Seventy-five years ago today, on October 31, 1950, Washington Capitols forward Earl Lloyd jogged onto the floor in Rochester, New York, and changed the NBA forever. He scored six points (and, by contemporary accounts, pulled down 10 rebounds) in a 78–70 road loss to the Rochester Royals. It wasn’t a box score for the ages, but it was a night that reset the league’s future: the first time a Black player competed in an NBA game.
The scene wasn’t grand. No television trucks outside. No commissioner’s dais. Just a sold-out, old-barn atmosphere at Edgerton Park Arena, the Royals’ compact home, where the sightlines were tight and the rims unforgiving. The Royals, an ancestor of today’s Sacramento Kings, were defending contenders and would win the NBA title the following spring. Lloyd’s Capitols were far less stable and would fold midseason. But on this Halloween, an ordinary opener became a hinge in American sports history.
Lloyd didn’t arrive alone to the doorway of integration. The NBA’s color barrier began to fall in 1950 through three men whose paths crossed that same year: Chuck Cooper, Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton, and Earl Lloyd. Cooper became the first Black player ever drafted (by Boston); Clifton, plucked from the Globetrotters, became the first to sign an NBA contract (with the Knicks). Because the Capitols opened their season a night before Boston and four days before New York, Lloyd became the first to play. The distinction is simple, factual and monumental.
In the moment, Lloyd’s debut felt less like a coronation than a commute. He warmed up, took his defensive assignment, battled on the glass, and took the same bus as everyone else, except that in 1950 America, very little about the trip was the same. He met hostility on the road and discrimination away from the court. He would later say that basketball’s integration didn’t mirror Jackie Robinson’s cauldron, college hoops had already mixed rosters in many places, but it still demanded resolve. The box score may have read 78–70; the subtext read courage. The first Black player in an NBA game. On a Tuesday night in upstate New York, not in a glittering big-city arena. That’s how many barriers fall: in plain gyms, by ordinary men doing extraordinary things.
As mentioned, the Capitols didn’t last. They folded on January 9, 1951, after just seven games, and Lloyd’s rookie year was cut off almost as soon as it began. He was then drafted into the U.S. Army and served during the Korean War, returning to the league with the Syracuse Nationals. In 1955, Syracuse beat Fort Wayne in seven games, making Lloyd and teammate Jim Tucker the first Black players to be part of an NBA championship team. That line matters: when the confetti fell, it fell on pioneers who had pushed open the door and stayed.
Lloyd would play nine seasons and more than 560 games, carving out a reputation as a rugged, position-sure forward who defended first and scored when needed. The counting numbers, career averages of 8.4 points and 6.4 rebounds, don’t translate easily across eras. The legacy does. He became the NBA’s first Black assistant coach in 1968 (Detroit), and in 1971 the Pistons named him head coach, one of the league’s earliest Black head coaches. In 2003, the Hall of Fame added his name to Springfield’s roll call.
What made October 31, 1950, so consequential wasn’t just the first step, it was the steps it made possible. The Royals franchise that hosted Lloyd’s debut became the Cincinnati Royals, then the Kansas City–Omaha Kings, then the Sacramento Kings; the family tree of that night stretches right into the modern Western Conference. And on every roster across today’s NBA, you can feel the downstream effect: a league powered, styled, and defined by Black excellence. The pipeline from historically Black colleges and urban playgrounds, from the Southern gymnasiums that once barred entry to the global NBA that sells out arenas in three continents, all of it traces back to the night the barrier moved.
The league didn’t issue a proclamation that evening in Rochester. No trophies were handed out. But sport can be a sneaky accelerant; its rituals normalize change, and its games write new rules in the margins. Cooper’s selection, Clifton’s signature, and Lloyd’s tip-off formed a three-act prologue to what the NBA would become. Within a decade, the sport welcomed Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain and began a transformation, on the court and in the culture, that would turn a fledgling post-merger circuit into a global stage.
Lloyd’s story resists simplification. He didn’t ask to be the symbol. He wanted to compete, to hold his ground in the post, to rebound with both elbows, to earn the respect of teammates who, in his telling, largely offered it. He also absorbed the worst of the road: slurs from the stands, hotels that turned him away, restaurants that wouldn’t serve him. He played on. He coached. He scouted. He taught. He lived long enough to see the league celebrate the very diversity that once made his presence controversial. When he died in 2015 at age 86, the remembrances read like what they were: gratitude notes to a man whose first step had made so many others possible.
Commemorations can drift toward sentiment. The truth is stronger. On Halloween night in 1950, Earl Lloyd took the floor because the Capitols needed a forward and because he was good enough to be that forward. The game ended; the schedule rolled on; the standings updated. But the league was different. The barrier, once theoretical and defended by habit, had been pierced by a box score.
Lloyd’s debut is not a myth to be polished, it’s a fact to be respected. And on its 75th anniversary, that respect looks like this: say the date, say the score, name the men who made it possible, and acknowledge the cost of what they did. Then, watch a game tonight and notice all that has grown from the courage to take the court.
