history of the NFL

The NFL's longtime shortage of black quarterbacks seems to have been a product of powerful racial stereotypes, operating at every level of the game to push white and black athletes to play different positions.

Stymied by the NFL's policies of racial discrimination, Robinson abandoned his gridiron dreams to play in baseball's Negro League instead, and from there moved on to the Dodgers and his historic destiny.

In 1971, a reporter asked Woody Strode to reminisce about his experience as the first black man to play in an NFL game.

The Black Quarterback and the Modern NFL
Football's color line broke in 1946 and there has been no place in the game for overt racial discrimination since George Preston Marshall's Redskins were forced to abandon the principle of white supremacy in 1962.

But Strode and Washington mostly remembered their days in pro sports as a miserable struggle against deeply ingrained prejudice.

Many of the modern NFL's most contentious issues regarding race have derived from the seeming existence of informal patterns of positional segregation within ostensibly integrated football teams.

In all, Pollard played eight NFL seasons, winning posthumous induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005.

George P. Marshall and the Segregation of the NFL
Historian Charles Kenyatta Ross, who has written a history of the integration of the National Football League, suggests that the league's early tolerance for a limited number of black players was rooted in pro football's marginal status in American culture at the time.

Many hailed the Redskins' victory and Williams's impressive performance as a kind of civil rights milestone.

Before going on to achieve worldwide notoriety as a singer, actor, civil rights spokesman, and radical political activist, Robeson played three seasons in the NFL in order to earn money to pay his way through Columbia University Law School.

Ross suggests that Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, who was an influential leader among early NFL executives and also happened to be an inveterate racist, convinced the league's other owners to impose a firm (if unofficial) color line on the NFL after 1933.

In all, Pollard played eight NFL seasons, winning posthumous induction into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2005.

In the very same month that Williams led the 'Skins to victory, popular CBS Sports football commentator Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder sparked a firestorm of controversy by invoking the oldest of racist stereotypes.

Fritz Pollard, a quick and elusive black halfback who had earned first-team All-American honors in 1916 while playing in the Ivy League for Brown University, was by 1920 the star player for the Akron Pros, one of the NFL's charter franchises.

Later, however, as the game became more popular and NFL teams found they had more to lose by alienating racially prejudiced whites, black players were slowly purged from NFL rosters.

Jackie Robinson was a sports legend and a civil rights hero, fondly remembered today as one of the most beloved American citizens of the twentieth century.

In the 1990s and 2000s, black quarterbacks became more and more prevalent in the NFL. Randall Cunningham, Jeff Blake, Kordell Stewart, Steve McNair, Donovan McNabb, Daunte Culpepper, Michael Vick, and Vince Young all followed in Warren Moon's footsteps by winning selection to football's all-star game, the Pro Bowl, at the quarterback position.

As long as the NFL occupied a place on the unpopular fringes of the country's sporting life, teams could get away with breaching the segregationist norms of Jim Crow-era racial practice by using talented black players.

While there was never any official prohibition against black quarterbacks in the NFL, African American players long struggled to get a chance to shine in the game's most crucial and celebrated position.

Ross suggests that Washington Redskins owner George Preston Marshall, who was an influential leader among early NFL executives and also happened to be an inveterate racist, convinced the league's other owners to impose a firm (if unofficial) color line on the NFL after 1933.

Zero black players appeared on NFL rosters between 1933 and 1946; even after Woody Strode and Kenny Washington began the process of re-integrating the league, Marshall's Redskins remained lily-white until 1962, when appalled Kennedy Administration officials threatened to boot the Redskins out of their publicly-owned stadium in the District of Columbia if the team continued its blatantly segregationist policies.

Many hailed the Redskins' victory and Williams's impressive performance as a kind of civil rights milestone.

While the NFL Champion Chicago Bears won the game by a wide 37-13 margin, the fleet-footed Robinson ran circles around the Bears' unprepared defenders.