On April 25, 1950, the Boston Celtics make Chuck Cooper, an All-American forward from Duquesne University, the first African American picked in NBA draft. With the selection, the first pick in the second round, Cooper breaks the NBA’s color barrier and changes the league for the better.
The pick was met with skepticism by some in the NBA, including some of the Celtics’ owners. But Celtics founder and original owner Walter Brown famously said that Cooper could be “striped, plaid or polka dot … All I know is the kid can play basketball, and we want him on the Boston Celtics.”
The crowd outside 254 West 54th Street in New York City on this day in 1927 would have been waiting for the curtain of a Puccini opera. On this day in 1957 or ’67, they […]
Moments before he was shot to death by a soldier of the Bolivian government, the revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara told his executioner, “Shoot, coward! You are only going to kill a man!” Guevara died a […]
The modern legend of the Loch Ness Monster is born when a sighting makes local news on May 2, 1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier relates an account of a local couple who claim to have […]
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