York Renaissance. From then on, Douglas insisted that the team was his property and used his influence behind the scenes. The organizers of the World Professional Basketball Tournament then declared that the Washington Bears would not be invited back in 1944 and booking agent EL Conway also had increasing difficulties in finding opponents for the weekly games.

The team from 1943 included the player manager Tarzan Cooper, the New York Rens Pop Gates , Boy Wonder Isaacs, Dolly King, Jackie Bethards, Charlie Isles, Puggy Bell, Zack Clayton and Robert "Sonny" Wood, the latter the only one being Douglas asked permission to play. A prominent member of the team was the capital city native and short-term Ren Wilmeth Sidat-Singh . He had been a star athlete from Syracuse University , whose African ancestry Sam Lacy had revealed in a 1937 Baltimore Afro-American newspaper article . Sidat-Singh was just the name of his adoptive father, and in the racial climate of the 1930s he was denied a career in professional football or basketball with this revelation. Wilmeth Sidat-Singh belonged to the African-American Army Aviation Corps of the Tuskegee Airmen and died on May 9, 1943 during a training flight after the crash of his machine by drowning in Lake Huron .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Bijan C. Bayne: Elgin Baylor. The Man Who Changed Basketball. Lanham / Boulder / New York / London, 2015: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. ISBN 978-1-4422-4570-9 (page 1, in English).
  2. ^ Susan J. Bayl: Smilin 'Bob Douglas and the Renaissance Big Five in: Separate Games. African American Sport behind the Walls of Segregation. edited by David K. Wiggins and Ryan A. Swanson. Fayetteville, 2016: The University of Arkansas Press. ISBN 978-1-68226-017-3 (page 30f, in English).
  3. ↑ Ric Roberts: Bears May Be Caught In Cage Trap. Bigwigs of Basketball Are Trying to Squeeze DC Court Huskies. From: The Pittsburgh Courier; Pittsburgh, PA, January 22, 1944 (page 14).
  4. ^ NN: Washington Bears. On: Black Fives Foundation website; Washington, DC, February 19, 2008. Retrieved January 19, 2018 (in English).
  5. ↑ NN: Lieut. Sidat-Singh's Body Recovered From Lake By Coast Guard. From: The New York Age; New York, NY, July 3, 1943 (page 1).