Harlem Globetrotters

Harlem Globetrotters

African American professional basketball team. The team was organized in 1927 in Chicago by the promoter Abe Saperstein and initially was a competitive team that won a world professional championship in 1940. Since the 1930s the team had incorporated comic routines into their games, and, with the integration of the NBA in the 1950s, the team increasingly emphasized comedy over competition. For the next 50 years the Globetrotters played exhibition games all over the world, displaying spectacular ball handling and humorous antics and always defeating their official opposition, the Washington Generals. In the mid-1990s the team returned to playing competitive games.