Pop Gates
William Penn "Pop" Gates was an American professional basketball player. Considered one of the top players of his day, he was among the first African American players signed to the National Basketball League, which through merger became today's National Basketball Association.
Early life
Gates was born in Decatur, Alabama and attended high school in New York City. During high school studies he earned All-Conference honors in both 1937 and 1938 and made the All-City first team in 1938, as well as won three All-City titles with YMCA teams. Some later newspaper publications claimed that Gates graduated from Clark College, but in fact his professional basketball career started right after graduating from Franklin High School.Basketball career
Gates started his professional basketball career with the famed New York Renaissance, beginning in 1938-39. Gates is one of the few athletes who went directly from a high school championship team to a world professional champion : in his first season with the Rens, the team won the 1939 World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago, the inaugural such event. Gates was the Rens' leading scorer in the championship game, won over the Oshkosh All Stars of the National Basketball League, a precursor to the NBA. Gates would play in all 10 of the editions of that tournament, both on all-African-American and racially integrated teams. He would twice be named to the World Professional Basketball Tournament First Team, including in 1943, when he led the Washington Bears, a team comprised mostly of former Rens, to a second WPBT championship.Gates played for the Buffalo Bisons/Tri-Cities Blackhawks in 1946-47 in the NBL, and later served as player-coach for the Rens, relocated to Dayton, when the team was added to the NBL during the 1948-49 season, the league's final campaign before merging into the new NBA. After the NBA did not admit the Rens into the new league, Gates and his Rens teammate William "Dolly" King joined the Scranton Miners of the American Basketball League, winning the league championship in 1949-50. Gates subsequently played for and coached the Harlem Globetrotters.
Role in professional basketball's integration
Seven months before Jackie Robinson made his debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Leo Ferris helped usher in a new era of racial integration for professional basketball when he signed Pop Gates to his fledgling franchise, the Buffalo Bisons in October 1946. Gates was one of two prominent African-American players to join the National Basketball League that year, along with fellow New York Ren and Washington Bear Dolly King, who joined the defending-champion Rochester Royals."When Leo Ferris came to me, it was like a godsend", Gates was quoted as saying in the book "Pioneers of the Hardwood: Indiana and the Birth of Professional Basketball." "It was a real highlight of my career to be accepted by the NBL as one of only two blacks in the league."
Despite the Buffalo Bisons moving from Buffalo, New York to Moline, Illinois --a place that could be seen as having more problems with racial segregation at the time--Gates would still be one of eight players from that original Buffalo Bisons NBL team from 1946 to remain with the Tri-Cities Blackhawks by Christmas of 1946. The Blackhawks franchise continues to the present day as the Atlanta Hawks.