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 12 of 13. Prior posts may be read by visiting my website blog at https://stevelovewriter.com/blog/ or my public Facebook page Stevelovewriter.com
The stench of racism lingers in Akron. Fritz Pollard, I think, would sense it. The Ku Klux Klan folded its tent and white sheets and disappeared during the mid-nineteen-twenties as Pollard’s Akron days came to an end. Klan members lost control of the Akron Board of Education, and became unwelcome in churches with their symbolic handouts of flags (patriotism) and Bibles (religion). The must not have visited the city’s strong Black congregations. That would have conflicted with their nativism—a hollow, soulless, blind belief in America First that Donald Trump regenerated years later and rode to the presidency—twice.
In 1993 the Akron Beacon Journal produced a series titled “A Question of Color.” Editor Dale Allen, explaining its premise and responding to those who questioned revisiting race relations, an “old hat” topic, responded: “Race relations is not an old story. It is as new—and as urgent—now as it was thirty years ago, when the civil rights movement was beginning to open up opportunity for all people to share in the American Dream.” He could easily have made the comparison with 1919 when Pollard came to Akron and could not eat with his teammates or 1934, the beginning of the NFL’s “gentlemen’s agreement” that excluded Blacks.
If the series, to which I contributed, was a journalistic success, it reached the highest level because it went beyond the words and photos in the newspaper’s usual comfort zone. “We didn’t stop with just reporting the problem. We facilitated an effort to do something about race relations,” Stuart Warner, a former Beacon Journal editor explained in “Those were the days in Rubber City,” a chapter of Plain Dealing: Cleveland Journalists Tell Their Stories. Direct action caused unease in the newsroom. Allen’s solution was “Solomon-like.” After soliciting the advice of community leaders and activists, the newspaper facilitated a broader conversation but did not steer the resulting Coming Together project toward preordained conclusions, actions or accomplishments.
This, in my opinion, is the reason “A Question of Color” won the 1994 Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for Public Service—the Pulitzer of Pulitzers. Coming Together worked to improve race relations in Akron, and other cities sought advice from the project until the Beacon Journal was sold in 2006. A Question of Color/Coming Together inspired President Clinton to choose Akron to hold his first town hall on race. I cannot help but wonder how such a group would have addressed the abuse Fritz Pollard endured and what it might have done for Black players excluded by the NFL.
More recently, could it have guided the league through the quagmire it created after former San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick ignited a player movement in 2016 to bring attention to social/racial injustice and police brutality? When these mostly black messengers went to their knees during the national anthem, all but begging for change, they were attacked as unpatriotic.
As concerned as Pollard was about providing Black players with the same opportunities as whites, even he paled compared with Paul Robeson as a Black activist on broader fields. Robeson, his friend and Akron teammate, was nothing less than a renaissance man—athlete, artist, activist, attorney, and more—a man who was repudiated by some in the Black community, including Jackie Robinson, for his edgy views, including that Blacks would have received better treatment in the Soviet Union than in Jim Crow America. As if to prove Robeson’s point, the House Committee on Un-American Activities dragged Robeson before it in 1950, where he swore under oath that he was not a member of the Communist Party. The State Department canceled his passport anyway. As Robeson commanded the public stage, Pollard disappeared.
In 1954 Pollard became the second African American inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. The NFL didn’t notice. One of the pro players he coached, Duke Slater (1951), was the first, and Robeson was finally chosen in 1995, seventy-seven years after his last season of two All-American seasons at Rutgers. Who cares, right? College is not the NFL. Pollard was conspicuously missing from the Professional Football Hall of Fame’s 1963 inaugural class; it included such Pollard contemporaries as George Halas, Jim Thorpe, and Red Grange. Pollard remained among the missing for forty-two years, nineteen after his death in 1986.
