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Not all sports pioneers are treated equally. Jackie Robinson became famous overnight. Chuck Cooper became the answer to a trivia question. Robinson, the first black player in the modern era to make a major-league roster, started at first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Three years later, Cooper was the first black player drafted by a National Basketball Association team. The Boston Celtics selected Cooper, an all-American at Duquesne University, in the second round.

Cooper made the team and played in the NBA for six stormy seasons, when ability often mattered less than skin color.

Owners of white-only hotels refused to rent a room to Cooper, separating him from his teammates on road trips. On barnstorming exhibitions in the South, the Celtics were told to leave Cooper behind. Boston management and many opposing white players backed his right to play, but that made the harassment no less ugly.

After the jeering stopped and Cooper returned to the workaday world in Pittsburgh, his breakthrough was largely ignored or forgotten.

Author Ron Thomas set out to change that. He examined Cooper's life and those of other trailblazing players for his book "They Cleared the Lane: The NBA's Black Pioneers."

	If you go . . . Author Ron Thomas will speak about Chuck Cooper at 9 p.m. Tuesday at Mellon Hall on the campus of Duquesne University. The event is free. Thomas also will be at the campus bookstore from noon-2 p.m. to sign copies of his book, "They Cleared the Lane: The NBA's Black Pioneers."

Thomas, 54, will reminisce about Cooper Tuesday night at Duquesne as part of Black History Month. Thomas says it was Cooper, more than any player, who motivated him to write the book.

In the 1970s and '80s, Thomas covered the NBA for the San Francisco Chronicle and USA Today. Even though basketball was his beat, he knew more about Robinson and the Dodgers than he did about the black players who integrated the NBA.

Thomas thought an important story had been overlooked. He made a mental note to interview Cooper, but put off the job until it was too late.

Cooper died of liver cancer Feb. 5, 1984, at age 57. Thomas had never spoken to him.

An unwritten history

After Cooper's death, a sense of urgency and purpose swept over Thomas. He began tracking down the other black men who played in the NBA in the early 1950s.

Fourteen years after he began his project, Thomas landed a book contract in 1998. "They Cleared the Lane" was published in spring 2002 by the University of Nebraska Press. It comes out in paperback next month.

Thomas' research brought him to Pittsburgh, where he interviewed Cooper's widow, Irva, and delved into Cooper's childhood and years at Westinghouse High School.

Many people contend that Pittsburgh never was a basketball town, but Thomas found quite the opposite.

As a pioneering pro, Cooper became a friend and role model to Maurice Stokes, another Westinghouse graduate whose dazzling talent seemed certain to make him an NBA superstar.

"I think of Stokes as the first Magic Johnson," Thomas said.

But Stokes died young, at 36, his promise unfulfilled. While with the Cincinnati Royals, he fell and hit his head in a 1958 NBA game against the Minneapolis Lakers. Three days later, the freak injury paralyzed him. Just 24 at the time, Stokes lived another 12 years before a heart attack killed him in 1970.

Once Thomas started his research, he discovered that almost nothing had been written about the NBA's early black players or their influence on the game. It seemed as if he had a period of sports history all to himself.

Though Cooper was the first black player drafted, Earl Lloyd of the Washington Capitols was the first to play in an NBA game.

Lloyd, a ninth-round draft choice from West Virginia State, took the court Oct. 31, 1950, one day before Cooper. Lloyd's Capitols played the Rochester Royals in Rochester, N.Y. The Royals won, 78-70.

The first black player to sign an NBA contract was neither Cooper nor Lloyd. That distinction went to Harold Hunter, a guard from North Carolina College. He never played in an NBA game, though, as the Capitols cut him in training camp in 1950.

Glory at Duquesne

During the NBA's first four seasons, 1946-49, no black player was considered for employment. Thomas says the owners' ban against black talent was driven more by money than racial prejudice.

Abe Saperstein, owner of the Harlem Globetrotters, threatened to boycott NBA cities if any black players were signed by the new league. The Trotters, in those days, often played competitive exhibitions that preceded NBA games. Their presence meant a hefty payday for NBA teams, most of which teetered on the edge of financial collapse.

The ban on black players was broken in 1950 by Celtics owner Walter Brown. He defied convention and fellow owners by choosing Cooper in the draft.

