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1942 – 1943
The team: In 1942 the United Auto Workers funded a National Basketball League team for the men of the Studebaker war plants: the Chicago Studebaker Flyers, whose players worked in the company's Chicago aviation-engine plant and played in the NBL, the strongest professional league of its day.
The integration: The Flyers, with the Toledo Jim White Chevrolets, were the first NBL teams to racially integrate the league, signing six former Harlem Globetrotters — Tony Peyton, Duke Cumberland, Bernie Price, Sonny Boswell, Roosie Hudson and Hillery Brown. The episode stands in the national record of the game's integration, and it carries a South Bend name.
The South Bend chapter: Eliminated from the NBL playoffs by the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, the franchise moved its operation to the parent company's home city and played the 1943 World Professional Basketball Tournament in Chicago under the name South Bend Studebaker Champions. The team folded after the tournament. It is the whole of the city's brush with top-level professional basketball in the era: one tournament, under this city's name, by a team built in a Studebaker plant.
Sources:
- Association for Professional Basketball Research / Just Sports Stats — the Chicago Studebaker Flyers, 1942–43: United Auto Workers funding, the six Globetrotters, the Zollner Pistons playoff elimination.
- World Professional Basketball Tournament record — the franchise's rebranding as the South Bend Studebaker Champions for the 1943 tournament, and its folding after.