Earl Lloyd

Earl Francis Lloyd was born on the third of April 1928 at Alexandria, Virginia, the third of four children of Theodore Lloyd — a coal-yard worker — and Daisy Mitchell Lloyd, a domestic worker. The Lloyd household was profoundly devout and economically straitened. He attended the segregated Parker-Gray High School at Alexandria, where he played basketball under the coach Louis R. Johnson and won the 1944 and 1945 Virginia Interscholastic Athletic Association State Tournament. He stood six feet five inches by his seventeenth year and held an academic record sufficient for matriculation at the historically Black West Virginia State College in 1946.

He played basketball at West Virginia State under the coach Mark Cardwell from 1946 to 1950. The West Virginia State teams of those years were the most accomplished historically Black college basketball squads of their period: the squad won three consecutive Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association Conference championships from 1947 to 1949. Lloyd was twice named CIAA All-Conference and once All-American.

He was drafted in the ninth round of the 1950 NBA draft by the Washington Capitols — making him the second of three African Americans drafted into the NBA in 1950, behind Charles "Chuck" Cooper (first round, Boston Celtics) and Nathaniel "Sweetwater" Clifton (signed before the draft, New York Knicks). The Capitols' schedule opener on the thirty-first of October 1950 against the Rochester Royals at Rochester preceded Cooper's and Clifton's first NBA games by a day. Lloyd thus became, by the calendar, the first African American to play in a National Basketball Association game.

He played seven games for the Capitols before being drafted into the United States Army for service in Korea. He served two years and rejoined the league with the Syracuse Nationals in 1952. He played for Syracuse for the following six seasons. The Nationals defeated the Fort Wayne Pistons four games to three in the 1955 NBA Finals — making Lloyd, on the tenth of April 1955, the first African American to play on an NBA championship-winning team.

He finished his playing career with the Detroit Pistons in 1960 and joined the Pistons as an assistant coach in 1968 — the first African American assistant coach in the NBA. He was promoted to head coach of the Pistons in 1971 and served as the second-ever African American NBA head coach. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003.

He died at Crossville, Tennessee, on the twenty-sixth of February 2015, at eighty-six.

He is honored here as the first Black NBA player.