Cooper had a good idea of what life in the NBA might be like. He had tasted bigotry in Pittsburgh, where neighborhoods were segregated and many stores would not let black customers try on clothing.

After graduating from Westinghouse in 1944, Cooper decided to leave the city. He enrolled at West Virginia State, which at the time attracted numerous urban blacks. He was in his first semester when the Navy drafted him. His military commitment lasted until after World War II ended in 1945.

Duquesne had discontinued basketball the last two years of the war. It reestablished its program in 1946, coinciding with Cooper's military discharge. This time, Cooper decided to remain in Pittsburgh and play for the Dukes.

In Cooper's first season, Duquesne won its first 19 games and finished 21-2. One of those wins actually was by forfeit, and it carried the stench of racism.

Tennessee, then an all-white university, was free to practice its segregationist policies in that time before the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education case. So hardened were their biases that Tennessee players refused to take the floor Dec. 23, 1946, against Cooper and Duquesne.

Cooper, the object of their animosity, stayed calm. He knew the Tennessee players disliked him for one reason only -- the color of his skin. The game, which was to be played at McKeesport Vocational High School, went into the books as a 2-0 Duquesne victory.

Despite the racial climate, Cooper's four collegiate seasons were covered in glory. Duquesne went 78-19 and twice played in the National Invitation Tournament, then a prestigious event.

Cooper, a sinewy, 6-foot-5 forward, averaged a modest 10.5 points a game. But his overall play was so strong that he was named an all-American in his senior season (1949-50).

Under the radar

Sports publications mentioned Cooper as a likely NBA draft choice. Even so, at least one unidentified white owner claimed he was shocked when Celtics owner Brown picked Cooper in the draft, which was staged in a Chicago hotel.

Sports writer George Sullivan, while withholding the name of the objecting owner, gave this account of the exchange:

"Walter, don't you know he's a colored boy?"

Brown replied: "I don't care if he's striped or plaid or polka dot. Boston takes Charles Cooper of Duquesne."

Lloyd said his subsequent selection by Washington occurred only because the Boston team made the first move toward integration. Had it not, the league might have waited another year or two before hiring any black players.

The NBA's black pioneers, no doubt, were helped by Jackie Robinson. Once Robinson arrived in the major leagues and became the first rookie of the year, most people realized other sports would soon be integrated, too.

Robinson faced early opposition from some of his own teammates. At least six Dodgers signed a petition opposing his right to play. Part of the reason was that many major-leaguers of that era were from the deep South. Almost none had been to college.

Thomas said white NBA players, all college men, were, on balance, far more accepting of black teammates.

But there was an even bigger reason the NBA's early black players received so little national attention. The league was small potatoes. In the beginning, the Celtics were overshadowed by the college team at Holy Cross.

Red Auerbach was hired to coach the Celtics in Cooper's rookie year. Auerbach, a big catch for the struggling Boston team, commanded a salary of $10,000. Cooper's first contract was for $7,500. But this was when a schoolteacher made $800 a year, so jobs in pro basketball were coveted.

Cooper played four seasons in Boston and one each for the Milwaukee Hawks and the Fort Wayne Pistons. He averaged 6.7 points and 5.9 rebounds a game for his pro career.

Irva Cooper, who married Chuck in 1957, after his NBA career was finished, said all the racial taunting had wounded him. "He had a bad taste in his mouth about basketball then," she said in a recent interview.

Cooper went back to college and obtained a master's degree in social work from the University of Minnesota in 1961. He pioneered another first in Pittsburgh nine years later when he was named the first black person to head a city government agency. Cooper became director of the parks and recreation department, but he didn't care for all the politics that came with the job. He left it after 16 months.

At the time of his death 20 years ago, he was an officer of Pittsburgh National Bank. Cooper never considered his situation comparable to that of Robinson's. If anything, he shared any praise he received with the three other black players who made NBA rosters in 1950-51. They were Lloyd, Hank DeZonie and Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton.

"I wasn't alone, didn't have to take the race-baiting and the heat all on my shoulders like Jackie Robinson," Cooper told Pittsburgh Magazine in 1976. "Besides, any black coming in after Jackie, in any sport, had it easy compared to the turmoil he lived through."

Thomas said he is not finished with the story of Cooper and the others who integrated the NBA.

Now a freelance writer, he is trying to raise money to produce a documentary about the men who opened the doors for anyone who was good enough to play.