Harry Lew

Harry Haskell "Bucky" Lew (January 4, 1884 – October 22, 1963) was an American basketball player, who is known as the first black professional basketball player.

Biography Harry "Bucky" Lew was born in the Pawtucketville section of Dracut, Massachusetts (now the Pawtucketville section of Lowell, Massachusetts, annexed in 1874 ), the son of William and Isabell (Brown) Lew. Like generations of Lews, Bucky Lew was a talented musician and played a violin solo at his graduation from Pawtucketville Grammar School.

Family history A member of an African-American family with a long history in Massachusetts, his great-great-grandfather, Barzillai Lew, was a freeman who served in the American Revolution. Barzillai was a fifer and served with Captain John Ford at the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17, 1775. His great-great-aunt Lucy Lew and her husband Thomas Dalton were civil rights activists. His teammates considered him one of the best double dribblers in the league, which was still legal.

The New England League changed its name to the New England Association and disbanded after the 1905 season. For the next twenty years, Lew barnstormed around New England with teams he organized, and in 1926 when he played his final game in St. John's, Vermont, he was forty-two years old. That was 24 years before the Boston Celtics drafted Charles Chuck Cooper, the first African American for the NBA. In 1928, he moved and relocated his dry cleaning business to Springfield, Massachusetts, where he lived until he died in 1963.

"Bucky" Lew was a man of courage and perseverance. "He didn't talk much about basketball," his daughter told a reporter, "but sometimes, if things weren't going so well for one of us, or if we were having difficult times, he'd talk about how things were for him back then. He used his athletic experience to teach us what life was about."

Lew has never been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame. His daughter, Phyllis Lew, had been trying to get her father included since the 1970s. Since 2016, Bucky Lew has been on the Basketball Hall of Fame, DIRECT-ELECT CATEGORY: Early African-American Pioneers Committee Nominations.