Ray Bartlett

THE NFL’S JACKIE ROBINSON – ALEXANDER WOLFF
He broke professional football’s color barrier with the Los Angeles Rams in 1946, yet even though he played alongside Jackie Robinson in college at UCLA, few people remember the great running back Kenny Washington or the shameful history of segregation in the NFL (page 60).

Robinson himself called Washington “the greatest football player I have ever seen,” yet Washington was victimized by an unwritten segregation agreement that had seeped into pro football starting in the mid-1930s. As SI senior writer Alexander Wolff describes it: “The snubbing of Kenny Washington indicts the football establishment more than any other exclusion. Though he led the nation in total offense as a senior in 1939, and played 580 of a possible 600 minutes by doubling as the anchor of the defensive secondary, Washington was relegated to second-team All-America by Hearst, the AP, the UP and Grantland Rice, while the East-West Shrine Game passed him over entirely. Yet when Liberty magazine polled more than 1,600 collegians on the best player they had faced on the field, Washington was the lone man named on the ballot of everyone he played against. It is only fitting that Washington—of whom former UCLA teammate Ray Bartlett once said, ‘He could smile when his lip was bleeding’—gouged the first bricks out of the NFL’s all-whites wall.”

Some of the NFL’s bellwether franchises—including the Bears, Giants, Steelers and Redskins—were among the teams that avoided signing or drafting any black players for the better part of two decades. And the story of the NFL’s integration proved less than rosy. Woody Strode was a teammate of Washington’s at UCLA and was signed by the Rams at Washington’s request. In an unpublished interview with SI, Strode said: “Integrating the NFL was the low point of my life. There was nothing nice about it. History doesn’t know who we are. Kenny was one of the greatest backs in the history of the game, and kids today have no idea who he is. If I have to integrate heaven, I don’t want to go.”

THE INTEGRATION OF THE LOS ANGELES RAMS

When the Rams moved from Cleveland to L.A. in 1946, several advocates for NFL integration saw their chance. The most outspoken was Los Angeles Tribune sports editor Halley Harding. A former football player at historically black Wiley College—where he overlapped with renowned English professor and debate coach Melvin B. Tolson, played by Denzel Washington in 2007’s The Great Debaters—Harding proved to be irrepressible in forcing the newly relocated Rams to sign first Washington and then Strode.

Wolff recalls Harding’s memorable speech at the January 1946 meeting between the Rams and the L.A. Memorial Coliseum Commission: “From surviving accounts we do know that Harding set his sarcasm aside and stood and delivered like a Wiley College debater. He walked the commissioners through the NFL’s early, integrated history…. He invoked the Double V campaign [“victory over fascism abroad and segregation at home”] and the contributions of black soldiers during World War II. He fingered Marshall as the handmaiden of Jim Crow pro football and appealed to Southern Californians’ tradition of tolerance. And he declared it ‘singularly strange’ that no NFL team had signed Kenny Washington. After Harding sat down, the Sentinel’s Abie Robinson told Ron Bishop, a Drexel communications professor, in 2002, ‘You could have heard a rat piss on cotton.’ ”

The path Washington blazed is not nearly as tidy or reassuring as the narrative to Jackie Robinson’s desegregation. As Wolff describes Robinson’s journey, “It’s a story that reflects how we like to think of ourselves, as a society forever improving if not perfecting itself, and it offers ennobling roles for whites as well as blacks.” Although his tenure in the NFL lasted just three seasons, Washington provided Robinson—and the Brooklyn Dodgers—with enough of a precedent to make their own historic statement. Recalling the end of Washington’s first season—in which the defending champion Rams fell to 6-4-1—Wolff writes: “Even if the season had been a disappointment on the West Coast, to a man watching from Brooklyn it had been a triumph. As a teammate of Charles Follis’s [the sport’s first black professional] with the Shelby Athletic Club at the turn of the century, Branch Rickey had been impressed by Follis’s even temper in the face of taunts and cheap shots. Now, Rickey said to himself, if blacks and whites could play a game of violent collisions in close quarters without major incident, the Dodgers could surely call up Jackie Robinson to the majors. Robinson made his debut with the Dodgers the following season.”

SI PLAYERS NFL POLL

Who is the most overrated player in the NFL? (page 17)

Brett Favre, Minnesota Vikings QB….13% Eli Manning, New York Giants QB….7%

Tony Romo, Dallas Cowboys QB….10% Ben Roethlisberger, Pittsburgh Steelers QB….5%

Terrell Owens, Buffalo Bills WR….8%

[Based on a survey of 239 NFL players]

FAST FACTS Players couldn’t vote for a teammate…. Poll was completed before Week 2…. Reggie Bush of the Saints, who got the