This milestone came just one year after Jackie Robinson, playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers, broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball.
As such, the NBL invited the Rens in hopes of bolstering a league that was slowly fading away faced with direct competition from the newly formed Basketball Association of America (BAA).
Four of the more popular NBL teams—the Minneapolis Lakers, the Fort Wayne Pistons, the Rochester Royals, and the Indianapolis Kautskys—had moved to the BAA prior to the start of the 1948–49 season.
With the entry of the United States into World War II and the drafting of many of its white players into the armed forces, the NBL sought out African-Americans to fill the vacancies on its teams.
For the 1942–43 season, the NBL integrated when 10 black players joined two of its teams, the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets and the Chicago Studebakers.