The rags-to-riches ideal, crystallized in Horatio Alger stories during the post-Civil War Reconstruction, made the concept of the American Dream stick — probably forever. With determination, enterprise and talent, any American can achieve fame, wealth and influence. That’s the story, anyway.

But for almost all of 19th-Century Black America, which had essentially no generational wealth and was primarily descended from slavery (to the very people with that wealth), achieving this mythical rise was tantamount to visiting Mars.

Yet some Black Americans did shoot for the stars — and landed among them.

For those who believe in the American Dream, they need only point to Cumberland Willis Posey Sr. — the founder of Posey Coal Dealers and Steamboat Builders. Posey was a business partner of the likes of Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie, and the first president of the nationally read Pittsburgh Courier newspaper.

Posey was the son of once-enslaved parents (both of whom died during his childhood) but showed such steamboating acumen that he rose from being a deckhand to, by age 20, being one of, if not the, first African-American to hold a chief engineer’s license.

If that wasn’t enough, through his marriage to Angeline Stevens — herself the first Black graduate of her high school and, later, a schoolteacher at a predominantly white high school — he raised perhaps the most accomplished Black American sportsperson of at least the first half of the 20th century.

When Posey became “Sr.” to Cumberland Jr., the Poseys’ youngest child, little did Sr. know that Jr. would take the family name to even greater heights.

Posey Jr., nicknamed “Cum,” was born in 1890 in Homestead, just outside of Pittsburgh, where his parents had settled, and remains the only person enshrined in both the National Baseball and Naismith Memorial Basketball halls of fame.

Posey Jr. is Duquesne University’s first recorded Black athlete and is inducted in the school’s Sports Hall of Fame as a basketball and baseball player.

The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review paraphrased then-Duquesne President Charles Dougherty in a 2016 article that came shortly after Posey Jr.’s selection to the Naismith Hall.

“Although what then was known as ‘Duquesne University of the Holy Ghost’ was tolerant of Black students,” the article says, “which was unusual at the time, the light-skinned Posey passed as being white because of the intolerance of the school’s opponents,” Dougherty said.

Playing under the alias “Charles Cumbert,” Posey Jr. led Duquesne basketball in scoring for three straight seasons (1916-18).

But before even coming to Duquesne, Posey Jr. had formed the Monticello Athletic Association’s all-Black basketball team. Monticello is considered to be 1912’s Colored Basketball world champions. Later known as the Loendi Big Five, the team won four more Colored Basketball titles, from 1920 to 1923.

“As an athlete, Posey is best remembered as a basketball player,” The New York Age wrote in 1927, “although he was good at football and baseball. For years he retained the reputation as the best Negro guard on any basketball five in the country. Loendi … has, year after year, defeated the best colored and white professional teams.”

The Naismith website says, “Posey floated quickly and gracefully around the perimeter where he scored most of his points.”

Yet as gifted an athlete as Posey Jr. was, he was arguably an even more gifted entrepreneur.

Posey Jr. served as the Loendi squad’s operator, which included, according to his Society for American Baseball Research biography, “managing, booking, and promoting.”

Wrote Harlem’s The Interstate Tattler in 1929, “The mystic wand of Posey ruled basketball with as much eclat as ‘Rasputin’ dominated the Queen of all the Russias.”

Incredibly, Posey Jr. balanced basketball while playing for and later managing and owning the famed Homestead Grays Negro baseball team. Society for American Baseball Research reports Posey Jr. became Grays captain by 1916 and that his “quickness made him a natural center fielder.” He remained involved with the Grays until his death in 1946.

“Stemming from his experience with his basketball club,” SABR reports, Posey Jr. started booking Grays games by 1918 and became team secretary. Shortly after, he worked a deal to purchase the club and, according to the Baseball Hall website, “built the Grays into a perennially powerful and profitable team, one of the best in the East.”

Wrote Baltimore’s The Afro-American in 1929, “Cum Posey the athlete is now Cum Posey the magnate. He is an opportunist who has made sport pay him liberally for his contributions to it. I doubt if any Negro sports figure is known to as many people as Posey.”

And again from The New York Age in 1927: “Posey is just completing 20 years activity as an athlete, coach and athletic promoter. His record during this 20 years stamps him as the leading Negro athlete of all time. He has accomplished more as an athlete and coach and has been more successful from a financial standpoint than any of his contemporaries.”

Though, he wasn’t close to being done.

Under Posey Jr., the Grays went on to win eight Negro National League pennants (1937, 1938 and 1940-1945) and two Negro World Series (1943 and 1944) while drawing large crowds to their home games in Pittsburgh and Washington, D.C. While Posey Jr. is listed as a player in the Basketball Hall, he earned his spot in the Baseball Hall, which came in 2006, is through his work as a team executive.

Like his father, Posey Jr. had a strong relationship with the Pittsburgh Courier, which, at one point, had the largest circulation of any Black newspaper.

From 1931 to 1936, Posey wrote a “Pointed Paragraphs” column in the Courier, followed by “Posey’s Points” from 1936 to 1945. The column gave prominent coverage to Black sports, especially baseball, and helped to generate interest in and further legitimize the Negro Leagues, many of which had seasons later recognized as being part of major-league Baseball’s official history.

Posey Jr.’s mother and father died in 1917 and 1925 at ages 55 and 66, respectively. Posey Jr. died from lung cancer in 1946, also at age 55.

Posey Jr.’s wife, Ethel Truman, who married him in 1913 when she was 20, inherited a stake in the Grays after her husband’s death.

Ethel, who had four children — Ethel, Mary, Anne and Beatrice — with Posey Jr., remains one of the few women to ever own a major league team, but her importance to the Grays may have been evident well before her husband’s death.

“While Posey was often on the road with the Grays, Mrs. Posey stayed at home with the girls,” SABR’s bio of Ethel reads. “That did not mean she did not take an interest in the team or have a role to play. Ethel Posey said that she tended to be the steadying influence on her husband, providing counsel and logic when he often wanted to act too quickly. He consulted her on financial issues in particular, which gave her insights into the running of the club after he died.”

Wrote then-Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence in 1946, “I regret exceedingly the death of my lifelong friend, Cum Posey. His passing is a severe blow to our community. I join with all the citizens of Pittsburgh in paying tribute to this great sportsman and sterling character.”

Added Ira F. Lewis, then-president of the Courier, “Cum Posey was a man who never forgot an enemy or a friend. He asked very few favors but was rather inclined to seek results on the merits of operation and competition. He prided himself on never being a good loser because, as he said, ‘Good losers are seldom winners.’ The athletic world will miss his spirit of competition and the contribution he has made to the day and generation through which he has passed. I will always respect his memory.”

Here’s hoping memory of each Posey never fades.

Professor Robert Edward Healy III is the founder and director of Duquesne University's Sports Information and Media program. For more on Cumberland Posey Jr. and his impact, especially on Western Pennsylvania sports, check out “Integrating Pittsburgh Sports” by Healy and The Association of Gentleman Pittsburgh Journalists, from Arcadia Publishing.