Brown University photo

Van Wickle Gates on Brown’s College Hill weren’t easy to open 

NOTE: I am posting a serial concerning Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard, star of the Akron Pros and first Black coach in the NFL. This is Part 4 of 13. Prior posts may found on my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com or on my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/

Fritz Pollard’s behavior grew more erratic before he found his way back to Brown. After leaving Dartmouth he received highly placed assistance from Boston attorney William Henry Lewis, an All-America center for the Crimson and friend of Leslie Pollard, in gaining admission to Harvard. Before he could register, however, Fritz was invited to attend a Harvard-Bates College game at Harvard Stadium.

He sat at the end of one of many benches required to accommodate a hundred players. After Harvard’s 44-0 victory, Pollard encountered a Bates coach against whom he had played as a semipro. The coach not only raised doubts about Pollard finding a place with mighty Harvard but also hard-sold smaller, less academically demanding Bates. Since Pollard was more interested in playbook than school book, this appealed to him.

Pollard, reeling with self-doubt, left Boston on the Bates team train headed for Lewiston, Maine. Bates admitted him, but Pollard discovered he could not play football during the 1914 season. Bates required transfer students to sit out a year to be eligible. Though he had never registered at Harvard, Bates considered Pollard a transfer.

Alone, missing his wife who had remained in Rhode Island, without football, and miserable in the numbing cold of a Maine winter, Pollard borrowed $10 from the Bates president and caught a train back to Boston to face music that was not the Harvard fight song.

When he hopped the train out of Boston with the Bates team, Pollard had not explained his actions or thanked William Lewis, the man who had opened the door to Harvard. How could he? What would he have said? He had no one else to turn to, though, so he sought out Lewis again and former Harvard player Clarence Matthews, another of brother Leslie’s friends.

They castigated Pollard for his irresponsible behavior and steered him toward Springfield (Massachusetts) Central High School where he could obtain the language credits and competence he needed to reapply at Brown. Pollard must have sensed this was his last chance, because he collected his wife and moved to Springfield, where he studied hard and worked harder. In February 1915 he took on even greater responsibility with the birth of son Frederick Douglass “Fritz” Pollard Jr. Maybe there could be a second act in the drama that Pollard had created.

Much of Pollard’s suffering resulted from his poor decisions. Returning to Brown was not one. Though he would survive more hardship—some because he was Black—it prepared Pollard for Akron and professional football. Before returning to Brown in the fall of 1915, Pollard spent a second summer working at Narragansett Pier, operating a small pressing and tailoring shop across the bay from the famous Rhode Island resort community of Newport. He had a similar enterprise at Brown that so much impressed Brown alumnus John D. Rockefeller Jr. that he provided Pollard a second room to expand his operation.

Pollard and other young African-American college students worked in the many Narragansett Pier businesses serving the white summer crowd. America was becoming more segregated under president Woodrow Wilson, and another Southerner, Colonel William J. Simmons, was reviving the Ku Klux Klan that would become powerful in Akron during the 1920s when Fritz Pollard became the city’s brightest athletic light and a controversial Black figure.

When he returned to Providence, Pollard left his wife and their infant son with friends in Springfield. Brown did not accept married students, and Ada’s father remained opposed to his daughter’s marriage. Only two African-American students were among about one thousand attending the Baptist-affiliated university in 1915. Life was structured and athletes were not big men on campus, except physically, and Pollard not even that. Was this worth the struggle?

From research and interviews John Carroll concluded that while little if any overt prejudice existed on campus, Pollard was barred from fraternities and had no roommate because no whites were willing to live with a Black; Rudolph Fisher, the other African American, commuted from his Providence home.

A year later Jay Mayo “Ink” Williams, an end from Monmouth, Illinois, who would become a standout in the early National Football League, joined Pollard on a Brown team that had included an African American as early as the mid-1880s. Given the many disappointments along his twisted college football path, Pollard should not have been surprised that an eligibility obstacle would keep him off the field for the Bruins’ 33-0 season-opening victory over outmanned Rhode Island State College.

Brown officials could not immediately determine Pollard’s eligibility given their unfamiliarity with applying rules of the new National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). He had been at Northwestern, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Bates, if not exactly on those teams. Did that count against him?

When two days after the first game he was allowed to join the Brown team, Pollard’s welcome made the lack of one in Akron four years later seem like bouquets and garlands. Locker rooms can be not only comfort zones of camaraderie but also hostile territory so cruel even the toughest football player may be brought to tears.

Racist language and miscreant behavior that rolled off the thick-skinned Pollard when he could see them coming like some wild-eyed tackler stung when sprung on him as happened when he marched into the Brown field house to meet his new teammates. A singular Southern voice broke the silence that greeted him. He never forgot the words. “Christ,” drawled the player, “a nigger.” Pollard could not have been a surprise to unsuspecting teammates, and, in fact, was not, based on how another player responded. “That’s Fritz Pollard,” the player said. The unimpressed Southerner stood firm and unrepentant. “I don’t care what he calls himself,” he said. “He’s still a nigger to me.”

This exchange, which Carroll noted, originally appeared in a manuscript that Jay Barry produced in collaboration with Pollard. Barry, known as “Mr. Brown Football,” first met Pollard in 1954 when Pollard was inducted into the National Collegiate Football Hall of Fame for what he contributed to his university and team after this stinging rebuke. Pollard grasped the broader significance of his welcome to Brown.

A Black in 1915 might be able to attend a good and white college if he “minded his own business, which meant staying out of the white man’s way.” Playing football or engaging in other extracurricular activities, however, raised a red flag that the Black was “passing himself off as an equal. And college men of the 1915 period, many of them men of good intentions, just were not ready to accept a Black as an equal.”

When trying to place this in historical context, it is necessary to understand the times, as Pollard did. He was not just trying to be an equal. He was trying to be better than any player, regardless of color. The players came to appreciate the fact he was better and how it benefitted all of them—even if Pollard didn’t look the part.

NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST 5: Not Just Another Player