The
American Football League, which was more innovative in virtually every way than the
conservative NFL, showed that aspect in recruiting minorities, as well. The AFL
began play in 1960 with Professional Football's first Hispanic-American quarterback, the Oakland
Raiders' Tom Flores, who was in the league for its
entire ten years, and then went on to coach the Raiders to two Super Bowl victories.
Early on, the American Football League began
recruiting from small colleges, which the NFL had avoided. Drawing on this source of
talent that had been essentially untapped by the NFL, in the AFL's first year its teams
signed such stars as Elbert
Dubenion (Bluffton), Lionel
Taylor (New Mexico Highlands), and Abner Haynes (North Texas State). For black
players, the AFL's recruitment from small colleges opened a door that the NFL had cracked
only grudgingly. On a per-team basis, the AFL had a significantly greater number of
black players than the NFL, which had still not fully overcome the exclusion of blacks
precipitated by the entry into the league of openly bigoted Redskins owner George Preston Marshall.
Accordingly, the American Football League hired many more black college
talent scouts, including the Houston Oilers' Tom Williams and The Kansas
City Chiefs' Lloyd C.A. Wells, pro football's first black full-time scout,
who was credited with signing AFL Hall of Famers
Otis Taylor and
Buck Buchanan as well as
a half-dozen other Chiefs who achieved AFL All-Star status.
|
At
its inception in 1920, the NFL, (as the "American Professional Football
Association") had several African-American players (a total of thirteen between
1920 and 1933). However, by 1932 the NFL had only two black players, and by
1934 there were none. This disappearance of black players from the NFL effectively
coincided with the entry of Marshall, one of the
leading owners in the league. Marshall openly refused to have black athletes on his Boston
Braves/Washington Redskins team, and reportedly pressured the rest of the league to follow
suit. The NFL did not have another black player until after World War II.
The NFL's Cleveland Rams, in order to
move to Los Angeles before the 1946 season, were forced by their lease with
the L.A. Coliseum to integrate their team. There were no black players
drafted, the Rams simply signed contracts with Woody Strode and Kenny
Washington. In 1946, the Cleveland Browns of a rival Professional Football
league, the All-America Football
Conference, signed two black players: Marion Motley and Bill Willis. Still,
the NFL's Marshall was quoted as saying "We'll start signing
Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites." In spite of this
open bias, Marshall was elected to the NFL's "pro football" hall of fame in 1963. As part of
his "qualifications" for enshrinement, the hall says: "Marshall
was totally involved in all aspects of his team’s operation and endured his share of
criticism for not integrating his team until being forced to do so in
1962." The Redskins had no black players until they succumbed to the
threat of civil-rights legal action by the Kennedy administration.
Similar to the Rams, they had to agree to integrate before being allowed to
play in their home team's stadium.
Even when the NFL did sign black players, poor
treatment was evident. Reportedly, black players routinely received lower contracts
than whites in the NFL, while in the American Football League there was
no such distinction based on race (Miller
Farr, in the foreword to The "Foolish Club" by Jim Acho, Gridiron
Press, 1997).
Conversely, the American Football League
actively recruited players from small colleges that had been largely ignored by the NFL,
giving those schools' black players the opportunity to play Professional Football. As a
result, for the years 1960 through 1962, AFL teams averaged 17% more blacks than NFL teams
did. (Reference: Outside the Lines: African Americans and the Integration of the
National Football League. By Charles K. Ross. New York: New York University Press, 1999, ISBN
0-8147-7495-4). By 1969, a comparison of the two league's championship team
photos showed the AFL's Chiefs with 23 black players out of 51 players pictured, while the
NFL Vikings had 11 blacks, of 42 players in the photo. Chiefs players stated
that a motivating factor in their crushing defeat of the Vikings in the
fourth and last AFL-NFL World Championship game was their pride in the
diversity of their team.
The American Football League had
the first black placekicker in Professional Football in the U.S., Gene Mingo (no college) of the Denver Broncos;
the first black Number One draft choice in the Chiefs' Buck Buchanan
in 1963; the first black middle linebacker, Willie Lanier in 1967, also with
the Chiefs; and the
first black starting quarterbacks of the modern era, Marlin Briscoe
(Nebraska) of the Broncos and James Harris (Grambling) of the Buffalo
Bills. |
At its most
sensitive position, professional football had not seen a starting black quarterback
in the first thirty years of the sport. In the modern era, Willie Thrower finished a game for the
Bears in 1953, but that was the extent of the NFL's capitulation to a rising tide.
In the fourth game of the 1968 American
Football League season, Denver Broncos coach Lou Saban made Nebraska Omaha's Marlin
Briscoe the first black to start at quarterback for a modern pro football team.
Briscoe went on to play eleven games, setting pro football records for a rookie
quarterback: 1,589 yards passing and 14 touchdowns in only 11 games. Against the Buffalo
Bills, Briscoe established career highs in passing yards (335) and touchdown passes (4) in
a 34-32 win. |
|
