Photo by Jeet Dhanoa on Unsplash
Chess may be black and white but it is not as dangerous as being Black in a white man’s early NFL
NOTE: I am posting a serial about Pro Football Hall of Famer Fritz Pollard, star of the Akron Pros and first Black coach in the NFL. This is Part 11 of 13. Prior posts may be read by visiting my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/ or my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com
Fritz Pollard took the same approach as target of violence on the field as he had when he whipped a Coaldale, Pennsylvania, boxing champion who was sore that his team had lost to Pollard’s or that Pollard was Black—or both. He played it smart.
Pollard used the sideline as protection, and if tackled in-bounds, he would spin onto his back like a cat, cleats up, prepared to stave off inevitable late hits. When he found himself in a pile of mean men pummeling him, he did not immediately retaliate. He caught the offending player later and struck, if he believed an official would not catch the offense. Most important, Pollard reminded the recipient what prompted the payback and that he would visit more on him if the dirty play continued. With the flying wedge and other means of violence not too distant in pro football’s past, the action could resemble the carnage that attracts some auto racing fans to the track.
At the end of his career, back in Akron, Pollard may have endured his worst physical beating. As usual, it stemmed from his color. Even before the game, trouble loomed. Longtime Akron Beacon Journal sports editor/columnist Jim Schlemmer resurrected the incident twenty years later in 1946 to make a point to the great Paul Brown, founder of the team named for him. Nothing had changed.
Brown could not take his stars, future Pro Football Hall of Famers Marion Motley and Bill Willis, to Miami for a game in the new All-American Football Conference because people in South Florida did not want their delicate maulers on the same field with two of the first Black men in the professional game after the NFL had locked them out since 1934. Brown, Schlemmer observed, had seen this before when he famously coached Massillon Washington High School. Massillon, perennial state champion, had been challenged by the best in Miami but the teams never met because Massillon had dared integrate before it was ordered in 1954 by the United States Supreme Court. Schlemmer did not blame Brown but Florida school officials: “One had a right to believe that the pin-headedness of our ‘educational leaders’ would not carry over into professional sports. Apparently, we expect too much.”
To expect anything of NFL owners who concocted a “[white] gentleman’s agreement”—an oxymoron—to keep Blacks out of their precious league, was expecting too much. Schlemmer was being facetious. He understood discriminatory “pin-headedness” knows no bounds. I joined a line of Schlemmer successors as sports columnist at the ABJ, one I was proud to be a part of in no small part because Schlemmer had advised Brown he should follow the example of John Paul Flanagan, last manager of Akron’s NFL team.
Shortly before kickoff in 1926, Buffalo’s team manager informed Flanagan: “Of course you know, Pollard will not be allowed to play today. Our Rangers do not play Negroes.” Flanagan understood perfectly well what the racist Buffalo manager was telling him. “I’m glad you told me early,” he replied. “We have just time enough to catch a 3 o’clock train for Akron.”
Don’t you love a guy with convictions and the courage to exercise them? The Buffalo manager was responding to demands of his many players from Texas—a Lone Star bastion of bigotry. Who knows what he truly felt? As always in the NFL, the bottom line came down to money. With a substantial crowd awaiting a game and the Pros ready to head for the train to Akron, Buffalo’s Texans decided they would not mind having Pollard on the field after all.
By doing the right thing, Flanagan did Pollard no favor. Let Schlemmer explain: “Pollard took a physical beating until carried out, more dead than alive, early in the fourth period. The Akron team won with ease, however, for the Rangers were more intent upon piling on Pollard than in chasing [other] ball-carriers. That was a good Akron pro team and I have always had high respect for it because of the way the players took care of Pollard.”
The NFL was a different story. Pollard fought the hierarchy, and the hierarchy won. The NFL used Pollard and the other early Black players and then weeded them out and shut the door to them for twelve seasons. Halas was among the leaders, his denials aside. Oh, he found Pollard acceptable enough to wink at his Providence homecoming with the Steam Roller in 1925 to play Cleveland and Green Bay before a game against Halas’s Chicago Bears and the biggest draw of the NFL, Red Grange, The Galloping Ghost.
Grange had signed with the team—no waiting for a draft—immediately following his final season at Illinois. Akron’s season had concluded (4-2-2), and Pollard, the businessman, wanted to cash in on the Grange phenomenon. He joined the Steam Roller before Grange’s appearance in Boston on Halas’s make-the-cash-register-cha-ching tour.
