The Harlem Rens: Part 1

The cartoon images from the slide show come from Patrick Reynold's great collection
of New York City history called the Big Apple Almanac
The music is "Drop Me Off In Harlem" played by Louis Armstrong
The story of the Harlem Rens comes from black fives.com

In 1923, basketball manager Robert "Bob" Douglas made a deal with Harlem real estate developer William Roach, the owner of the new Renaissance Ballroom and Casino. Douglas owned and managed an all-black basketball team called the Spartan Braves, which was a leading contender for the black national championship title. But his basketball club had no home court. The Renaissance Ballroom, with its perfect location in the center of Harlem, its spacious floor, and its balcony seating that looked down from above, would be the ideal venue. Douglas asked Roach if the Spartans could play their home games at his ballroom in return for changing the name of the team to the "New York Renaissance" in order to promote the dance hall far and wide.
After some negotiating, Roach agreed. Douglas, now armed with a permanent home court, next introduced full-season player contracts to lock in his players, and the Big "R" Five became America's first all-black, black-owned, fully professional basketball team. The "Rens" attracted the best Negro talent in basketball. The team's original lineup included future Basketball Hall of Famers Clarence "Fats" Jenkins and James "Pappy" Ricks, as well as Frank "Strangler" Forbes and Leon Monde. All four of these men also played professional baseball in the Negro Leagues.
By 1924-25 the "Rens" had won the first of many Colored Basketball World Championships and thereafter proceeded to dominate not just black basketball, but all of basketball for the next 25 years. During that period, the Rens routinely beat white national champion basketball teams like the Original Celtics, the Philadelphia SPHAS, and the Indianapolis Kautskys. The irony is that the leagues in which these teams played did not allow African American players or teams to join.
That fact didn't stop Douglas and his Rens. They focused on winning, which they did by pioneering the motion offense, their trademark style of play that featured crisp passing, movement without the ball, disciplined shooting, and tenacious defense. In one stretch during the 1932-33 season, the Renaissance won 88 straight games in 86 days. That 1933 team, which included Willie Smith, Zach Clayton, and Charles "Tarzan" Cooper, was inducted as a unit into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1963.
The peak of the Rens fame and success came in 1939 when they won the first ever World Pro Basketball Tournament, an event sponsored by the Chicago Herald-American, a leading newspaper. The Rens, one of only two all-black entries in the 12-team invitation-only pool, beat the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars of the racially segregated National Basketball League (a forerunner to the NBA) in the title game. The Rens 1938-39 championship lineup included legendary stars John "Boy Wonder" Isaacs and William "Pop" Gates, as well as Cooper and Jenkins (Jenkins by then had been playing pro basketball for over 25 years).
Winning the inaugural World Professional Basketball Championship title opened a lot of eyes, and soon afterwards a lot of doors began to open. By the late 1940s the racial barriers to which pro basketball leagues previously had clung to so vigorously began to fall. In 1948 the National Basketball League invited the New York Rens to take over the Dayton franchise, thus making the Rens (now called the Dayton Rens) the first all-black basketball team to join a professional league.
New York Rens merchandise
From 1923 to 1948, the Rens won 2,588 of 3,117 games - a staggering winning percentage of 83% sustained over a 25-year period! By comparison, the combined winning percentage of the Chicago Bulls, the Boston Celtics, and the UCLA Bruins in their best dynasty years only reaches 76%, and their combined all-time winning percentage isn't even 60%! To compare further, the Boston Celtics took 65 seasons to win that many games!
In 1972, Rens owner Bob Douglas became the first African American enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame as an individual, in honor of his major contributions to the sport. Cooper and Gates followed, in 1977 and in 1989, respectively.
But that is where the Rens march to the Hall of Fame abruptly halted. Temporarily, we hope, because there are many other New York Rens players who deserve to be enshrined there. These include John Isaacs, Clarence Jenkins, William "Puggy" Bell, and Zach Clayton. (By the way, the number of Original Celtics players enshrined in the Hall of Fame, a team the Rens beat frequently, is far greater than the mere three Renaissance team members currently inducted.)
Through ever increasing exposure, advocacy, and activism on the part of journalists, historians, authors, family members, licensees, retailers, current and former athletes, entertainers, and others, the voting members of the Hall of Fame enshrinement committees will eventually become conscious enough to properly embrace this history.

The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine,

The Harlem Globetrotters Popcorn Machine, a 1974 live-action Saturday morning variety show starring the Globetrotters and Rodney Allen Rippy and Avery Schreiber. It featured comedy skits, blackout gags, and educational segments. The show was produced by Funhouse Productions and Yongestreet Productions for CBS.
The players on the show were: Marques Haynes, Curly Neal, Tex Harrison, Meadowlark Lemon, Nate Branch, Reece "Goose" Tatum, Bobby Joe Mason, John Smith and Theodis "Wolfman" Lee .

