http://www.examiner.com/washington-...segregation-and-reintegration-of-pro-football
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.
[size=+3]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.[/size]
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.