Grange had drawn forty thousand to Chicago on Thanksgiving, thirty-five thousand in Philadelphia on December 5 and sixty thousand to the Polo Grounds in New York on December 6. Halas sent him out again on December 9 against Providence. It was asking too much. Halas could not have cared less. There was money to be made. A Halas critic, Bill Furlong, is quoted in Jeff Davis’s book, Papa Bear, as saying Halas had “all the warmth of breaking bones.” White spectators and foes alike wanted breaking bones—Pollard’s—while the Black community wanted its hero to avoid being turned into a snap-crackle-and-pop toy.
Pollard survived without serious consequence but not because the Bears did not try to maim him when he entered the game in the fourth quarter. He carried the ball only three times for eight yards, but the Providence Journal reported on one of those: “the Bears were so intent on squelching the dusky Fritz that five of the orange-jerseyed athletes piled on the former Brown star.” Chicago, loser for the first time since the equally ineffective Grange joined the team, received a penalty, and his biographer John Carroll wrote: “Undoubtedly, Pollard blamed Halas for the incident, and it probably contributed to the feud between them that ripened over the years.”
Though Pollard was miffed that Halas had refused to play Akron in the years after he and his teammates had given Halas’s team a chance at the 1920 championship, his continued animus was fueled by Halas’s actions after Pollard’s playing days. Not only did Halas reject playing the Chicago Black Hawks, the first of two black all-star teams that Pollard put together, but he also joined in banning Blacks from the NFL from 1934 to 1946. Pollard created the Black Hawks and the Brown Bombers in New York to give Black players that opportunity white owners of the NFL had taken away and to prove that, despite his own experiences, Blacks and whites could compete without racial incidents. Pollard won neither NFL hearts nor minds. The NFL ignored him and the contributions he made to it during its tenuous formative years.
When he left the field after being fired by the Pros in 1926 (too expensive for a fading team) and finished the year with Gilberton in the Coal League, Pollard remained an important, if sidelined, part of the game with his Black all-star teams. During those years he also was immersed in other businesses. Some failed (an investment firm cut down by the New York Stock Market Crash of 1929) and others succeeded (coal merchant, booking agent, Black weekly newspaper publisher—the New York Independent News—film and music producer, and tax consultant). He founded his newspaper, the country’s first Black tabloid, in 1935 and wrote for it, including about sports, which kept him in close proximity to college and pro football.
Owners in 1933 offered countless explanations that sounded like rationalizations (hard financial times) or equivocations (Southern players do not like playing with or against Blacks) for why there appeared to be an unwritten agreement to exclude Black players. Halas proffered one of the more ludicrous when he told Pittsburgh journalist and broadcaster Myron Cope in 1970 that “no great Black players were in college then.” When he mentioned this in a 2009 Sports Illustrated story about re-integration of the NFL, Alexander Wolff wrote that “such protestations are disingenuous and even slanderous.” The Black press noted what was happening, but seemed to fear that a howling protest could worsen the situation.
George Preston Marshall, owner of a two-year-old NFL team in Boston that in 1937 he moved to Washington, D.C., and made it the team of the South, submitted a reorganization plan that the influential Halas stamped with approval. If Marshall were not a racist why did he wait to integrate his team until 1962, last of the NFL owners to do so. And Halas? He sent mixed signals. He clearly had animus for Pollard yet wanted to sign Black halfbacks Ozzie Simmons in 1936 and Kenny Washington in 1939. His racist fellow owners refused to bow to his hypocrisy.
When Halas finally allowed his Bears to play a Black Chicago all-star team in 1938, Pollard was not involved. Could that have swayed Halas? Pollard had resigned as coach of New York’s Brown Bombers, his final football days behind him. Not until 1946, when Blacks were allowed into the new All-American Football Conference with Paul Brown’s new Cleveland Browns, did football re-integrate. Forced to respond, the NFL finally gave Kenny Washington and others their chance.
Early in the World War II years, when integration of sport became a topic of conversation and those pushing for this drew praise, Fritz Pollard, its early champion, was all but forgotten. That prompted a remindful letter to the Amsterdam News from Rip Day, former Brown Bomber manager.
“I still say,” Day wrote, “that Fritz Pollard did more to advance the idea of the best-against-the-best-regardless-of-color than any single man in the business.” Pollard’s status—or, more correctly, lack of it—would be a sore subject for years for the NFL. It should have been the same in Akron. I and others failed Pollard, if unintentionally. Where else should Pollard’s rightful place as NFL icon have been better remembered? And to whom should it have been more obvious and important than Akron’s sports columnists?
NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, BLOG POST PART 12: Stench of Racism Lingers