As they tried to resurrect him in the minds of the public, and particularly the Hall of Fame’s forty-eight-member Selection Committee, nine of whom serve on the Seniors Committee, Pollard’s family ran head-on into a roadblock. When Fritz Pollard III pitched stories about his famous-but-faded grandfather to the media from whence the selectors come [one from each of thirty-one NFL cities—New York, with two teams, has two representatives—and sixteen at-large members] the comeback was a blank look or a question as to what the heck grandpa had done. “My response was, ‘Where do you want me to start?’”
Selectors should have known Pollard deserved a place among the game’s greats. He appeared in the notes to be considered in choosing the first class. “His name never came up in ’63,” the Chicago Tribune’s Don Pierson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, after he and newer members of the Seniors Committee finally righted the wrong of more than forty years. “That was before the Civil Rights Act. They weren’t looking at historical figures. They wanted guys who would sell the Hall, promote the Hall.”
After a second class was chosen New York Times columnist Arthur Daley, late in 1964, challenged the selectors: “Can the committee continue to skip past such vaunted pioneers from the first-team periods as Paddy Driscoll, Benny Friedman, Joe Guyon, Keith Molesworth, and Fritz Pollard, to name only a few?” Yes, it could. Driscoll (1965) and Guyon (1966) soon went from the forgotten to the never to be forgotten, but Pollard continued to languish in obscurity.
Periodically, the historically inclined, such as Newark, New Jersey, syndicated columnist Jerry Izenberg, fired another shot across the Hall of Fame’s selectors’ bow. In 1978 Izenberg wrote of Pollard: “It is a shame and a scandal that more young people do not even know his name. … He is not a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. That is an incredible oversight—almost as incredible as the chain of events which form Pollard’s own personal history.”
During the years leading to Pollard’s selection there should have been more writers like William C. Rhoden, who worked for The New York Times. He hammered regularly on the amazing injustice of Pollard’s exclusion. Rhoden’s bottom line before the vote on Pollard: “If Fritz Pollard isn’t selected, there shouldn’t be a Hall.” Pollard’s daughter, Leslie, encapsulated why his exclusion had continued for a shameful number of years when she spoke with the Boston Globe. “It’s strange,” she said in February 2004. “This generation doesn’t know anything [about my father]. Almost all my younger life, there was mention of my father in his football days almost every time you picked up a newspaper. Now, people have never heard of him.” He was yesterday’s news.
The person who, in my estimation deserves the most credit for righting this wrong, is Pollard biographer John M. Carroll. Publication in 1992 of his comprehensive account of Pollard’s life—a book far more inclusive than this essay, which is informed by it—should have shamed the Hall of Fame selectors and seniors committee into a red-faced embrace of Pollard. Instead, another thirteen years passed before the Hall of Fame selectors finalized Pollard’s right to spend eternity in Canton. So many previous honors should have alerted all concerned that Pollard was grossly underappreciated. What he did on the field as a professional was striking. But there was so much more:
- The 1954 selection to the College Football Hall of Fame
- His 1967 election to the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame
- His inclusion in the 1971 inaugural class of the Brown Athletic Hall of Fame
- His choice in 1973 as one of first thirty-eight athletes inducted into the National Black Hall of Fame
- His receipt of the 1978 Whitney M. Young Jr. Memorial Award by the New York Urban League “in honor of his courage, determination, and accomplishments as a pioneer in collegiate and professional football during the early years of the 20th century and for his contributions and inspiration to the Black community”
- The awarding in 1981 of an Honorary Doctor of Letters from Brown University
- And, last but hardly least, the naming of Art Shell to coach the Oakland Raiders in 1989, which informed those who mistakenly thought he was the first black NFL coach that that person was, in fact, Fritz Pollard. This led to the creation the Fritz Pollard Alliance four years later to monitor and hold the NFL’s feet to the fire to abide by the 2003 Rooney Rule, named for Art Rooney, late Steelers owner. It required teams to do what the Raiders late owner Al Davis had done instinctively, voluntarily—to consider an ethnic minority for each head-coaching and top front-office NFL job.
NEXT—FRITZ POLLARD, THE LAST BLOG POST: Forgotten No Longer
