"From one team member to the next, the Globetrotters who played during the Jim Crow era can share stories of their struggles. Curly Neal, a Globetrotter from 1963-1985, is one of the most recognized team members. He was awarded the Legends honor in 1993 for making a major contribution to the success and the development of the Globetrotters organization. He penned an op-ed piece for USA Today in which he recalled one of the multiple racial incidents the team experienced:

“I can still remember hearing the story from the great Tex Harrison. Fifty-nine years ago, the Harlem Globetrotters had just played in front of 18,000 fans in northern Florida — most of them white — and tried to grab a bite to eat at a restaurant. The restaurant wouldn’t let the team in. Wouldn’t serve them. They went to a hotel next. They were turned away. Later, they found out that a performing chimpanzee sponsored by a local bowling alley got a big fancy suite.”

Sweet Lou Dunbar, who joined the Globetrotters in 1977 after playing in the semipro league with the Houston Rockets, said black families would house the team when they couldn’t find a hotel. But Globetrotter Hallie Bryant, who received the Legends distinction in 2009, remembers having to resort to extreme measures when the team couldn’t find a hotel or black family in Nebraska.

“When the team played in a Nebraska town that only had ‘white hotels,’ the team had to sleep in the county jail; players often had to bunk together in unheated quarters,” said Bryant, who spent 27 years in the organization as player, official spokesperson and director of team personnel. And with separate hotels for black and whites, the Globetrotters had to double up on games because audiences were logistically segregated.

“They had to play for two different audiences; for the white audience and [then] they had to go across the track and play for the black audience,” Dunbar said. While the Globetrotters were treated as second-class citizens at home, overseas, they were treated like royalty."


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