Harlem Globetrotters: The Super Globetrotters

The Super Globetrotters, a second animated series created by Hanna-Barbera for NBC in 1979. It featured the Globetrotters (now including new squad members James "Twiggy" Sanders, Nate Branch and Louis "Sweet Lou" Dunbar) as undercover superheroes, who would transform from their regular forms by entering magic portable lockers carried in "Sweet Lou" Dunbar's Afro, or in a basketball-shaped medallion. Although the Super Globetrotters would first attempt to take on the villain with standard comical heroics, things would almost always be settled with a basketball game.

Harlem Globetrotters

The introduction from their 1970's cartoon show.

Harlem Globetrotters, a Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning cartoon, broadcast from September 12, 1970 to May 1973. Originally broadcast on CBS, and later re-run on NBC as The Go-Go Globetrotters.

The Harlem Globetrotters

I saw this youtube movie linked (the soundtrack got a little raunchy and since I'd like kids to use this site I substituted some more of the great Max Roach with the Clifford Brown quintet (Clifford Brown(tp),Max Roach(ds),Richie Powell(p),Harold Land(ts),George Morrow(b) playing
a segment of their "I'll Remember April") to the Chicagoist blog with this story

Last week we were channel surfing and came across "The Harlem Globetrotters: A New Generation" on Channel 50. We watched it for a little bit and were caught up in both the athleticism of the new Globetrotters and the timeless entertainment of their gags. It reminded us of the days when ABC's "Wide World of Sports" would showcase the team seemingly every other month. Michael Jordan is the greatest basketball player to be associated with a Chicago team, but the Globetrotters are arguably the most recognizable squad to ever come out of Chicago. Originally called the Savoy Big Five, the team consisted of former students of Wendell Phillips High School brought together by Abe Saperstein as a means to draw crowds to the recently opened Savoy Ballroom at 4733 South Parkway. Saperstein eventually renamed them the "Harlem" Globetrotters because of the wide-reaching influence of the Harlem Renaissance on African-American culture at the time (an aside: the Globetrotters didn't play their first "home" game until 1968). It also flows off the tongue more freely than "Savoy Big Five" or even "Bronzeville Globetrotters."

from wikipedia

The Harlem Globetrotters is an exhibition basketball team that combines athleticism and comedy. Created by Abe Saperstein in 1926 in Chicago, Illinois, the team adopted the name Harlem because of its connotations as a major African-American community. Over the years they have played more than 20,000 exhibition games in 118 countries. Brother Bones's whistled version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" is the team's signature song. Globie has been their mascot since 1993.
There is no clear consensus as to the very beginnings of the Globetrotters. The official history ] contains several details which are clearly untrue, such as the team being organized in 1926 in the Savoy Ballroom, which opened in 1927. What is clear is that the genesis of the Globetrotters takes place in the South Side of Chicago in the 1920s, where all the original players grew up. Most of the players also attended Wendell Phillips High School. When the Savoy Ballroom opened in November of 1927, one of the premier attractions was the Savoy Big Five, a basketball team that played exhibitions before dances. In 1928, several players left the team in a dispute over bringing back other players who had left the team. That fall, several players led by Tommy Brookins formed a team called the "Globe Trotters" which would tour southern Illinois that spring. Abe Saperstein became involved with the team, though to exactly what extent is unclear. In any event, by 1929 Saperstein was touring Illinois and Iowa with his basketball team, called the "New York Harlem Globe Trotters". Saperstein decided to pick Harlem as their home city since Harlem was considered the center of African-American culture at the time, and an out of town team name would give the team more of a mystique. After four decades of existence, the Globetrotters played their first "home" game in Harlem in 1968.
The first star player of those early Globe Trotters (the name would be merged into one word later on) was Albert "Runt" Pullins, an adept dribbler and shooter. Soon he would be joined by 7'4" Inman Jackson, who played center and had a flair for showboating. They would originate the two roles that would stay with the 'trotters for decades, the showman and the dribbler.
The Globetrotters were initially a serious competitive team, and despite a flair for entertainment, they would only clown for the audience after establishing a safe lead in the game. In 1939, they accepted an invitation to participate in the World Professional Basketball Tournament, where they met the New York Rens in the semi-finals in the first big clash of the two greatest all-black professional basketball teams. The Rens defeated the Globetrotters and went on to win the Tournament, but in 1940 the Globetrotters avenged their loss by defeating the Rens in the quarterfinals and advancing to the championship game, where they beat the Chicago Bruins in overtime by a score of 37–36.
The Globetrotters beat the premier professional team, the Minneapolis Lakers (led by George Mikan), for two years in a row in 1948 and 1949, with the Lakers winning later contests. The February 1948 win (by a score of 61-59, on a buzzer beater) was a hallmark in professional basketball history, as the all-black Globetrotters proved they were on an equal footing with the all-white Lakers. Momentum for ending the National Basketball Association's color line grew, and in 1950, Chuck Cooper became the first black player drafted by an NBA team, the Boston Celtics. From that time on the Globetrotters had increasing difficulty attracting and retaining top talent.
Tony Peyton was the last living member of the original Globetrotters. He was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1996. He died in Midland, Texas, on July 23, 2007, at the age of eighty-five.