Earl Lloyd

Earl Francis Lloyd was born April 3, 1928 in Alexandria, Virginia and died February 26, 2015 in Crossville, Tennessee at age eighty-six. He grew up in the segregated Parker-Gray district of Alexandria — the African-American residential and commercial quarter north and west of King Street that the City of Alexandria has since recognized as the Uptown / Parker-Gray Historic District.

Early life in Alexandria

Lloyd attended Parker-Gray High School, the segregated public school for Black students that operated on the 900 Wythe Street Place 900 Wythe Street Site of Alexandria's segregated public school for Black students, opened in 1920 at 900 Wythe Street and replaced in 1950 by a new Parker-Gray High School that served until … on Wythe Street from 1920 through 1965. He graduated from Parker-Gray in 1946 as a star basketball, football, and baseball athlete in the Virginia segregated-schools athletic league of the 1940s.

The Parker-Gray gymnasium where Lloyd played his high-school basketball was a modest structure with neither bleachers nor a proper hardwood floor — the gulf between segregated school facilities and those of nearby white schools was extreme by the physical-infrastructure measures the era’s school-board reports routinely documented.

West Virginia State + the NBA

Lloyd attended West Virginia State University (an HBCU, then West Virginia State College) on a basketball scholarship, graduating in 1950. He was selected by the Washington Capitols in the ninth round of the 1950 NBA draft — the same draft that saw Chuck Cooper picked by the Boston Celtics and Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton signed by the New York Knicks, the three Black athletes who broke the NBA’s color line in the 1950–51 season.

Lloyd took the floor for the Washington Capitols in their season opener at Rochester on October 31, 1950 — one day before Cooper’s debut and four days before Clifton’s — making him the first Black athlete to play in an NBA regular-season game. The Capitols folded mid-season; Lloyd served two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, then resumed his NBA career with the Syracuse Nationals (1952–1958) and the Detroit Pistons (1958–1960). He won an NBA championship with Syracuse in 1955.

After basketball

Lloyd retired from playing after the 1960 season, then served as a scout, assistant coach, and head coach for the Pistons — becoming the second Black head coach in NBA history when he took over the Pistons in 1971. He worked in player development and youth-basketball outreach for the rest of his career.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003. The City of Alexandria honored Lloyd in 2010 by naming a community park near the former Parker-Gray school site in his honor.