HARDWOOD REVOLUTION: THE NBA’S GROWTH AND PLAYER REVOLT, 1950-1976

In the mid-twentieth century, professional basketball underwent a series of changes that revolutionized the sport. Although pro basketball began in the late 1890s, no one authority or cabal had been able to control the institution even as important changes in race relations, technology, and society began nationalizing the sport during the 1930s and 1940s. The founding of the National Basketball Association (NBA) in 1949 was a premature declaration of control over the revolutionary changes underway. The NBA’s initial consensus that tightly controlled labor, expelled small cities from major-league basketball, and dithered on confronting racism, reached its apex in the late 1950s. However, even during this period the consensus was questioned and challenged. Founded in 1954, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) was subsequently fueled by an injection of anti-segregation protests from its Black players and was in open revolt against the NBA by the mid-1960s. The union had never acquiesced to and would no longer tolerate the 1949 consensus. Fortuitously for these laborers, opportunistic businessmen via the American Basketball Association (ABA) joined the revolutionary fray hoping to carve out a space for new league to challenge the NBA’s monopoly.Ultimately, through impressive interracial labor action that stymied and defeated NBA ownership politically and legally, a new consensus was agreed to in 1976. Albeit under onerous terms, the ABA merged with the NBA ending business competition. Meanwhile, the NBPA legitimized the NBA’s monopoly. In exchange the NBA guaranteed its laborers generous pensions, medical care, and the right to free agency. Although owner-labor conflicts would continuously arise over the ensuing decades, the basic operational template for pro basketball was set. For nearly 50 years, the NBA and NBPA have gone unchallenged in their dual domination of professional basketball’s business and labor apparatus since the 1976 consensus concluded the vicious labor and racial disputes of the hardwood revolution.