Black players in professional American football

• 1. Introduction

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  Black players in professional American football have been part of the game almost from its very first moments. Charles Follis, believed to be the first black professional football player, started receiving pay in 1899 - before most Americans had ever seen an organized professional football game. From those earliest days to the present, the story of black players in the NFL is one of presence, erasure, and return. It is a story shaped by individual courage, by legal pressure, and by a deliberate agreement among owners who chose, for more than a decade, to keep black athletes off their rosters. How did a player like Kenny Washington spend seven years locked out of the league he was talented enough to play in on day one? How did one owner's personal prejudice become an institutional policy? And how did the sport transform from near-total exclusion to a league where black players now make up over 70% of all players?

• 2. Before the Ban

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  Fritz Pollard and Bobby Marshall suited up in 1920, the very first season of what is now the NFL. Pollard would go on to become the first black head coach in the league's history the following year in 1921 - a distinction he would hold alone until 1989. At that time, the league operated with player-coaches rather than separate coaching staffs, which made Pollard's dual role less exceptional than it would seem today. Between 1920 and 1926, a total of nine black players appeared on NFL rosters. Among them were figures who became towering presences far beyond football: Paul Robeson, who became an internationally acclaimed artist and black activist, and J. Mayo Williams, who became a prominent producer of race records.

  Charles Follis had laid the groundwork for all of them. Follis played for the Shelby Blues from 1902 to 1906 as a two-sport athlete, and his receiving of pay in 1899 is what historians point to as the origin of black professional football. His career predated the NFL by more than two decades, yet it established that black athletes could and would compete at the professional level when given the opportunity.

• 3. The Great Depression Lockout

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  Harold Bradley Sr. played one season with the Chicago Cardinals in 1928. Phil Scott took the end position for the Orange Tornadoes in 1929. Dave Myers played for the Staten Island Stapletons in 1930 and then for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1931. These sporadic appearances were the last flickers of black participation before the door closed entirely. The stock market crash of 1929 accelerated a shift already underway. White team owners argued, according to source accounts, that it would look bad to see black players working and getting paid while so many white Americans were unemployed. The pressure to exclude black players hardened into something more formal.

  In 1933, the last year before the ban took full effect, only two black players remained in the NFL: Joe Lillard of the Chicago Cardinals and Ray Kemp. Lillard's tenure ended because of his tendency to get into fights, even though he had been responsible for almost half of the Cardinals' points that season. Kemp left voluntarily to pursue a coaching career that would prove long and successful. Their departure cleared the way for what NFL reporter Steve Wyche described, in the Amazon Prime show Evolution of the Black Quarterback, as roughly twelve years with no black players in the NFL.

  While black athletes disappeared from the league, other racial minorities were present in notable numbers. Jim Thorpe, the most famous product of the Carlisle Indian School football program, played through this era. In 1928, the Dayton Triangles fielded the first two Asian-Americans in NFL history: Walter Achiu, a Chinese-Hawaiian running back, and Arthur Matsu, a Japanese-Scottish quarterback. The first Hispanic players in the NFL also appeared during this period - Cuban immigrant Ignacio Molinet for the 1927 Frankford Yellow Jackets and Jess Rodriguez for the 1929 Buffalo Bisons.

• 4. George Preston Marshall

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  George Preston Marshall entered the league in 1932, and many observers point to his arrival as the moment that turned informal discrimination into something resembling a coordinated policy. Marshall openly refused to have black athletes on his Boston Braves, later renamed the Washington Redskins, and reportedly pressured other owners to follow his lead. His hostility was, by the source's account, specifically directed at black players. He openly welcomed and promoted Native Americans on his team, including his first head coach, Lone Star Dietz, who was widely believed at the time to be Native American. The choice of "Redskins" as the team name in 1933 was partly intended to preserve the native associations that had come with the team's previous name, the Boston Braves.

  Marshall also had a commercial motive for his position. His Redskins had a strong following in the Southern United States, and he guarded that relationship carefully. He resisted NFL efforts to place expansion teams in the South until a moment of political leverage arrived: Clint Murchison Jr. acquired the rights to "Hail to the Redskins," the team's fight song, and threatened not to let Marshall use it unless he received an expansion team in Dallas.

  Marshall's defiance on racial integration outlasted nearly every other owner. By 1957, the first black assistant coach, Lowell Perry, had been hired by the Pittsburgh Steelers - yet the Redskins still had no black players on their roster. In 1961, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall threatened to evict the team from D.C. Stadium unless they signed a black player. The Redskins first tried to draft Ernie Davis, who refused to play under Marshall; the team then traded Davis to the Cleveland Browns. It was not until 1962 that the Redskins finally integrated, signing Bobby Mitchell and two other African American players, making them the last NFL franchise to do so.

• 5. Kenny Washington and the Return

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  In 1939, UCLA fielded one of the greatest college football players in history. Kenny Washington was a senior that year, popular enough that his team drew national attention in the print media. After Washington played in the College All-Star game in August 1940, Chicago Bears owner George Halas asked him not to return immediately to Los Angeles - Halas wanted to sign Washington to the Bears. Washington waited a week or so, then returned to Los Angeles without a contract. No NFL team would touch him.

