Here is the presentation that accompanied the lecture on the history of segregation in the NFL and college football to serve as background to the sequence on Black coaches in the NFL and college football.

1. Critical Issues in Sports
JRN 589
Black Coaches
Prof. Hanley

2. Black Coaches
• Football’s greatest sin remains
the failure to hire coaches of
color in both the NFL and college
game.
• The game had always been
largely segregated between
whites and blacks, and it would
remain that way despite
advances in civil rights over the
mid 20th century.

3. Black Coaches
• The history of the game and its
attitude toward players of color
over more than 150 years
explains a large reason why
black coaches are consistently
overlooked in the NFL and major
college football.
• We will review that history now.

4. Black Coaches
• College football was generally
played by white students against
white students for most of the
19th and 20th centuries. But
there were exceptions.
• Colleges founded for African
Americans started football
teams as early as the 1890s.

5. Black Coaches
• Black colleges had been playing
football since 1892 when the
first game between historically
black colleges took place.
• Biddle and Livingstone met in
North Carolina in the first game
between colleges founded for
African-Americans.

6. Black Coaches
• William H. Lewis was the first
African American to play eastern
collegiate football, competing
for Amherst from 1889 to 1891.
• He later became the first African
American to be named to
Walter Camp’s All-American as
center in 1895 for Harvard,
where he also coached from
1895 to 1906.

7. Black Coaches
• At Michigan, George Jewett
starred in 1890 and 1892,
standing as the first African-
American player at the school
and, later at Northwestern, and
in the collection of schools that
would later be called The Big
Ten.

8. Black Coaches
• Whites and blacks both adopted
football as a college sport for
the same reasons, only they did
so in parallel universes that
would not intersect for
generations.
• White fans watched white
games; African American fans
watched African American
games.

9. Black Coaches
• Colleges such as Wiley in Texas,
presented football and other
sports in language that Walter
Camp would understand:
• “ … the best education is that
which develops strong, robust
body as well as other parts of
the human makeup.

10. Black Coaches
• Patrick Smith’s study of the
emergence of athletics at
historically black colleges
suggested that “athletics
seemed to offer at least a
limited means through which
historically African American
schools could become
assimilated, on their own terms,
to a national collegiate culture.”

11. Black Coaches
• In the first decade of the 20th
century, African-American
participation in football was
thought to be a mechanism to
“soften racial prejudices“ and to
advance "the cause of blacks
everywhere,” an editorial in
Howard University’s newspaper
argued in 1924.

12. Black Coaches
• “Athletics is the universal
language,” it concluded.
• Yet the press of the late 19th
and 20th centuries up until
World War II did not cover black
college football under the same
rubric of that for white football:
manly courage and heroic
character.

13. Black Coaches
• Instead, the press focused on
the characteristics of the
physical form, neutralizing the
capacity of Black athletes to
assimilate within the white
culture. Sound familiar? (Blacks
described as “athletic” in
modern media)

14. Black Coaches
• In response to enforced
segregation and rapid growth,
black colleges formed the
Colored Intercollegiate Athletic
Association (CIAA) to regulate
football, much as the NCAA had
been doing for white colleges
beginning in 1906.

15. Black Coaches
• The schools also developed
traditions distinct from white
colleges such as the rabble, a
halftime event in which
students who carried their
instruments to the game
performed and the crowd took
the field alongside them to
dance.

16. Black Coaches
• Yet like white college football in
the 1920s,Black college football
was not immune to criticism or
scandal.
• W.E.B Du Bois, a leading black
intellectual of the 20th century,
delivered a scathing critique on
the standing of college athletics
during a 1930 speech.

17. Black Coaches
• “Our college man today, is, on
the average, a man untouched
by real culture. He deliberately
surrenders to selfish and even
silly ideals, swarming into semi-
professional athletics and Greek
letter societies, and affecting to
despise scholarship and the
hard grind of study and
research."

