The Integration of the Washington Redskins

June 2, 2:23 PMWashington Redskins ExaminerMark Newgent

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Doug Williams

This is the first installment in a series on the integration of the Washington Redskins, adapted from a graduate school research project I conducted in 2004.

Part 1: The “Fight for Old DC”

The Washington Redskins had an ignominious start to Super Bowl XXII in San Diego. Their opponent the Denver Broncos, jumped out to an early 10-0 lead and Redskins quarterback Doug Williams injured his knee in the first quarter. Seemingly out of the game by the start of the second quarter, Doug Williams hobbled back out on the field and made history. The Redskins offense exploded for 35 points in the second quarter, a Super Bowl record, and went on to win their second Super Bowl, 42-10. In that second quarter Doug Williams threw three touchdown passes of 80, 50, and 8 yards. What is more impressive is that Williams’ three touchdown passes and two other rushing touchdowns came in a time span of only 5:47. To put that statistic in historical perspective, the Chicago Bears who in 1940 demolished the Redskins in the NFL title game 73-0, did not score 35 points in any of the four 15-minute quarters of that game. The Redskins, mostly through Doug Williams set that record in a third of the time it takes to play a full quarter.

That day, Doug Williams became the first African-American to play quarterback in a Super Bowl and win the game’s Most Valuable Player award. Afterwards Williams had to endure many questions about being the “first” African-American quarterback to win the Super Bowl. The questions became so inane that one reporter even asked Williams “How long have you been a Black quarterback?” Williams took the overly patronizing questions in stride and he consistently answered, “Joe Gibbs and Bobby Beathard didn’t bring me in to be the first Black quarterback in the Super Bowl they brought me in to be the quarterback of the Washington Redskins.” Former hall-of-fame linebacker and Redskins radio broadcaster Sam Huff recalled his feelings about Williams that day, “I remember saying on the air, now it is over. Now the Black quarterback has won the Super Bowl so you don’t have to go through that anymore.” The “it” being, the constant questioning of the ability of African-American quarterbacks to succeed in the NFL. Sam Huff should know, he played in the late 1950s and the 1960s an era when his Black teammates could not stay in the same hotels or eat in the same restaurants with him and the other White players. What makes Doug Williams performance in Super Bowl XXII important is not solely because he was the first African-American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, but because he did it for a franchise that had a legacy of racism and discrimination against African-Americans.

The Washington Redskins were the last team in the NFL, indeed in all of the three major professional sports, football, Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association, to integrate its roster. Even professional hockey integrated before the Redskins. While professional football began the process of reintegration in 1945, the Redskins were the last team to do so. Redskins founder and owner, George Preston Marshall made no pretense of hiding his racist and segregationist views. Doug Williams winning Super Bowl XXII and the spectacular way in which he did it was “a resounding response to the segregationist legacy of George Preston Marshall.”

Bobby Mitchell, Washington’s assistant general manager and the first African-American to play for the Redskins, paved the path that Williams and other great African-American Redskins players followed, watched with satisfaction. Mitchell said, “I had friends of mine in this town who knew I played for the Redskins and loved me, but hated the Redskins because of the legacy. After Doug, some people said ‘Now, we’re okay.” Bobby Mitchell and Doug Williams share a distinct historical connection. Mitchell, the first African-American on the team of founded by a blatantly racist owner and Doug Williams the first African-American quarterback to win a Super Bowl, who did it for the very same team that carried what The Washington Post’s Michael Wilbon called, “racial baggage.”

It is this “racial baggage” this series will chronicle. While the other professional football franchises began to reintegrate their rosters in 1946—after a ban beginning during the Great Depression—the Redskins held out until 1962. Why did the Redskins not integrate their roster until 15 years after the rest of professional football? What forces were at play and who were the main personalities involved? My aim is to tell the story beyond the often apocryphal story most fans know, and tell the story as it unfolded.

The 1961-62 Redskins controversy took place at a moment in American history when the Civil Rights Movement was peaking and captured the attention of the nation, and the ramifications of the landmark 1954 Brown v Board of Education were beginning to take effect. The first integrated class of the DC public school system was graduating, and Martin Luther King would make his historic speech at the March on Washington two years later. The Washington, DC of 1961 was a much different place than the city we know now. The District was a southern city, which meant it was strictly segregated, with all the ugly features of Jim Crow .

The NFL too was a different entity in 1961 than it is today—a regional attraction on the cusp of greater things. Baseball was still the national pastime and the NFL played second fiddle to the major leagues. The Super Bowl did not exist, and the AFL was in its infancy. The lucrative television contracts the league now enjoys with the major television networks were only the talk of nascent negotiations. Individual owners negotiated their own separate television contracts. Marshall used this practice of individual negotiations to make the Redskins the team of the south. Washington was the only NFL franchise located south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Marshall created a vast radio/television network to broadcast Redskins games throughout the south. He cultivated a “southern strategy” to appeal to a southern football market, which he monopolized. After the 1960 season the owners elected Pete Rozelle to be the new commissioner of the NFL. 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. Today the NFL’s brand of professional football has subsumed Major League Baseball as our “national pastime.” The league negotiated its first major network television contract in 1961 at the height of the battle to force George Preston Marshall to integrate, a factor often overlooked.

Although just a small event in the larger context of the struggle civil rights and equality, the integration of the Redskins was indeed significant event. By the late 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s Washington’s demographics were in flux and the city’s population had become majority African-American yet the city was still run by Whites and governed by southern Jim Crow customs. The Civil Rights Movement brought changes for equality and Black representation in city government and services. However, hosting a racist owner with an all-White team that pandered to the White south could not square with the changes taking place in the city. In the end, the effort to force Marshall to integrate his team truly was a “fight for old DC.”

Coming Up…Part 2: George Preston Marshall: entrepreneur, racist.