Though labor strife is an ominous cloud that hovers over the 2010 season, there is no entertainment business - not in music, movies or sports - that enjoys more fanfare in the United States than the National Football League. Its mere presence forces other sports leagues to carefully schedule their games as far away from live broadcasts as possible. Merchandise sales continue to grow with each star that emerges, even in the midst of the Great Recession. Most of all, the relative parity that the NFL has displayed in the last decade has given fans from coast to coast something to hold onto, no matter how hopeless the future may actually be.
Yet, in all of the hysteria and immediacy of the moment, we tend to forget that the NFL existed prior to "The Greatest Game Ever Played," the 1958 NFL Championship Game between the then-Baltimore Colts and New York Giants. It seems that more than any other league, the NFL is the one league in which its early history is so murky that even revisiting it takes painstaking research in the internet era.
Sadly, this includes its history with integration. Arguably, it has the least acknowledged record on race of the four major sports.
Jackie Robinson's name is akin to the four Presidents on Mount Rushmore, the symbol of racial progress in the most definitively American sporting interest, the game of baseball. The legacy that endures in large part to the efforts of his family is not just because of how he stood in the face of racism, but because he was a career .311 hitter, possessed tremendous speed on the base paths, and played exceptional defense at second base.
That's what cannot be said about those who broke color barriers in other sports. The first African-American to play in the NBA, Earl Lloyd had, by his own admission, a fairly undistinguished nine-year career. Though often mistaken as the first African-American to play in the NHL, the Canadian native Willie O'Ree played a short time with the Boston Bruins before carving out a long career in the Western Hockey League and becoming an ambassador for the NHL. Even with boxing, which prominently shared the sports stage in the early 20th century, it wasn’t until the release of phenomenal 2004 documentary and book, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson, that calls for a Presidential pardon of the first black heavyweight boxing champion were heard.
Professional football was not immune to this, no matter if it was the NFL or its forerunners and independent teams which existed in the early 1900s. Charles Follis was the first African-American player to suit up for a pro team in 1904 for the indie-operated Shelby Blues. Few teams allowed for integration, but just like the finances and locations, there were maddening inconsistencies. Though organized leagues sprouted in later years, the same problems - low gate receipts, deaths on the football field from a lack of safety measures, gambling scandals - reared their ugly head amidst the rising social ills from the Great Depression. When the NFL became an organized outfit, it actually contracted teams to stave off losses in the economic turmoil. Some would say that if they cut potential spots for white players, it was hard to justify offering chances for black players, whether they were independents, semi-professionals, or even some of the best college players at the time.
Football of the early 20th centuery had yet to capture the audience in the way that its outdoor counterpart in baseball had. It was less popular than not only boxing and horse racing, but even less of a draw than college football. The person who was the most influential in the progression of professional football, notably the NFL, was the man held the most responsible for its greatest regression: George Preston Marshall, owner of the former Boston and eventual Washington Redskins.
With Marshall on the scene, his influence was so powerful that nary a commissioner or fellow owner would challenge him. After the 1933 season, with the Depression taking hold, racial tensions growing and his newly-relocated team being the southern-most franchise in the NFL, Marshall led the unofficial ban on black players. Just a few years after Fritz Pollard, Paul Robeson, Joe Lillard and others came into the fold, segregation returned with a complete freeze-out of capable players.
When the All-American Football Conference (which gave us the Cleveland Browns, San Francisco 49ers and the original Baltimore Colts) began play in 1946, it brought on several innovations and milestones that the NFL lagged in accepting. Its inaugural game saw Marion Motley and Bill Willis play for the Browns and become the first black players to play professional football since the ban took place. Motley and Willis took the field a full year before Robinson suited up for the Brooklyn Dodgers to begin baseball's modern-era integration. Realizing that the black populous was only going to grow as were calls to re-integrate, NFL teams slowly lifted the unofficial ban. However, as the AAFC and another start-up league in later years, the American Football League, took on African-Americans, the NFL boasted a mere seven on their rosters in 1949.
