Harold Hunter (basketball)

• 1. Introduction

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  Harold Hunter signed his name to a contract on the 26th of April 1950, and in doing so became the first African American to sign a professional deal with an NBA team. The Washington Capitols drafted him the day before. He was a guard, a tournament MVP, a young man from Kansas City with a future that seemed to open wide. Then, a few weeks later, he was cut during training camp. He never played a single game in the NBA.

  That gap between the milestone and the moment it was supposed to lead to is at the heart of Hunter's story. What does it mean to break a barrier and then be turned away at the door? And what did the man who carried that distinction go on to build over the next six decades? Those are the questions this documentary will try to answer.

• 2. Sumner and the CIAA

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  Sumner High School in Kansas City, Kansas held a top ten national ranking in science at the time Harold Hunter graduated in 1944. It was the only all-black high school remaining in the city, a fact that shaped the texture of life inside its walls. Hunter left Sumner and headed to North Carolina College in Durham, North Carolina, where he played guard.

  At North Carolina College, Hunter helped the team win the 1950 Colored Intercollegiate Athletic Association Tournament championship. He was named the most valuable player of the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association tournament that same year. Those honors placed him among the best players at historically Black colleges at a moment when that circuit was largely invisible to mainstream professional scouts.

  Decades later, the university inducted Hunter into its Athletic Hall of Fame in 1984. In 2009, the university retired his basketball jersey to mark its centennial. The Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association added him to its own hall of fame in 1987. And in 2000, a group of Sumner alumni published a book called The Sumner Story, which focused specifically on Hunter's career as a way of documenting the school's broader history.

• 3. The Contract and the Cut

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  Hunter was drafted in the 10th round of the 1950 NBA draft by the Washington Capitols. The draft took place on the 25th of April 1950. The very next day, he signed the contract that made history. No African American player had ever signed with an NBA franchise before that moment.

  The Capitols brought him into training camp, and that is where the story took its painful turn. He was cut before the season began and never appeared in an NBA game. The milestone remained real, but the playing time never came.

  The story has an additional wrinkle. Hunter later signed with and played for the Washington Capitols again, this time for their 1951-52 season. By then, however, the franchise had stepped down from the NBA to play in the smaller American Basketball League. The team folded in January 1952, after the NBA held the legal copyright to the Washington Capitols name and history, creating complications that ended the organization for good.

• 4. Building a Coaching Record

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  Hunter's first coaching job came at Williston School in Wilmington, North Carolina, during the 1950-51 season, where he coached both the boys and girls basketball teams. He then moved to P. S. Jones High School in Washington, North Carolina, serving as athletic director and coaching football, basketball, track, and tennis from 1952 to 1954. He returned to Williston from 1954 to 1957.

  In 1957, he joined Tennessee State University as an assistant coach for the Tigers. Two years later, in 1959, he succeeded outgoing head coach John McLendon and took over the program. Over the nine seasons he led the Tigers from 1959 to 1968, the team compiled a record of 172-67. That stretch included four separate runs of more than twenty consecutive wins. Seventeen of his Tennessee State players were drafted into the NBA. Hunter stands as the second-winningest men's basketball coach in Tennessee State history.

  He also became the first African American to lead both men's and women's teams to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national basketball tournament, a distinction that sat alongside his work at Tennessee State.

• 5. Coaching the 1968 Olympic Tour

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  In 1968, Harold Hunter became the first African American to coach the U.S. men's Olympic basketball team. His assignment was a tour of the Soviet Union and Europe. One game on that tour stood out above the rest.

  The U.S. team defeated the Soviet national basketball team in a game held in Minsk, in what is now Belarus. The Cold War context of that victory gave it a weight beyond any ordinary exhibition result. Hunter had gone from being cut by a professional franchise eighteen years earlier to leading the United States against the Soviet Union on Soviet soil.

• 6. New Orleans and Later Years

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  Hunter arrived at Xavier University of Louisiana in May 1974, taking over the Gold Rush basketball team after the departure of previous coach Bob Hopkins. His first seven games with the team were all wins. The 1974-75 season finished 11-9. The following year the team went 12-15. In his third season the team won only six games, and in 1977 Bernard Griffith succeeded him as head coach.

  During his time at Xavier, Hunter pushed his players toward community involvement. In 1975, the team repainted the university's St. Michael's residence hall over the summer. On the 8th of November 1975, they played an exhibition game to benefit the Big Brothers of Greater New Orleans.

  Hunter later worked as an assistant coach for Dillard University's women's team under head coach Mary Teamer during the 1980s, and coached at Southern University from 1986 to 1991. All three schools - Xavier, Dillard, and Southern - are in New Orleans, where he and his wife Jacqueline lived after his retirement. Hurricane Katrina changed that in 2005, forcing them to leave the city and relocate to Tennessee.

  In 2008, Hunter was interviewed for the ESPN documentary Black Magic, which examined early pioneering basketball players from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. He died at his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee, at 6:55 a.m. on the 7th of March 2013, at the age of 86, survived by his wife Jacqueline T. Hunter, a biology faculty member at Xavier University of Louisiana, their daughter Micki, and their son Harold Jr.