This is Karen Hunter and welcome to the hub. Today I want to tell you about Willie O'Ree.

Willie O' apostrophe R.E.

He was the first black person to play in the National Hockey League.

Now the National Hockey League just had its all-Star game a couple of weeks ago and when I was doing my research for that because there was some racial incidents that happened with a few players.

By the way, out of the nearly 700 players today in the National Hockey League,

roughly about 25 of them are black.

So, you know, there's a lot of racial disharmony, I guess,

not with the players per se but there was an incident recently

with a player who got suspended for using a racial slur but I want to bring up

Willie O'Re because my goodness I don't know what that was like in the 1950s to be the first

black man to play hockey. Well I'm gonna tell you about it in a second. By the way

Willie O' Ree still living. There is a documentary actually celebrating his playing time in his life,

ESPN put it out.

So you can go to ESPN.com and check that out.

It's called Willie.

He's in the Hockey Hall of Fame, inducted in 2018.

He was born October 15th, 1935 in Freder

New Brunswick, Canada and I'm gonna get to the Canada connection in a second but

as I was reading up on Willie O'Rhea I was like who's the first

black person to play in the NBA we know Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier

in baseball we know that all right it history. But how can we never heard about Earl Lloyd

who broke the color barrier in the NBA? I never heard about him until today, which is part of the

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