18. Black Coaches
• “Du Bois and George Streator
proposed sweeping changes to
black college football that would
anticipate reforms in the white
college game, including three-
year eligibility limits, forcing
players who changed schools to
sit out a year, and the institution
of faculty control over athletics.

19. Black Coaches
• Even with such reforms, Black
college football teams and Black
players remained on the outside
of white college football.
• Colleges in the south would
generally not play teams from
the north, midwest or west that
refused to bench their Black
players for games.

20. Black Coaches
• The integrated schools outside
of the south largely complied.
• Schools in the mid-southern
states such as North Carolina
would relax the requirement
from time to time if it presented
a chance to secure a bowl bid.
But that was rare.

21. Black Coaches
• Meanwhile, southern colleges
sought to achieve parity on the
gridiron with schools elsewhere.
• Scholars Christopher Nehls and
Andrew Doyle concluded that
the south did this to “restore
southern masculinity” and to
“gain some revenge.”

22. Black Coaches
• In the 1920s, the University of
Georgia president S.V. Sanford
said: “football meets that
unforgotten needs of the race
which in the days of chivalry had
to be satisfied by the
tournament and the joust.”

23. Black Coaches
• When the Rose Bowl committee
invited the University of
Alabama under coach Brown
alumni Wallace Wade to
Pasadena in 1926 to meet
Washington, the South rallied
behind its all-white team for
representing the region’s culture
of masculinity and traditional
values.

24. Black Coaches
• It did not matter that three
other teams had declined
invitations before the
committee reached out to
Alabama.
• It would serve as a “tonic for a
people buffeted by a historical
legacy of military defeat,
poverty, and alienation …, ’’
wrote Doyle.

25. Black Coaches
• It turned out to be so much
more. Thousands gathered in a
Montgomery, Alabama, theater
and in newspaper offices to
listen to reports read off the
telegraph.
• Alabama won a hard-fought 20-
19 battle, and the south rejoiced
and credited its traditions for
the win.

26. Black Coaches
• Alabama returned to the 1927
Rose Bowl and tied Stanford, 7-
7.
• School president George Denny
said: “I come back with my head
a little higher and my soul a little
more inspired to win the battle
for this splendid Anglo-Saxon
race of the South.’’

27. Black Coaches
• Southern university
presidents built on Alabama’s
success by raising money for
new stadia to showcase the
teams and the region’s way of
life.
• Segregation would harden
because of it.

28. Black Coaches
• Schools outside of the south
could be said to have
supported segregation at least
indirectly by referring coaches
such as Wade of Brown to
schools in the region and
directly by agreeing to play in
front of all-white crowds.

29. Black Coaches
• Yale, which did not have a
Black football player until
1946 when Levi Jackson of
New Haven enrolled at the
school, helped the University
of Georgia beyond a simple
agreement to play there when
the school was seeking to
establish its football
reputation.

30. Black Coaches
• On October 12, 1929, Georgia
beat Yale, 15-0, in the stadium’s
dedication game.
• The crowd of 30,000 – including
the governors of nine southern
states – was the largest at the
time to watch a football game in
the region.

31. Black Coaches
• Yale gave the host university half
of its share of the gate receipts
to help pay off the construction
loans.
• That illustrates how schools
outside the region gave
southern football and its
tradition of segregation
credibility –and financial
support.

32. Black Coaches
• The UGA stadium was named
for Sanford, its president at the
time of construction.
• It still stands – greatly expanded
– today – and the expression
“between the hedges” it
spawned remains part of college
football.

33. Black Coaches
• Back to Alabama’s Rose Bowl
win. The white South looked
upon football as an instrument
to showcase its masculinity and
pride and this used the game to
promote its “heritage” during a
time of change.

34. Black Coaches
• And the use of the Confederate
flag at college football games
stands as an example of that
expression.

