The Black Fives by Claude Johnson

Author:Claude Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abrams
Published: 2022-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

By this time the Smart Set Athletic Club had lost so much basketball talent to other squads that its officers decided to de-emphasize the sport in favor of track and field. For the upcoming 1913–4 season, the club would only sponsor a lightweight floor team, which J. Hoffman Woods was elected to manage. The squad featured a talented young player named Leon Monde, who was elected captain. He would soon play a pivotal role in a series of events that unlocked professionalism among African Americans in New York City. With their major focus shifted to track and field, the Smart Set recruited some of New York City’s finest runners to join their club. This was a smart move. Within a year, these athletes would be featured on the front page of the New York Times’ sport section. NEGRO ATHLETES WIN MANY HONORS, the headline read, over a story about Smart Set runners besting White competitors and predicting how, soon, “many laurels now won by white athletes will pass into the keeping of negroes.” And in a rare acknowledgement of Black athletic clubs, the Times recognized that “promising colored athletes” now had their own organizations to join.25

But the Smart Set wasn’t done innovating. That season, they also announced plans to become the first African American organization to schedule an indoor tennis spectator event, an indoor basketball-tennis doubleheader to be held on Tuesday evening, March 18, 1914, at the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory, a National Guard facility on Lexington Avenue at East Twenty-Fifth Street that contained a five-thousand-seat arena. The same venue would be used during the early 1950s by the National Basketball Association for some New York Knicks home games. “The beautiful indoor tennis courts of the Sixty-Ninth Regiment Armory will furnish great advantage for fast and snappy play,” said the New York Age. The event would be sponsored by the still new National League on Urban Conditions Among Negroes, also known as the Urban League. Boxholders would include Mrs. Oscar Scottron, the widow of Samuel Scottron, Edwin F. Horne, the cofounder of the Smart Set AC, and the famous African American vaudeville star Aida Overton Walker.

The Smart Set club’s effort to promote tennis among African Americans led the Age to predict that the game would soon become “one of the greatest attractions of the season.”26 They were right. Within two years, so many outstanding Black tennis players would develop throughout the country that an African American governing body would form in 1916 called the America Tennis Association, with its mission to develop Black talent as well as to standardize rules, organize tournaments, and establish rankings.

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