Let's run down the history. The sneaker began life in the 19th century as a multipurpose rubber-soled casual shoe designed for activities like playing croquet and beach walks. (The performance shoe of the 19th century was the work-boot, not the sneaker.) The name first appeared around mid-century. But wasn't until sports like basketball developed that the sneaker found its 20th century athletic vocation. And its marketing developed along with the sport.

Chuck Taylor All-Stars -- for decades now a favorite of guitar-playing, tousle-haired old souls -- began its life in the early 20th century as a basketball sneaker, if a relatively low-tech one. And Taylor became the first known basketball player to make the transition from sneaker-wearer to sneaker salesman. He had been a high school player who wore Converse on the court -- they'd already been around for a few years -- and sought a job as a shoe salesman upon graduation. By the end of his career, he had played basketball for the Celtics, run college and pro clinics, and (yes, at the same time) acted as the first celebrity endorser (and a travelling salesman) for the sneakers that had by then been renamed after him.

The Taylor sneaker crusade worked. Through the 1960s, basically everyone wore All-Stars on the court. They became popular off the court, too, particularly as a symbol of youth and youth rebellion. James Dean favored the Jack Purcell, a style similar to the All-Star (Converse bought it in the 1970s). And high-top Chucks became an unofficial shoe of a number of rock subcultures around the time the basketball players themselves began to move on from the simple canvas sneaker. The Ramones wore them on album covers. All this tacit (and free) quasi-endorsement gave the shoe a (white) counterculture cachet that has not quite burned off yet.

Meanwhile, the design of the to-the-purpose basketball shoe went in a different direction, and took young men, particularly young black men, with it. The black connection to basketball dates back to the turn of the 20th century. Like baseball, the relatively young sport became associated with racial uplift, and basketball teams formed at historically black colleges even before the World War I. The first black professional teams -- the Globetrotters and Renaissance in New York -- emerged in the 1920s. When the sport began to integrate in the 1950s, the legacy of these teams, along with the pioneering work of a few legendary black college players and coaches, formed the basis of the coming black domination of basketball. By the end of the 1960s, the majority of the players in the NBA were black.

It so happens that this coincided with a radical shift in the basketball sneaker market. Leather footwear entered the market in the 1960s, marking the beginning of the end for All-Stars as a basketball shoe. Nike and Puma entered the game in the 1970s, and marketing to non-athletes soon accelerated. The sneaker companies figured out that by offering distinct models and linking their shoes to well-liked players, they could radically expand sales. The idea started with "signature" shoes for a handful of players, and took off from there. It was the old celebrity endorsement, but better, because it implied a link between the shoe and the athlete's performance.