Cumberland Posey
American basketball player
Cumberland Willis Posey, Jr. (June 20, 1890 – March 28, 1946) was an American baseball player, manager, and team owner in the Negro leagues, as well as a professional basketball player and team owner.
Posey was the best African American basketball player of his time, playing from the early 1900s (decade) through the mid-1920s. His peers and the sporting press considered him an “All-Time Immortal”. “The mystic wand of Posey ruled basketball with as much eclat as ‘Rasputin’ dominated the Queen of all the Russias”, observed the Harlem Interstate Tattler in 1929.
Posey led Homestead High to the 1908 city championship, played basketball at Penn State for two years, moved to the University of Pittsburgh where he earned a pharmacy degree in 1915,[1] and formed the famous Monticello Athletic Association team that won the Colored Basketball World’s Championship in 1912. He later played varsity basketball for Duquesne University, under the name “Charles Cumbert”, and led the Dukes in scoring for three seasons through 1919. Today he is enshrined in the Duquesne Sports Hall of Fame under his real name.
During the mid-1910s, Posey formed, operated, and played for the Loendi Big Five, which became the most dominant basketball team of the Black Fives Era through the mid-1920s, winning four straight Colored Basketball World Championship titles. He retired from basketball in the late 1920s to focus exclusively on the business of baseball and on his weekly sports column in the Pittsburgh Courier, “In The Sportive Realm.”
He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2016.[2]
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