I can’t say I ever knew that skateboarding used to be perceived as a pasttime only for white boys.

It ain’t anymore, as concrete surfing now draws black city kids as well, due in no small part by buy-in from hip-hop artists like Pharrell Williams and other urban arbiters of cool.

In black neighborhoods, skateboarding was regarded as something foreign that crept in from the suburbs. “Black people would look at me like I was the brother who fell from another planet,” said Steven Snyder, 45, a former professional skateboarder and a manager at Uprise Skateboard Shop in Chicago. He compares the social stigma of skating within the black community to that of “making out with a white woman in the 1950s down South.”

Over the last two decades, the sport shifted away from ramp-based vert skating to street skating, a variation that made use of urban structures like stairways, curbs and railings. As the importance of access to ramps dwindled, skateboarding’s fan base grew increasingly diverse.

From the mid-1980s onward, black street skaters such as Ray Barbee, Kareem Campbell and Harold Hunter (who died last year) became prominent. In 2004, Reebok started sponsoring Stevie Williams, a gold-toothed, bling-flashing skater from Philadelphia. Mr. Williams, now 27, has his own line of Reebok gear, DGK by RBK (DGK is an acronym for Dirty Ghetto Kids), and is regarded as a successor to Allen Iverson and Jay-Z as a pitchman with street appeal.

I take special note of this development because, as a hockey fan, I’m sensitive to the perception of my favorite sport similarly white-only territory. That’s gotten some reinforcement of late with Barry Melrose’s recent flap over his comments about the Newark neighborhood around the Devils’ new Prudential Center arena. If skateboarding can pull off this transformation, can ice-skating brigade do it as well?

I always thought the National Hockey League failed miserably to expand its horizons in this way back in the mid-1990s, when oversized hockey jerseys started becoming the fashion garb of choice among rap stars. This was practically an engraved invitation to sell the game to a new audience.

Maybe hockey can start with the roller (versus ice) skates as well. Inline skates are about as popular as the boards, and it’s a simple segue into street hockey games from there. That’s enough of a hook to introduce the same urban crowds to the on-ice product.