Tommy Brookins

Thomas Robert Brookins (September 2, 1906 – June 1988) was an American sportsman and entertainer. He founded the basketball team that became the Harlem Globetrotters, and toured the world as one half of the vaudeville singing and comedy duo Brookins and Van.

Biography An African American, Brookins was born in St Louis, Missouri. He moved with his family to the South Side of Chicago as a child, attended Hyde Park High School, and graduated from Wendell Phillips High School, the only all black high school in the city.

By 1926, Brookins led an all-black basketball team, the Savoy Big Five, who played exhibition games in the Savoy Ballroom before dances. A keen sportsman, he also played baseball for the Chicago Giants. In 1928, Brookins and several other players left the Big Five following a dispute, to form the Globe Trotters, and started touring around southern Illinois putting on exhibition matches, with singing and music between the games. Brookins hired businessman Abe Saperstein to promote and manage the team, and Saperstein gave them the name "Harlem Globe Trotters", recognizing Harlem's position as the center of black culture. When Saperstein started sending out several teams without Brookins' knowledge, Brookins left the organization. Based in Britain for several years, they became successful, described in one short film they made as "one of America's foremost comedy acts", and toured elsewhere in Europe, and in Australia. in a pairing which he considered would not succeed in the U.S. at that time "because the booking agents were afraid of an act made up of a Negro man and a white girl in a sophisticated role." He continued to work in Europe, mostly in Italy but also in France and Denmark, and was able to perform songs in several languages, including Yiddish. In Denmark, he made recordings of spirituals, issued in 1956, and also worked as a coach with the newly established Danish national basketball team. He also worked in clubs in St Louis in the late 1950s, before moving to Hawaii. There, he continued to perform, and also became politically active, supporting the Honolulu mayoral campaigns of Neal Blaisdell in the early 1960s.