  For most of the early 1940s, Washington played in the Pacific Coast League with the Hollywood Bears. During World War II, a timely injury forced him to miss the 1942 season, which likely rendered him ineligible for military service. By the time his injuries had healed, the NFL was resorting to using partially handicapped players who were themselves ineligible for service - yet Washington received no interest from any NFL teams. He would ultimately serve a tour of duty in the armed forces in 1945 as a kind of sports ambassador.

  The opening came through legal pressure rather than goodwill. After the Rams received approval to move to Los Angeles, members of the African American print media brought a pointed argument to the Los Angeles Coliseum commission: the Coliseum was supported with public funds, and the commission was therefore bound by an 1896 Supreme Court decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, not to lease the stadium to a segregated team. The commission told the Rams they had to integrate with at least one African American player. The Rams agreed, and on the 21st of March 1946, they signed Kenny Washington. The signing caused what the source describes as "all hell to break loose" among NFL franchise owners. A second black player, Woody Strode, followed on the 7th of May 1946.

• 6. The AAFC's Different Path

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  While the NFL dragged its feet, the newly founded All-America Football Conference took a different approach. In 1946, the Cleveland Browns signed Marion Motley and Bill Willis. By the time the AAFC merged with the NFL in 1950, six of the league's eight teams had signed black players, with most having done so by the league's second season in 1947. In comparison, only three of the ten NFL teams - the Rams, Lions, and New York Giants - had signed a black player before 1950.

  The AAFC was also more aggressive about racism on the field. Former 1920s NFL star Tommy Hughitt, working as one of the league's lead officials, aggressively penalized unsportsmanlike conduct motivated by racism. No equivalent enforcement existed on the NFL side.

  Meanwhile, no black player was selected in the NFL draft until 1949, when George Taliaferro was chosen in the 13th round. Taliaferro declined and signed instead with the rival AAFC. In 1954, running back Joe Perry of the San Francisco 49ers became the first black player recognized as NFL Most Valuable Player, when United Press International named him pro football's player of the year. In October 2018, Taliaferro, the first African American ever selected through the NFL draft process, died at age 91.

• 7. Position Segregation and Quotas

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  Being allowed into the league did not mean being allowed to play anywhere in it. Black players were often steered into the same positions so that competition within those positions would thin their numbers through natural attrition. Contracts for black players in the NFL routinely ran lower than for white players in equivalent roles, while the American Football League reportedly made no such race-based distinction. The quarterback position was the most resistant to integration.

  Walt Frazier - an esteemed high school quarterback who received scholarship offers to play college football - chose basketball instead because he believed he had no future as a black quarterback at the professional level. That calculation led to a Hall of Fame basketball career. Willie Thrower did see some action as a backup quarterback for the Chicago Bears in the 1950s. Marlin Briscoe of the Denver Broncos eventually became the first black regular starting quarterback of the modern era, a milestone that arrived in the AFL rather than the NFL.

  Gene Mingo of the Denver Broncos became the first black placekicker in U.S. professional football, though the source notes his primary identity was as a running back. After the AFL-NFL merger in 1970, more than 30% of the combined league's players were African American - a figure that represented a dramatic transformation from the twelve-year exclusion that had ended in 1946.

• 8. The Modern League

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  At the start of the 2014 season, NFL surveys showed the league was 68.7% African American and 28.6% non-Hispanic white. In Week 1 of the 2020 season, ten quarterbacks with known Black African ancestry started games on opening week - Cam Newton, Teddy Bridgewater, Dwayne Haskins, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes, Kyler Murray, Dak Prescott, Tyrod Taylor, Deshaun Watson, and Russell Wilson - the most ever on opening week, in the position that had been most fiercely protected from integration.

  Yet certain patterns have proved durable. At the start of the 2013 season, 23 of the 32 starting quarterbacks were white, representing 72% of the total. The center position was 82% white as of the same survey period. Of 32 starting kickers in 2013, only one was black. In recent decades, the cornerback and halfback positions have trended sharply in the other direction, played almost exclusively by black athletes.

  On coaching, Art Shell took over the then-Los Angeles Raiders in 1989, becoming the first black head coach in the NFL since the end of the player-coach era - nearly seven decades after Fritz Pollard held the role. Dennis Green followed three years later with the Minnesota Vikings. The Rooney Rule, an affirmative action policy requiring teams to interview racial minorities for head coaching positions, was implemented in 2003 and expanded in 2009 to cover other senior management and player personnel roles.

  Ownership has remained a ceiling no black candidate has broken through. The NFL rejected two opportunities: Rommie Loudd's Orlando Suns expansion bid and Reggie Fowler's bid on the Minnesota Vikings. In both cases, the prospective black owners were found to have inflated their wealth through illegal activities. As of the source's writing, only two owners of non-European descent held NFL franchises: Korean-born Kim Pegula of the Buffalo Bills and Pakistani-American Shahid Khan of the Jacksonville Jaguars.