22. Breaking Barriers
After Boston’s eight-straight NBA championship in 1965, Red Auerbach retired. Bill Russell would take charge as player-coach for the 1965-66 season. He became the first African-American coach in the league.
Auerbach’s reliance on black head coaches continued with K.C. Jones and Tom “Satch” Sanders. The move to hire Russell at head coach came at a time when Boston was still a racially polarized city and just six years after the Red Sox came baseball’s last integrated franchise.
The Celtics, 15 years earlier, had made Chuck Cooper the first African-American player drafted by an NBA team. Cooper joined Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton and Earl Lloyd as the league’s first African-American players in 1950. The Celtics and Auerbach notched another NBA first by starting an all-black lineup on December 26, 1964.
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