The integration, segregation, and reintegration of pro-football

June 16, 3:56 PMWashington Redskins ExaminerMark Newgent

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        Fritz Pollard

This is part three in a series on the integration of the Washington Redskins

Part 1: The fight for old DC
Part 2: George Preston Marshall: entrepreneur, racist
Part 3: The integration, segregation, and reintegration of pro-football

Bobby Mitchell’s trade to the Washington Redskins from the Cleveland Browns, in 1961 completed a three-phase process of integration of African-Americans in professional football. To understand the significance of the integration of the Redskins and the importance of Mitchell’s trade to Washington, a survey of the African-American experience in professional football is necessary to appreciate the process that Mitchell completed.

The history of African-Americans in professional football can be described in three stages: initial participation, exclusion, and reintegration. Due to the disorganization and obscurity that characterized the early days of professional football, African-Americans played on professional teams and owners marketed stars like Charles Follis, Joe Lillard, Ray Kemp, Fritz Pollard, and Paul Robeson to attract fans. As the popularity of professional football grew in during the mid-1920s, and the NFL evolved into a more effective organization, the numbers of African-Americans playing professional football steadily decreased; and mostly due to racial fears during the Great Depression owners instituted an unofficial ban in 1934. After World War II the hypocrisy of fighting Nazi racism abroad while tolerating Jim Crow at home could no longer be sustained. In 1946, a full year before Jackie Robinson integrated Major League Baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Bill Willis, Marion Motley, Kenny Washington, and Woody Strode reintegrated professional football.

The Early Years

Charles Follis was the first African-American to play professional football when he signed to play for the Shelby Athletic Club in 1904. Follis most likely had an influence on Branch Rickey, the man who would bring Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers. While playing baseball for Wooster College in Ohio, Follis met Rickey who played for Ohio Wesleyan. Follis endured verbal and physical taunts on the baseball diamond and the gridiron, he met this racism with little anger or hostility and often turned the other cheek. Branch Rickey was impressed by the way in which Follis endured the harassment and would later require the same from Robinson. Follis was a star for the Shelby team but the physical abuse from the other all-white professional teams took a toll oh him. Many of his opponents openly tried to injure him to take him out of a game or end his career. The constant harassment eventually forced Follis to end his playing career in 1906.

While Follis was the first African-American professional football player and a minor star on the field, the first two African-Americans to make a big splash in professional football were Fritz Pollard and Joe Lillard. Pollard was an All-American at Brown University from 1916-1918, where he routinely played against Paul Robeson from Rutgers. Pollard joined the Akron Indians (later Akron Pros) in 1919 after a brief stint in the military during World War I. Pollard was the first true Black football star in the NFL. Robeson would join Pollard on the Akron team in 1920 and together they led Akron to an 18-game winning streak. Robeson later left football to pursue his singing career and Pollard bounced around the league until quitting in 1926.

Joe Lillard was the second Black star to make an impact on professional football. The Chicago Cardinals signed him in 1932 and he was the only African American in the league. Lillard’s talent was undeniable. He was a star running back at The University of Oregon but was declared ineligible to play varsity athletics because he played semi-pro baseball. Despite his talent, Lillard suffered from an attitude problem. Lillard’s relationship with his coach and his teammates was contentious at best. Lillard displayed a “prideful attitude” alongside a “lackluster effort.” Cardinals coach Jack Chevigny complained that Lillard was often late for or missed practices entirely. His teammates resented Lillard’s swaggering attitude, which bordered on selfishness and wished that he would be more of a team player. Unlike Follis and Pollard, Lillard did not adhere to their non-hostile reaction to racial abuse on the football field. He had a volatile temper and was quick to retaliate to any harassment. Pride often got the best of Lillard, in 1933 during a game with the Pirates he was ejected for fighting. African-American media, Al Monroe of the Chicago Defender in particular, urged Lillard to “play upon the vanity of whites.” Monroe aptly observed that Lillard, the only Black player in the NFL in 1932, was the, “lone link in a place we are holding on to by a very weak string.” Lillard’s career ended after the 1933 season. No African-Americans would play professional football again until 1946.

Aside: I mention Paul Robeson only briefly as his accomplishments as an athlete, singer, and social crusader are well known. However, one thing about Robeson needs to be mentioned: he was an ardent Stalinist and cheerleader for the Soviet Union. While fighting for civil rights for African-Americans at home, he stood silent on the worst deprivations of the Soviet Union, in particular Soviet anti-Semitism and crusade against the civil rights of Stalin’s enemies abroad. A Hero to some Robeson may be, but his career as an apologist for a man responsible for more murders than Hitler cannot be overlooked.

