Bio

Donald Angelo "Don" Barksdale (March 31, 1923 March 8, 1993) was a professional basketball player. He was a pioneer with a number of African-American firsts to his credit.

Born in Oakland, California, Don Barksdale attended nearby Berkeley High School, where the basketball coach cut him from the team for three-straight years because he wanted no more than one black player.

Barksdale honed his playing skills in park basketball and then played for two years for Marin College, across San Francisco Bay, before earning a scholarship to UCLA. A 6'6" center at UCLA, he became the first African American to be named consensus All-American in 1947. Barksdale was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

In 1948, he was the first African American to play with the U.S. Olympic team. He joined the team in Basketball at the 1948 Summer Olympics. He became the first African-American basketball player to win a gold medal in the Summer Olympics.

Barksdale, who had been playing with the Amateur Athletic Union's Oakland Bittners, was given an at-large berth from the independent bracket, but not without heavy lobbying by Fred Maggiora, a member of the Olympic Basketball Committee and a politician in Oakland, which was adjacent to Barksdale's hometown. About eight years later Maggiora told Barksdale that some committee members' responses to the idea of having a black Olympian was "Hell no, that will never happen." But Maggiora wouldn't let the committee bypass Barksdale.

The 1948 Olympic team had five Kentucky Wildcats basketball players who had just won the very first Wildcat national championship in the 1948 NCAA Men's Division I Basketball Tournament. The rest of the Olympic team, consisting of the AAU Champions Phillips 66ers, and the Kentucky team later scrimmaged on Stoll Field in front of 14,000 spectators, the largest crowd to watch basketball in Kentucky at that time. Barksdale became the first African-American to play against Kentucky in Lexington. He could not stay at the hotel with the rest of the team, but instead stayed with a black host family.

After college, he played for the Oakland AAU team until the NBA began to integrate. Through Barksdale's basketball-playing years, he was also starting a career in radio broadcasting. In 1948, he became the first black radio disc jockey in the San Francisco Bay Area. He also worked in television and owned a beer distributorship. He became the first African-American beer distributor in the Bay Area. He became the first African American television host in the Bay Area with a show called Sepia Review on KRON-TV.

In 1951, he signed a lucrative contract with the Baltimore Bullets and entered the NBA as a 28-year-old rookie. He would be the third African-American to sign an NBA contract after Chuck Cooper joined Boston and Earl Lloyd signed with Washington. While with the Bullets, he became the first African American to appear in an NBA All-Star Game in the 1953 NBA All-Star Game. Shortly afterward, he was traded to the Boston Celtics. Two years later, his playing career was cut short by ankle injuries.

After his basketball career ended, he returned to radio, started his own recording label, and opened two nightclubs in Oakland.

In 1983, he launched Save High School Sports Foundation, which is credited with helping to save Oakland school athletic programs from collapse.