"To me, as much as the NFL talks about history from time to time, they only seem to bring up certain parts of their history," said Stephon Johnson, baseball aficionado and staff reporter for the venerated black weekly New York Amsterdam News. "It's almost as if they cherry pick which parts of the NFL's past they want people to know... Colts/Giants at Yankees Stadium, the Ice Bowl... the Purple People Eaters and the Steel Curtain, but we never know about the beginning of the NFL. We don't know about the first to do anything unless it's a pretty unusual story. To me it mirrors what America has become. We know certain parts of our history (and even those are distorted somewhat), but we conveniently forget the rest because it's 'too long ago' or 'too ugly' so we've developed a 'can we move on?' mentality."
Just as Johnson charges, the NFL has crafted its image through selective memory, ensuring that fans don't have to defend its passion by accepting a questionable past. Yet, for anything that happens in the sports world, you don't learn about it strictly from the league or individual teams. The media at the time was a complicit partner as it didn't exactly champion the cause. Though the late Shirley Povich of the Washington Post played muckraker for the league's desegregation efforts, the sport trailed too far behind baseball for there to have been a national public outcry.
There was also the lack of attention from what could have been a sympathetic media partner, the black press. At the time, papers such as the Pittsburgh Courier and Chicago Defender, two of the leading African-American papers, had intermittent coverage of the NFL. Many of these papers would reproduce sports stories of the mainstream dailies with their own spins or devote their resources to the popular sports of those times, even after baseball became further integrated beyond Robinson and Larry Doby.
In conversations with several media members, this conundrum came up. "The black press just wasn't there (covering football) in those days," said Patric Fharah, a Jersey City-based TV producer and reporter whose football knowledge is as extensive as the day is long. "The media just didn’t talk about it like they did with baseball. Even today, the topics that fans care about still don't come up. Honestly, who cares about the Mets' fifth starter?"
The exception, of course, came when some in the black press found a way to push the NFL towards integration. In 1946, when the Cleveland Rams tried to secure use of the Memorial Coliseum after moving to Los Angeles, the press went on a crusade, declaring that a team should not be able to use a public venue when it practices racial discrimination. This pressure compelled the team to sign Kenny Washington and Woody Strode, men who starred at UCLA alongside none other than Jackie Robinson, making perhaps the most formidable backfield in college football at the time. A similar and more stirring event happened to Marshall's Redskins in 1962 when the 30-year lease on DC Stadium was held up by the federal government. It wasn't until then that Redskins traded the rights to Syracuse star Ernie Davis - who staunchly refused to play for Marshall - for future Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell.
What's probably more disappointing isn't that fans, media, and arguably some league and team personnel don't know this history today. It's that they were seemingly unaware in the days that fully-integrated teams began to take hold in the 1970s with legendary squads in Miami, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles (Rams) and Dallas.
The John C. Mitchell's book, Fritz Pollard: Pioneer in Racial Advancement, recalled a halftime ceremony from the 1978 New York Urban League Football Classic between Grambling and Morgan State in which the NFL's first black player and head coach was honored:
Pollard had accomplished much in eight-and-a-half decades, but most of the fans who saw the small, elderly man accept the engraved plaque (the esteemed Whitney M. Young Jr. Memorial Award from the New York Urban League) knew little of Fritz Pollard or his courage and determination. The New York newspaper strike had curtailed advance publicity of the 1978 Young Award and seemed certain to limit national coverage of the award ceremony the following day. A few months later, the nationally syndicated sportswriter Jerry Izenberg had described Pollard as "a genuine unknown hero," lamenting that it was "a shame and a scandal" that "young people do not even know his name." Izenberg explained the oversight by pointing out that each generation regardless of race acts as if it "invented the games we play, the barriers we break and hurdles we clear."
In 2010, few are looking at the history of Pollard and Follis, of Strode and Washington, of Motley and Willis, and of the others who have paved the way for 65% of the participants in "America's Passion" to be of African descent. Even in the era of instant access, it's not exactly the fault of its fans or media as much as it is the byproduct of its popularity. "The NFL is a 'now' culture," quipped Johnson. "Baseball, however, is all about the past and/or 'getting them' the next day. But it's rarely about the present."
For once, football and those who love it should take a page from the diamond and bring it to the gridiron.
[Jason is a staff sportswriter for the New York Beacon, an African-American weekly in New York City. He is also the schizophrenic mind behind a Sports Scribe. Follow him on Twitter to glimpse the rapid-fire method to his madness. To read more by Jason, check out his profile.]
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