Although many Blacks would star as college football players in the 12 years between 1934 and 1946, no NFL teams would draft or sign them. After the 1933 season the NFL owners instituted an agreement to exclude African-Americans from playing professional football. There were many reasons African-Americans were allowed to play professional football in its infancy. One is that in the early twentieth century professional football was a fledgling enterprise. Compared to Major League Baseball, boxing, and even college football, professional football did not enjoy wide spread popularity or significant fan support. Team owners used Black players and the amazing play they exhibited as drawing cards to bring in fans and generate popularity. Second, early professional football was an unorganized loose association of teams. No uniform set of rules for play existed. Teams played by different sets of rules from game to game, players jumped from team to team seeking the highest compensation, routinely teams would disagree on the matter of which one of them won a game, and—like many sports in the early twentieth century—ubiquitous gambling scandals. Even after the NFL officially organized in the showroom of a Canton auto dealership in 1920, the new league still suffered from the same problems.

In 1925 however, NFL owners got what they desperately needed in the form of Red Grange “The Galloping Ghost.” Grange was a national college football star from the University of Illinois. More importantly for the NFL owners he was the White superstar they needed to attract fans. Legendary sportswriter Grantland Rice called Grange, "three or four men and a horse rolled into one for football purposes." Grange put professional football on the map, with baseball and boxing in America. With Grange on their roster the Chicago Bears became the kings of professional football. The popularity and appeal of professional football soared because of Red Grange. The Great Depression had an impact as well. Like all aspects of American life the Great Depression hit the NFL very hard. The league contracted from twelve to eight teams in 1932. With so many Whites out of work and given the prevalent racial attitudes of the 1930s, it was bad business during the depression to pay Black players handsome salaries while White men could not find work. Thirteen Black players played in the NFL from 1920 to 1933. After 1925 only eight African-Americans held roster spots on professional football teams. In 1934 African-Americans disappeared completely from the rosters of NFL teams until the coming of Woody Strode and Kenny Washington to the Los Angles Rams, and Bill Willis and Marion Motley with the Cleveland Browns.

NFL owners all publicly denied any ban official or otherwise. Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney said, “For myself and for most of the owners I can say there was never any racial bias.” Chicago Bears owner George Halas denied the existence of any ban as well and lamely attributed the ban to the fact that there weren’t any talented Black football players to draft from the college ranks, even though there were many. Halas lamely added that the professional game did not appeal to Blacks. The statement of Los Angeles Rams owner Tex Schramm is telling though, “You just didn’t do it—it was just something that wasn’t done.” Schramm’s statement is proof enough of an unwritten “gentleman’s agreement” to ban African-Americans. If the sentiment was so strong; why would the owners need to make it official by putting the ban in writing? The fact that no African-Americans—despite a glut of talent—played in the NFL for 12 years is proof enough of a ban.

Furthermore, it was George Preston Marshall, who handled the reorganization of the NFL in 1934, only two years after he established the first franchise south of the Mason-Dixon Line—marketed to White southerners. Marshall was a southern-born racist and he clearly did not want African-Americans on his team. It was under Marshall’s stewardship, entrepreneurial acumen and flair for showmanship that the NFL began to prosper and create profits for the owners. With this newfound power among the owners it was probably very easy for Marshall to influence the other league owners to quietly institute and go along with a silent but all too clear policy of excluding African Americans from playing professional football.

World War II, Reintegration, Television, and the Rise of the NFL

Fighting Nazism in Europe with Jim Crow racism at home served as historian William Chafe noted “a crucial catalyst aiding Black Americans in their long struggle for freedom.” Indeed, African-Americans pushed the federal government to enforce anti-lynching laws and prompted the Roosevelt administration to create the President’s Committee on Fair Employment Practices (FEPC). The nascent movement for equality during and after World War II would eventually blossom into the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. African-Americans had fought for their country abroad and now they were fighting for equality at home. African-Americans fought for equal rights in the workplace, the armed forces, and schools. They did so as well in the realm of professional sports.

In 1946, Woody Strode and Kenny Washington signed to play football for the Los Angeles Rams of the NFL. That same year the Cleveland Browns of the All America Football Conference (AAFC) signed Bill Willis and Marion Motley. These four signings ended the 12-year ban on African-Americans in professional football. In 1946 the Cleveland Rams relocated to Los Angeles and signed Washington and Strode. The impetus around the signing of these two Black players centered on the Rams use of the Los Angeles Municipal Coliseum. The African-American press corps objected to the use of public facilities by teams that practiced racial discrimination. The Rams quickly signed Washington and Strode. Their signing was not merely an altruistic move by the Rams. They needed the two players to gain a lease to use the coliseum. However, the financial benefits of acquiring African-American players became apparent when Black fans swarmed to the coliseum to see Washington and Strode play—which significantly raised the Rams’ gate receipts—even though both players did not have stand out careers. Strode did go on to a career in film with roles in Spartacus, The Ten Commandments, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Quick and the Dead.