35. Black Coaches
• In a speech at the University of
Virginia in Charlottesville in
1954, historian C. Vann
Woodward said that southern
whites adopted segregation as a
strategy to suppress upwardly
mobile African-Americans.
• The Confederate battle flag
stood as a symbol.

36. Black Coaches
• All-white southern schools
refused to play teams with black
players, often offering to bench
their best players if the
opposing northern team sat
their African-American players
as happened in 1934 when
Michigan and Georgia Tech
played.

37. Black Coaches
• As on the field, the stands at
college football games in the
south were white. When
African-Americans were
permitted entry into a game,
they were segregated in a far
corner of the end zone.

38. Black Coaches
• Segregation in southern football
persisted through the 1950s and
into the 1960s – and 1970s.

39. Black Coaches
• Even after court decisions
ordered southern schools to
integrate, whites sought to
block that from happening.
• Among the whites in 1957 when
a high school in Little Rock was
integrated? Jerry Jones.

40. Black Coaches
• Darryl Hill became the first Black
player to compete in a southern
conference when he took the
field for Maryland against North
Carolina State on Sept. 21, 1963.
• Hill, a running back, was
recruited by assistant coach Lee
Corso, now of ESPN.

41. Black Coaches
• "I, by far, had my best games in
the south," Hill said in a news
story on the 50th anniversary of
when he first enrolled at
Maryland in 1962. "When they
shut my mother out at Clemson
and wouldn't let her into the
stadium, I set an ACC single-
game pass-catching record …"

42. Black Coaches
• In the Southeastern Conference,
Nate Northington became the
first African-American player in
the league when he played for
Kentucky in 1967.

43. Black Coaches
• Several Southeastern
Conference teams incrementally
recruited African-American
football players after that but
the league would become fully
integrated until 1972 when
Mississippi and Louisiana State
University became the last
schools to do so. Alabama,
Georgia and Vanderbilt
integrated football in 1971.

44. Black Coaches
• In 1969, Texas became the last
all-white team to win a national
championship.
• The university celebrated the
50th anniversary of the
championship in 2019 without
remarking on the team’s
segregated status.

45. Black Coaches
• Meanwhile, the pro game was
integrated from the start, as
some 13 African-Americans
played in the NFL between 1920
and 1933.
• But African-Americans were
unofficially banned from the
NFL from 1933-1946.

46. Black Coaches
• Owners claimed the ban was
imaginary, but the facts show
that no African-American
players participated in NFL
games during that period.

47. Black Coaches
• Ray Kemp, the last African-
American to play before the
segregationists assumed control
of the league, said this after his
release from Pittsburgh:
• “It was my understanding that
there was a gentlemen’s
agreement in the league that
there would be no blacks.”

48. Black Coaches
• Joe Lillard was another player
who excelled in the NFL until
the ban. A Boston columnist
wrote:
• “Lillard is not only the ace of the
(Chicago) Cardinal backfield, but
he is one of the greatest all-
around players that has ever”
played.

49. Black Coaches
• George Halas, founder of the
Chicago Bears and a key figure
in NFL history, reportedly said, “I
don’t know. Probably the game
didn’t have the appeal to black
players at the time.

50. Black Coaches
• But an African-American player
by the name of Fritz Pollard who
played against Halas in high
school and later coached against
him in the NFL saw something
different: racism.
• That was something Pollard
endured his entire life.

51. Black Coaches
• Pollard stands as the most
prominent African-American
football player of the first third
of the 20th century who
excelled on the field and
successfully sought to integrate
the NFL from his start as a pro.

52. Black Coaches
• Born in 1884 in Chicago, Pollard
was the son of a Civil War
veteran and successful barber
who named him Frederick
Douglass, after the abolitionist.
• But his German and
Luxembourger neighbors called
him Fritz, a nickname in those
countries.

53. Black Coaches
• Pollard’s older brother Leslie,
who played at Dartmouth,
coached football at Lincoln
University in Pennsylvania, and
influenced him to attend college
after his high school.
• Fritz Pollard enrolled at Brown,
in Providence, Rhode Island.

