The Philadelphia Panthers

The Philadelphia Panthers were an all-black basketball team of the 1910s and 1920s.

It grew out of the city’s Christian Street (a.k.a. Southwest”) Colored YMCA in the late 1910s, when Philadelphia emerged as a black basketball power base with such teams as nearby Lincoln University, the Vandals and Buccaneers of Atlantic City, the Briscoe Five, and the Southwest Scholastics.

They were so successful and popular that African Americans in the City of Brotherly Love, insofar as black basketball was concerned, embraced them as “Philadelphia’s Representative Team.”

The biggest stars on the semi-pro Panthers were tall homegrown center Charles “Tarzan” Cooper, Jackie Bethards, and Billy Yancey, a two-sport athlete who also played pro baseball as a shortstop for the New York Lincoln Giants and the Hilldale Club.

All three men later played for the New York Renaissance, and Cooper was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1970.

A portion of net proceeds from the sales of our Black Fives assortment will benefit the The Black Fives Foundation, which works to inspire excellence by preserving, teaching, and honoring the pre-NBA history of African Americans in basketball.