In Cleveland, the Browns of the AAFC signed two African Americans purely for talent alone. Legendary coach Paul Brown scouted and signed to standout players in Willis and Motley. Both players led the Browns to four consecutive league championships. Brown knew of the color ban in both leagues but did not care he wanted the best players on his team so he could do one thing: win. Black sportswriter Wendell Smith wrote that Paul Brown owner and coach of the Cleveland Browns, “automatically becomes one of the ‘men of the year’ in sports because he voluntarily signed Motley and Willis.” Willis and Motley had Hall of Fame careers in Cleveland.

Two important factors come out of the reintegration stories of Washington, Strode, Willis and Motley. First is the financial factor, the addition of Black players uncorked African-American sports fans as a market for owners. Tying integrated rosters and non-discriminatory hiring practices to the use of publicly funded stadiums, played into the financial factor as well. Publicly financed stadiums were a boon to professional sports teams because owners did not have to expend a great deal of capital (and accrue massive debt) to build their own stadiums. The local community and the team usually shared the burden. The second factor that eventually would tie into the financial factor was the competitive edge and quality of play that the African-American football player brought to their teams. Simply put, many of the African-American players were just plain better than their White counterparts. The success of the Browns with Willis and Motley clearly proved this. African-American players, after reintegration, attracted fans much in the same way that Joe Lillard and Fritz Pollard did in the 1920s. Only this time the African-American football player was in the NFL to stay.

Despite shattering the color barrier on a few NFL rosters, (there would be some holdouts, the Redskins most notably) African-Americans still had to endure the humiliation of racism and segregation as Sam Huff recalled about his Black teammates on the New York Giants:

We had Roosevelt Brown, Roosevelt Grier, Emlen Tunnell. In New York, it was no big deal. You know the only time it was a big deal is when we traveled out of town. Like, we came to Baltimore. ….And I remember this distinctively. Our Black ball players were not allowed to stay in a lower Baltimore hotel with us. I mean, in Baltimore. And we were embarrassed by it. I mean, hey, you're talking about Hall of Fame football players--Hall of Fame people. They were good people…. and that was embarrassing. When I went to West Virginia University, even that far back, we never had one Black ball player on the team.

Two important events took place in the 1950s, which had a profound effect on the popularity of the NFL and sparked even more infusion of Black talent on to its rosters. First, in 1950 the NFL absorbed most of the teams from the AAFC and expanded to 13 teams. Similar to the divisional realignment it underwent under Marshall in 1934, the league split into two conferences the American Conference and the National Conference. Second, the advent of television boosted the popularity of football. Football was a game tailor made for television. Nearly 45 million Americans watched the 1958 NFL Title Game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants—The Greatest Game Ever Played—won by the Colts in thrilling sudden death overtime. Even though only about half of American households owned a television set, and the game was blacked out in the New York area, it was the talk of the country for weeks afterward. For the first time, the popularity of professional football as a major sports entity began to rival that of baseball. Television lifted professional football out of regional obscurity.

The man most responsible for realizing television’s utility for football was NFL commissioner, Pete Rozelle. Rozelle saw the revolutionary power that television could have for professional football and he made sure the league took advantage of it. In 1962, the year the Redskins finally integrated, Rozelle negotiated a lucrative television contract for the league. CBS paid the NFL over $4 million for a television package. In 1964 it paid a whopping $14 million for the NFL television rights. That deal netted each team more than $1 million each. Rozelle abandoned the prior practice of negotiating local television contracts between individual owners and local affiliates. Rozelle collectivized the NFL’s television strategy and bargained with the major networks as a league. He marketed the NFL as an experience and the major television networks paid handsomely to broadcast that experience to an American public that was hungry for the NFL’s brand of professional football. In 1960 the NFL held over 80 games in front of more than three million people. Thirteen years later the league presented 182 games for more than 10 million people.

The experience of World War II and its impact on the American consciousness helped create the conditions for the reintegration of professional football. Concurrently television revolution t boosted the popularity and profitability of the NFL. The increased popularity and profits would have a profound impact on George Preston Marshall’s decision to finally integrate his team, as would the issue of publicly financed stadiums and the power of the African-American sports fan as a consumer.

Up next: Bobby Mitchell and the integration of the Washington Redskins.