54. Black Coaches
• “Pollard appeared on the
collegiate scene at the right
time for his shifty brand of play,”
wrote Julie Des Jardins in her
biography of Walter Camp
(2015). “The legalization of the
forward pass had opened up the
ground game and allowed his
sidestepping to become a
formidable weapon.’’

55. Black Coaches
• In 1916, Pollard became the first
African-American to play in the
Rose Bowl after he led Brown to
a 5-3-1 record entering the
game, including a 3-0 win over
Yale at the Yale Bowl as fans
shouted the n-word at him.
• Washington State contained
Pollard and won, 14-0.

56. Black Coaches
• One of Pollard’s teammates in
that Rose Bowl? Wallace Wade.
• As noted earlier in this lecture,
Wade, coached Alabama and
led that team to the 1926 Rose
Bowl victory that gave southern
football national credibility
despite segregation that barred
blacks from the field and stands.

57. Black Coaches
• In 1917, Walter Camp selected
Pollard to his All-America team,
making the Brown halfback the
first African-American to be
named to a backfield position.
• Pollard graduated from Brown in
1919 and pursued a pro career,
signing with Akron to play
against all-white Massillon.

58. Black Coaches
• Pollard was not the first African-
American to sign a pro contract.
• Charles Follis, of Ohio, signed a
pro contract with the Shelby
Blues in 1904.
• Among his teammates? Branch
Rickey, who would sign Jackie
Robinson to a MLB contract.

59. Black Coaches
• Pollard encountered racism
from the start.
• “Akron was worse than Georgia
at that time, because it was full
of Southerners who had gone
up there to work during the
war,” he said in an interview
years later.

60. Black Coaches
• “Dire threats have come from
the Tiger camp of just what they
are going to do the little colored
chap,” a newspaper reported
before the game.
• Massillon taunted Pollard en
route to a 13-6 victory.

61. Black Coaches
• But in his first full season in
1920, Pollard led the team –
now known as the Pros – to a
record of 8-0-3.
• Akron was declared the league’s
first champion, remaining as
one of only four unbeaten
teams in NFL history.

62. Black Coaches
• From 1919-1926, he played and
coached in the American
Professional Football
Association and the NFL,
becoming the first African-
American quarterback in the
NFL, for Akron in 1923, and the
first head coach, for Hammond,
Indiana.

63. Black Coaches
• Pollard played for the
Providence Steamrollers against
the Chicago Bears at Braves
Field in Boston. • That
December 1925 game was
promoted as a all-star match
between Pollard – and Red
Grange.

64. Black Coaches
• Pollard sought to get back into
the NFL in the 1930s, but to no
avail as the league’s de facto
segregation policy persisted.

65. Black Coaches
• The Pro Football Hall of Fame
enshrined Pollard in 2005, 19
years after his death in 1986 at
the age of 92. His grandson
delivered the acceptance
speech. In part, it read:

66. Black Coaches
• “During both his college and pro
careers, he was a target of
multiple incidents of racial
abuse. Many times, he was the
only black player on either
team, and probably the only
person of color in the stadium.
He was singled out for rough
play and endured racial taunts
that were customary for the
time.

67. Black Coaches
• “The haunting sounds of Bye-
Bye Black Bird, a song that was
sung in his college days, still
stung until the day he passed
away. The abuse was at times so
bad that he had to be escorted
to the field just before the
kickoff.”

68. Black Coaches
• After the 2001 NFL season, two
of the league’s three Black head
coaches were fired. That left the
league, in which roughly 70% of
players were of color, with only
one Black head coach. Indeed,
in the league’s 80-year history,
there had only been six,
including Art Shell, the first
Black head coach in modern NFL
history.

69. Black Coaches
• In 2003, a group of former
players and executives headed
by former NFL executive John
Wooten formed Fritz Pollard
Alliance to advocate for equal
employment of Black coaches
and executives in the NFL.