Chuck Cooper was a Hall of Fame player for the Boston Celtics as much for what he was able to accomplish off the court as on the it with the team that became the first team to draft a Black man into the NBA when they took Cooper out of his collegiate alma mater Duquesne.
The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania native was taken by Boston with the No. 13 overall selection of the 1950 NBA Draft, one of a trio of trail blazing players alongside Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton and Earl Lloyd who broke the color barrier in the league that year. He’d go on to have a solid career with the Celtics, the (then) Milwaukee (now, Atlanta) Hawks, and the (then) Fort Wayne (now, Detroit) Pistons before going back to school to get his Master’s degree.
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To learn more about the life and work of Cooper with Boston and beyond, check out the clip embedded below.
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This article originally appeared on Celtics Wire: How Chuck Cooper made history with the Celtics